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After the Revolution: Memory, Absence, and Carrying on in Black Literature and Film of the Americas

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Abstract

Situated in different but related “post-revolutionary” contexts, After the Revolution: Memory, Absence, and Carrying on in Black Literature and Film of the Americas begins by positing communal and intersubjective labor as central to the interrogation of resistant and revolutionary subjectivity. The dissertation engages with recent scholarship on affect and ontology in Feminist studies, Black studies, and critical theory in order to reframe intersectional approaches to race and gender within the fields of literary and media studies. Focusing on Black literature and film of the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America, the dissertation asserts the intellectual and political stakes emerging from theorizations of everyday life and the affective dimensions of race and gender in cultural productions. Its concentration on the “after” of revolution departs from event-based narratives of social and political transformation and moments of revolt, and highlights instead artistic expressions of daily living. These moments are are no longer about explosive transformation, heroes, and grand historical gestures, but rather the quiet spaces in between, and the enervating work of carrying on. More so than within revolutionary activity itself, I argue, these are the moments where the sedimentation of subject formation within newly defined political and social parameters begins.

The dissertation brings together interdisciplinary cultural studies methods derived from theories of coloniality, such as put forth by Sylvia Wynter, Black feminist theories of resistance, empowerment, and affective politics as developed by Audre Lorde and June Jordan; contemporary Black feminist theorizing of subjectivity, identity, and epistemology, drawing from Denise Ferreira da Silva and Saidiya Hartman; and contemporary Black scholarship concerned with discursively produced constructions of Blackness, such as that by Frank Wilderson, Jared Sexton, and Fred Moten. In doing so, I draw attention to affective circuits within different geopolitical and historical contexts that are formed in relation to race, gender, and sexual hierarchies of power.

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This item is under embargo until July 24, 2024.