Dissertation Defense: Alex Pereira

Candidate Name: Alex Pereira

Major: Spanish

Advisor: Joanne Rappaport, Ph.D.

Title: The Repeating Book: In Search of the Creole Text in the Caribbean

In my dissertation, I argue that Caribbean thought and literature exhibit exceptional characteristics that make them unique, sharing features that make them what I call the “creole text.” Orlando Fals Borda’s Historia Doble de la Costa (1979-86) and Antonio Benítez Rojo’s La Isla que se Repite (1989) guide my analysis. Historia Doble de la Costa is a much lesser-known book, it is a tetralogy that navigates between a poetic and a historicist discourse which, for lack of a better term, can be described as a social history whose structure duplicates its pages as if it contained two books, one of them a history from below, with parallel texts on facing pages. Historia Doble de la Costa also repeats itself because each of its four volumes repeat elements of the others to narrate the histories of the different subregional islets of the Colombian Caribbean. Through drawing on Benitez Rojo idea of “repetition”, I show that this repetition characterizes textual creolity in general, such as in C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins (1938), Fernando Ortiz’s Contrapunteo Cubano del Tabaco y el Azúcar (1940), Lydia Cabrera’s El Monte (1954), George Lamming’s The Pleasure of the Exile (1960), Édouard Glissant’s Le Discours Antillais (1981), Manuel Zapata Olivella’s Changó, el Gran Putas (1983), among others. I maintain that the creole text is cannibalistic in the sense that it is a textual assemblage that combines different fields of knowledge, approaches, intellectual traditions, formats and writing styles in an undisciplined manner. This anthropophagous attitude constitutes an artistic amalgam, unclassifiable, with a tendency towards excessiveness and the baroque, generating polyphony. In this way, the creole text opens up, including not only the oral record and myth, but also narrating the agency of subjects previously considered passive objects, in particular, the historical experience of the African diaspora.