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.