This dissertation is the first book-length study of Caribbean island literatures from the English- and Spanish-speaking regions to explore the material and metaphorical geographies of prostitution anchored in the port cities of Jamaica, Trinidad, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. Although studies of urban space are typically oriented towards metropolitan centers of Caribbean migration, this project foregrounds the port city as a geographical space that is bound up with the figure of the public woman in what I am calling a relationship of intimacy. Its alternative literary historiography extends post-independence Caribbean literature of citizenship and nationhood to contemporary writers who destabilize both the island paradise myth and national conceptions of unity. In particular, I argue that this alternative gendered spatial imaginary provides a dynamic model that complicates the imposed colonial boundaries of race, gender, class, and nation that have been reproduced by the postcolonial state. My dissertation builds on sociological studies of sex work in the Caribbean by making a case for the role that creative narrative interventions play in bringing greater legitimacy and visibility to women who are marginalized within nationalist discourses

The case studies to follow examine eight primary texts set or produced over the course twentieth century that center the major port cities of Jamaica, Trinidad, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. Each chapter pairs a canonical work from the post-independence era with a more recent fictional engagement, and each pairing informs a culturally-responsive approach to the public woman and her associated spatial tropes of prostitution. The first chapter looks to the novels of diasporic Jamaican authors Orlando Patterson and Kerry Young, arguing that while Patterson uses a rhetoric of fallenness and uneven geographic mobility to show the limits of Jamaican multicultural modernity, Young exposes the metaphors of containment and abjection that underline this narrative. The second chapter investigates performance-oriented works of Earl Lovelace and Tony Hall from Trinidad for the way they redirect a national discourse of increased indebtedness away from imperial dynamics of domination and dependency in favor of celebrating the Carnival public woman. The third chapter turns its attention to Puerto Rican writers Luis Rafael S�nchez and Mayra Santos-Febres and their divergent engagements with tourist and nationalist discourses through the female figure of the brothel in San Juan and Ponce. The fourth chapter bridges the gap between “official” and “dissident” Cuban novelists, arguing that both Miguel Barnet and Fernando Vel�zquez Medina employ the rumbera and the recurrent trope of Havana’s ruins to recuperate an alternative literary vision of the city that rejects the sex-based and text-based repressions perpetuated by the revolutionary state.

“Representing Radical Politics in Anglophone Caribbean Literature After Independence” examines the depiction of black radicalism across multiple works by V. S. Naipaul, Sam Selvon, Merle Collins, and Earl Lovelace—the first writers of fiction to address the emergence of Black Power in the Caribbean. These authors repurpose, expand, and revise their portraits of Caribbean resistance movements in the wake of decolonization and in so doing betray the limitations inherent in the literary forms that their representations take. I argue that reading these authors alongside each other illuminates a myriad of formal difficulties that prevent Afro-Caribbean revolutionary struggle from being portrayed as something other than mere mimicry of Anglo-American forms. When read in turn, each author illustrates the evolving search for a form amenable to the fictive depiction of a radical politics indigenous to black West Indian culture. Collectively, their works either manifest or challenge the inability to recognize the uniquely Caribbean relationship of blackness to radicalism due to the region’s politics being seen until the 1980s as imitating or secondary to British or African American modes. The dissertation finds that, respectively, the authors’ testing of literary forms moves from mimicry to parody to allegory before culminating in Lovelace’s most recent novel, Is Just a Movie (2011), a work of historiographic metafiction that spotlights the representation of Caribbean Black Power as parodic only to dismantle that interpretation as myopic. The focus of my dissertation on the literature of black radicalism in Trinidad, Grenada, and the U.K. makes an important contribution to the field of Caribbean Studies in its demonstration of how literary forms bring into representation a global Black Power Movement that is thought to have failed as a viable political enterprise in the West Indies. It shows how Collins’s and Lovelace’s complex interpretations of Caribbean Black Power counter and broaden Naipaul’s and Selvon’s oversimplifications of the movement.

"Pigments of Our Imagination: Anthropological Myths, Racial Archives and the Transnationalism of Apartheid" repositions South African cultural production within discourses on Africa, the Black Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean. By focusing on apartheid's intellectual origins, this project begins by mapping the production of a transnational race discourse between Germany and South Africa in order to situate apartheid within a broader circulation of ideas on race and colonial governmentality. I argue that this transnational dialogue embodies a larger shift in the racial technologies utilized by nation-states over the course of the twentieth century, in which the employment of anthropology gained increasing significance in the development of national race policies. Exploring the ways in which pre-apartheid intellectuals articulated a `new language' for representing race to the state, I demonstrate that as apartheid ideology coalesced it did so under an increasingly cartographical rubric for imagining how races were to be organized within South Africa. As a form of colonial racial governance, I show how apartheid's geographical mapping of race was also ideologically buttressed by a historical imperative of projecting ideas of racial difference and distinction back into the southern African past. I argue that this mythologizing was part of apartheid's attempt to `ground' itself as an organic, and indigenous, ideology of the South Africa nation. In order to interrogate this racist mythology, I trace a history of South African cultural production - from early, pre-apartheid black literature to contemporary performance and visual art - that, in demonstrating a consistent discourse on racial and cultural creolization in South Africa, runs counter to apartheid mythologies of separation. In the final chapter, I move towards an `oceanic' critique of apartheid's rigid, continentally-based system of classification. I argue that the visual economies of the Indian Ocean offer a regional vantage point from which to view South African apartheid as part of a nexus of transoceanic exchange across the southern tip of Africa. I conclude that a history of creolization discourse in South Africa not only undoes the equation of apartheid as an exceptionalist, national anomaly, but also demonstrates South Africa's entanglement in in the global circulation of racial ideas.