Textual memorials of a transatlantic America : heritage tourism of the African diaspora in Hispanic and U.S. Latin@ narratives
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- "I put it down on paper and then the ghost does not ache so much" - Sandra Cisneros, A House on Mango Street Meditating on Sandra Cisneros' earth-shattering words reminds us of the simple task of writing as an unequivocal act of memory reflection. This simple statement — one that conjures ghosts by the simple act of reprocessing — begs the question: What is the relationship between memory and writing that moves us towards spiritual redemption? Can writing have an impact on interpretive practices of affect in a way that an environment cannot? "Textual Memorials of a Transatlantic America" takes a transatlantic approach to Latin@ and Latin American studies by examining historical multilingual slave records and applying trans-global theoretical constructs. As a result, this work is interested in how monuments and texts, as structures creating memory through infrastructure and fiction, enable similar rituals of engagement and African Diasporic presence through the spaces they create. By reviewing a selection of "postmemory" authors, I explore how the diverse genres of their cultural production all share a regional and Afro-historical reconstitution of slave trade memory over former plantation spaces. Caribbean thinker Édouard Glissant states that the African Diaspora's history is "fragmented, if not totally shattered" (Caribbean Discourse 9). My dissertation reveals how this "shattered" infrastructure shapes a renewed dynamic of memorialization throughout the foundations of the Hispanic-American landscape. Ultimately, my project proposes a reassessment of Hispanic-American history and literary genealogy by theorizing in the physical terms of "memorials" the understudied black presence in the Global South. In this dissertation, I develop the aesthetic concept of "textual memorials, " where I carefully examine authors in a range of postmemory works from the novel, to the essay, to film. Each chapter integrates anthropological inspections of memorial spaces and it is through this lens that we can interpret a particular dynamic between space and narrative that fosters a level of memorialization aesthetics regarding the African Diaspora. In peeling back the layers of nation-building myths where aristocracy sought to keep the memory of slavery buried, I argue that various cultural products from the Hispanic Caribbean complement memorial sites made invisible by modernity's edifices. At times, these aesthetic structures in narrative make up for the lack of a physical memorials on the ground in both Latin America and the U.S., but in other cases, these aesthetic practices we can conjure onto the page (or scene, in the case of film), chart out the effects of the plantocratic economy made visible by memorializing reading practices.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2016 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Quesada, Sarah M |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures. |
| Primary advisor | Ruffinelli, Jorge |
| Primary advisor | Saldívar, José David |
| Thesis advisor | Ruffinelli, Jorge |
| Thesis advisor | Saldívar, José David |
| Thesis advisor | García-Peña, Lorgia, 1978- |
| Thesis advisor | Greene, Roland, 1957- |
| Advisor | García-Peña, Lorgia, 1978- |
| Advisor | Greene, Roland, 1957- |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Sarah M. Quesada. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2016. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2016 by Sarah Margarita Quesada
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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