Abstract

Given both the history and contemporary reality of Caribbean societies, cultural identity is often theorized in diasporic terms as a set of constantly shifting relationships that cannot be contained within the more rigidly drawn boundaries of the nation. While the diaspora paradigm is generally read to offer a progressive and anti-essentialist formulation of cultural identity, some critics have questioned to what extent it can provide a framework for considering questions of self-determination and the rights of citizenship, issues historically of importance to an earlier generation of anticolonial writers and theorists. In this dissertation I consider Patrick Chamoiseau's Texaco, Earl Lovelace's Salt, and Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place, arguing that these texts respond to this critical impasse by formulating a revised version of the concept of the nation. By using performance to conceptualize fluidity and indeterminacy, but in temporal rather than spatial terms, they maintain the progressive elements of the diaspora paradigm while still addressing issues of self-determination. Engaging the Caribbean's wealth of performance traditions through both literary representation and formal enactment, the writers foreground their own textual performances as acts of enunciation, and in so doing they participate in the historically specific forms of identity that they claim. This self-reflexive dimension reveals the way that writing enacts, offers one iteration of, and thereby creates what it names. In this way, these writers both assert a strong claim to cultural identity and collective agency and at the same time present an understanding of this identity as relational, incomplete, and always open to revision.