Bookkeeping: Discourses of Debt in Caribbean Canadian Literature

• Author / Creator

  van der Marel, Lisa C

• This thesis examines representations of debt and obligation in works of Caribbean Canadian literature published between 1997 and 2007. It uses these representations to discuss the relationship between postcolonial, global, and diasporic approaches to cultural studies. These disciplinary distinctions draw explicit and implicit divisions between the colonial, the postcolonial, and the transnational as discrete historical moments in a teleologic progression. Against such divisions, literary works by David Chariandy, Ramabai Espinet, Dionne Brand, and Nalo Hopkinson suggest that colonial pasts do not remain in the past but continue to overdetermine the ‘transnational’ present. Intriguingly, each of these authors uses the language of debt and obligation to describe these temporal and geographical entanglements. This thesis draws on new economic criticism, memory studies, theories of recognition, treaty citizenship, and Afro-pessimism to argue firstly that Caribbean Canadian literature’s representations of debt refute emerging neo-Marxist theories of debt’s governmentality offered in response to the 2008 global financial crisis, and secondly, that they expose diaspora studies’ underlying valuation of individual autonomy and possessive individualism. By representing colonial pasts as outstanding and unpayable debts, fictional and nonfictional works dispute the seemingly clean breaks contemporary scholarship and political debates can draw between colonial pasts and transnational futures.
  Debt, at its simplest, is any exchange not brought to completion; Canada’s present is a space of incomplete—and incompletable—cultural, economic, and intellectual exchanges. Bookkeeping: Discourses of Debt in Caribbean Canadian Literature offers an anti-colonial critique of the transnational present and asks what it means to live ethically amid the colonial aftermath’s systemic debts as they entangle past and future, nations and diasporas, bodies and archives, as well as political emancipation and consumer agency.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Anti-Blackness
  • Memory Studies
  • After Postcoloniality
  • Afrofuturism
  • Debt
  • Dionne Brand
  • Global Financial Crisis
  • Fiscal Entrapment
  • Recognition
  • Diaspora Studies
  • Literary Criticism
  • David Chariandy
  • Speculative Fiction
  • Indigenous Studies
  • Nalo Hopkinson
  • New Economic Criticism
  • Fiction
  • Obligation
  • Finance Capital
  • Transnational Turn
  • Ramabai Espinet
  • Settler-Colonization
  • Canada
  • Autobiography
  • Diaspora
  • Afro-Pessimism
  • Postcolonial Criticism
  • Deontology
  • Emancipation
  • Poetry
  • Transnational
  • Caribbean Canadian
  • Black Canada
  • Kinship
  • Global
  • Literature

• Graduation date

  Fall 2018

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Doctor of Philosophy

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R37659X57

• License

  Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission.