My dissertation, Geographies of Memory, Trauma, and Pleasure in African American and Caribbean-American Literature examines the geographies of the cane fields, bodies of water, and the back porch to illustrate the speculative ways anti-black violence, intergenerational trauma, pleasure and Black memory co-exist in Black literature. Examining the aforementioned geographies as “co-protagonists” in literary texts such as Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Roxane Gay’s “In a Manner of Water and Light” from her short story collection Ayiti, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes were Watching God and Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed, I argue that these geographies that are shaped or embody slavery, colonialism, and sexual violence also co-exist with Black life and pleasure. This vexed relationship creates speculative moments in Black life that are deemed normal/ part of everyday Black life. I want to investigate the complicated nexus of terror and pleasure (which builds on Saidiya Hartman’s study in Scenes of Subjection) in Black geographies. Rather than see pleasure and terror as mutually exclusive and not influencing each other, my work seeks to put them in conversation with each other in Black literature: how they influence each other and how they create fantastical moments in Black life. This new relationship allows us to think through more fantastic ways of Black life: how it can seem otherworldly due to the severity of violence and trauma in everyday life.

Creator

• Fetus, Mohwanah Garyne

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-f8gv-jc08

Subject

• African American studies
• Caribbean literature
• English literature

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:15263
• etdadmin_upload_764269

Keyword

• Black Memory
• Geography
• Pleasure
• Trauma

Date created

• 2020-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright