Abstract

 Performance and Personhood in Caribbean Literature. Focusing on the literary representation of performance practices in anglophone, francophone, and hispanophone Caribbean literature, Jeannine Murray-Román shows how a shared regional aesthetic emerges from the descriptions of music, dance, and oral storytelling events. Because the historical circumstances that led to the development of performance traditions supersede the geopolitical and linguistic divisions of colonialism, the literary uses of these traditions resonate across the linguistic boundaries of the region. The author thus identifies the aesthetic that emerges from the act of writing about live arts and moving bodies as a practice that is grounded in the historically, geographically, and culturally specific features of the Caribbean itself.

Working with twentieth- and twenty-first-century sources ranging from theatrical works and novels to blogs, Murray-Román examines the ways in which writers such as Jacques Stephen Alexis, Zoé Valdés, Rosario Ferré, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Marlon James experiment with textually compensating for the loss of the corporeality of live relationship in performance traditions. Through their exploration of the interaction of literature and performance, she argues, Caribbean writers themselves offer a mode of bridging the disjunction between cultural and philosophical approaches within Caribbean studies.

Table of Contents

Introduction

1. Performance and the Expansion of Personhood in Marissa Chibas's "Daughter of a Cuban Revolutionary"

2. Creole's Thinking Body: Patrick Chamoiseau's Solibo Magnifique and Marlon James's Book of Night Women   

3. From Spectator to Participant: Audience Formationin Guillermo Cabrera Infante's Tres tristes tigres,Oonya Kempadoo's Tide Running, and Ernest Pépin's L’Envers du décor

4. Staceyann Chin and Zoé Valdés: Sexilic Politics in the Blogosphere

5. "Dansez et Revivez!": Reviving Personhood in Rosario Ferré’s "Maquinolandera" and Jacques Stephen Alexis's Les Arbres musiciens

Coda

On May 26, 2016, I performed a reading from Performance and Personhood at Gibney Dance (NYC), as part of Field Studies, a three-day choreography lab convened by Dr. Hannah Schwadron of the School of Dance at Florida State University. The performance, entitled "Being Audience is Real Serious: A Reading from Performance and Personhood," is a vocalized play on my experience of having been an audience for Chibás's Daughter of a Cuban Revolutionary, in an experiment with extending performance (Wolska) through first, writing and theorizing, and second, reembodying the experience through reading out loud. 

In 2016, Derek Gottlieb created a beautiful podcast called Interdisciplinary Radio where he interviewed researchers about their work and threaded together an episode along a concept. He included my work on personhood in an episode centered on the enlightenment subject. As Derek wrote to us in an email, the question, "How can something so theoretically universal, something in which everybody participates, be so completely opposed to embodiment?" kept returning throughout the episode. Listen to the full episode and the rest of the series in the Interdisciplinary Radio podcast here.

Chapter 1.

The discussions of personhood are grounded in Vodou philosophy, Agamben's and Roach's work on substitution, and a performance analysis of Marissa Chibás's one-woman play, Daughter of a Cuban Revolutionary, view excerpts on Vimeo.

Chapter 3.

This chapter compares the performance stages that anchor the tourism industry throughout the Caribbean and contrasts them to improvised spaces that are off of that circuit.

•Referenced in Guillermo Cabrera Infante's Tres Tristes Tigres is the famous Tropicana Club, which is contrasted to el chowcito where La Estrella, a fictionalized portrait of La Freddy, originally performs (Besame mucho):

•Featured in the description of the rumshop Sunday fête in Oonya Kempadoo's Tide Running include Lady Saw's "Sycamore Tree":

Most notable is Buju Banton's "Til I'm Laid to Rest," the lyrics of which the protagonist mis-sings to make them more appropriate to his own desires.

•Ernest Pépin's L'Envers du décor describes the impact of being an audience member to the following songs:

Chapter 4.

Proposing that blogs can be read as drawing on both the performance dynamics of the dance circle and literary practices, this chapter analyzes blogs by Staceyann Chin and Zoé Valdés. As work in the digital sphere is wont to do, both blogs have changed their appearance and location radically since I undertook the analysis. Chin's personal website, staceyannchin.com, which hosted her blog "Cyberjournal" no longer exists, but much of her text--if not the comments on which much of my research relies--has been migrated to the notes section of her facebook page. Although its layout has changed in between 2014 and now, Zoé Valdés's website remains present at zoevaldes.net.

Chapter 5.

This chapter places Rosario Ferré's short story "Maquinolandera" in conversation with Jacques Stephen Alexis's Les Arbres musiciens. Ferré's "Maquinolandera" is named for and structured on the performance by Ismael Rivera as part of Cortijo y su combo.

Cover Art by Albert Chong. Dancing with Palo, from the I-Traits (Self Portraits) series, 1983.