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Abstract
This dissertation studies how recent novels by contemporary Afro-Latin American and Afro-Caribbean women writers contest dominant national histories, proposing new genealogies that recover black women as active national subjects and render their experiences visible. I argue that, by both revisiting and recreating the colonial archive, these novels move away from monolithic representations of African slaves and their descendants, and depict a more complex and nuanced view of the slave trade, the institution of slavery, and its legacy. Using theories of memory and trauma, I study the use of silence as a literary device to represent the intergenerational trauma of slavery; as a metaphor for both the archival absence of direct voices and the absence of physical traces (monuments, neighborhoods, etc); and as a strategy to address how African heritages have been overlooked in communities defined by miscegenation or indigenous heritage. I argue that each novel can be read as what Pierre Nora called a “lieu de mémoire,” decrying the erasure of slavery in historical discourse and proposing new ways to memorialize and honor the lives of African slaves and their descendants. In chapter one, I study Jonatás y Manuela (1994) by Ecuadorian Luz Argentina Chiriboga, analyzing her use of silence and maternal genealogies to reclaim the role of women slaves during the period of independence and nation formation in Ecuador. In chapter two, I study the intersection of art, memory and trauma in Malambo (2001) by Peruvian Lucía Charún-Illescas. In chapter three, I examine the transmission of intergenerational trauma in Rosalie l’infâme (2003) by Évelyne Trouillot and Le livre d’Emma (2001) by Marie-Célie Agnant, both from Haiti. In chapter four, I conclude by analyzing, with the help of new museum theory, how Fe en disfraz (2009) by Puerto Rican Mayra Santos Febres confronts the problematics of national and transnational memorializing of slavery and its legacy in the present.
