Intertextuality and Literary Friendship in Caribbean Diasporic Writing and "As Man" (Poetry Collection)

• Author / Creator

  Bogle, Cornel

• This dissertation comprises a collection of poetry framed by an introductory essay that foregrounds the aesthetic, archival, and critical impetuses behind the work. Deploying techniques of erasure, found, and lyric poetry, the collection surfaces lyrical subjects and manifests aphoristic affective utterances taken from varied source texts such as letters, memories, and artifacts from my family archives; Joseph Brodsky’s Nativity Poems; and letters exchanged between two Caribbean diasporic writers living in Canada, Austin Clarke and Sam Selvon. This thesis is embedded within a series of intertextual relationships that instigate poetic and critical explorations of genre, form, and themes within the Anglophone Caribbean literary tradition. The first section, "Imagining Leaving," consults personal experiences and family histories to stage an inquiry into how diasporic place-making and intergenerational trauma remain central to the constitution of Caribbean subjectivities. The following section, "Natty Oms," engages with Brodsky’s Nativity Poems, a text that performs diasporic literary community-making through practices of translation of Brodsky’s poems by his writer-friends, including the Caribbean writers Derek Walcott and V.S. Naipaul. This thesis produces an erasure poem from Brodsky’s work to consider how intimacy, eroticism, and spatial disorientation function as diasporic literary aesthetics. The final section, "As Man," employs techniques of found poetry to signal the role of Canada in Caribbean literary history, as well as to explore diasporic epistolary practices, homosocial intimacies, and Caribbean masculinities. This dissertation offers three significant contributions to the field of Caribbean and Black diaspora studies. First, through creative practice it renders an account of the personal relations that fuelled Caribbean cultural production among prominent male writers by foregrounding shared intimacies as opposed to institutional affiliations. Second, it asserts the utility of intertextuality as a creative method, particularly suited to explorations of diaspora, rather than merely as a hermeneutical approach. Lastly, this doctoral thesis advances our understanding of key figures in the development of Anglophone Caribbean literature, insight into production of diasporic aesthetics, and the historical continuities in Caribbean literature across periods and geographies.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Caribbean
  • Caribbean Canadian
  • Masculinities
  • Diaspora
  • Found Poetry
  • Literary Friendship
  • Intertextuality

• Graduation date

  Spring 2022

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Doctor of Philosophy

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-t5y8-0x13

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.