UC Irvine

This dissertation explores the significance of space in the creation of existential meaning and the development of a collective identity in Spanish and French Caribbean literature. Subjection to colonial and neo-colonial exploitation and displacement has limited the ability of Caribbean people to develop a meaningful connection with the Caribbean space. Through the romantic novel Sab by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda and the autobiography of Juan Francisco Manzano, I analyze how “habitation” and “livable forms of life” emerge as ways Caribbean literature navigates this displacement and helps cultivate meaningful connections with places for Caribbean people. In the first chapter, “Habitation”, I analyze how the novel Sab uses Romanticism to reimagine the small-scale as sites where relationships between various forces shaped the Caribbean space, offering a positive association with the past and prompts an emotional and intellectual exercise to foster a meaningful connection to spaces. In the second chapter, “Livable Forms of Life,” I analyze how the Autobiografía explores the relationship between the narrator and the city La Habana and how the performance of subjectivity leads him to return to and transform La Habana into a “home.” In the last chapter, “The Place of Dwelling,” I build upon the two conceptual frameworks of the previous two chapters to illustrate how Texaco’s reappropriation of the bildungsroman genre creates a new conceptual framework: the autobiography of space. Through Texaco’s focus on space and the various ways of being-in-the-world developed in each site instead of focusing the narrative on an individual person, the novel’s culmination in the establishment of Texaco the shantytown celebrates a collective being-in-the-world characterized by heterogeneity, and most importantly the appreciation of, attachment to, and the preservation of space.