Belonging-in-Difference 2013.pdf (1.09 MB)
Belonging-in-difference: negotiating identity in Anglophone Caribbean literature
thesis
posted on 2023-08-30, 13:47 authored by Marie-France FaulknerThrough the critical discourse analysis of Anglophone Caribbean literature as a
polyrhythmic performance, this research sets out to examine the claim that, in a
world in a state of constant flux, emerging Caribbean voices are offering a
challenging perspective on how to negotiate identity away from the binary constructs
of centre and margin. It argues that the Caribbean writer, as a self-conscious
producer of alternative discourses, offers an innovative and transcultural vision of the
self.
This research consists of three stages which integrate critical discourse and literary
analysis with colonial/postcolonial and socio-cultural theories. Firstly, it investigates
the power of language as an operation of discourse through which to apprehend
reality within a binary system of representation. It then examines how the concept of
discourse, as a site of contestation and meaning, enables the elaboration of a
Caribbean counter-discourse. Finally, it explores the role, within the Caribbean text,
of literary techniques such as narrative fragmentation, irony, dialogism,
intertextuality, ambivalence and the carnivalesque to challenge, disrupt the
established order and offer new perspectives of being.
My study of Anglophone Caribbean texts highlights the power of language and the
authority of the ‘book’ as subtle, insidious tools of domination and colonisation. It
also demonstrates how, by allowing hitherto marginalised voices to write themselves
into being, Caribbean writers enable linear narratives and monolithic visions of
reality to be contested and other perspectives of understanding and of meaning to be
uncovered. It exposes the plurality and the interweaving of discourses in the
Caribbean text as a liberating, dynamic force which enables new subject positions
and realities to emerge along the lines of similarity and difference.
At a time when the issue of identity is one of the central problems in the world today,
the research argues that this celebration of the plural, the fluid and the ambivalent offers new ways of being away from the stultifying perspective of essentialist forms.
History
Institution
Anglia Ruskin UniversityFile version
- Accepted version
Language
- eng
Thesis name
- PhD
Thesis type
- Doctoral
Legacy posted date
2013-06-24Legacy creation date
2019-08-07Legacy Faculty/School/Department
Theses from Anglia Ruskin University/Faculty of Arts, Law and Social SciencesUsage metrics
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