University of Miami Scholarly Repository Open Access Dissertations Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2012-06-15 Caribbean Bodyscapes: The olitP ics of Sacred Citizenship and the Transpersonal Body Josune Urbistondo University of Miami, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/oa_dissertations Recommended Citation Urbistondo, Josune, "Caribbean Bodyscapes: The oP litics of Sacred Citizenship and the Transpersonal Body" (2012). Open Access Dissertations. 807. https://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/oa_dissertations/807 This Open access is brought to you for free and open access by the Electronic Theses and Dissertations at Scholarly Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Access Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholarly Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI CARIBBEAN BODYSCAPES: THE POLITICS OF SACRED CITIZENSHIP AND THE TRANSPERSONAL BODY By Josune Urbistondo A DISSERTATION Submitted to the Faculty of the University of Miami in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Coral Gables, Florida June 2012 ©2012 Josune Urbistondo All Rights Reserved UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy CARIBBEAN BODYSCAPES: THE POLITICS OF SACRED CITIZENSHIP AND THE TRANSPERSONAL BODY Josune Urbistondo Approved: ________________ _________________ Patricia J. Saunders, Ph.D. Dean of the Graduate School Associate Professor of English ________________ _________________ Brenna Munro, Ph.D. David Luis-Brown, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of English Associate Professor of Cultural Studies and English Claremont Graduate University Claremont, California ________________ Elena Machado-Saez, Ph.D. Associate Professor of English Florida Atlantic University URBISTONDO, JOSUNE (Ph.D., English) Caribbean Bodyscapes: The Politics of Sacred (June 2012) Citizenship and the Transpersonal Body Abstract of a dissertation at the University of Miami. Dissertation supervised by Professor Patricia J. Saunders. No. of pages in text. (259) When an individual is unintelligible to the nation, whether because of gender, sexuality, and/or race, the promises of the nation are foreclosed. In this project I explore the relationship of sacred citizenship as an alternative and at times overlapping form of politics that creates a possibility of belonging for marginalized identities in Caribbean and Caribbean diasporic women’s writing. All the novels examined in this project, Cristina García’s Monkey Hunting (2004), Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night (2001), Patricia Powell’s The Pagoda (1998), Mayra Montero’s The Red of His Shadow (2001), Ana-Maurine Lara’s Erzulie’s Skirt (2006), and Daína Chaviano’s The Island of Eternal Love (2008), depict protagonists that practice restricted versions of national citizenship. Due to varying degrees of marginality, the protagonists, therefore, construct alternative and qualitative citizenship practices. Belonging though sacred citizenship strikes a balance among acknowledging the materiality of the body, how one produces sacral spaces for the self, and the physical, spiritual and psychological crossings that push against long-standing epistemic frameworks of being and understanding. For Cristina García’s Monkey Hunting and Daína Chaviano’s The Island of Eternal Love I examine their efforts for recuperating the Chinese-Cuban identity. Their novels construct cross-cultural, syncretic spaces and present memory as a shared and accessible vehicle for belonging. While García nearly silences the Creole voice, Chaviano’s novel not only represents the Chinese-Cuban identity but also expands representation to both African and European identities within the Cuban social landscape. Chaviano’s use of mythic figures and doubling scenes counter singular notions of remembrances all the while granting sacred belonging outside time. For instance, Chaviano’s portrayal of love as a vehicle for representing political change juxtaposes our main love story between Pablo and Amalia occurring in pre-revolutionary Cuba with the 1990’s Special Period and the Balseros crisis. When moving into Anglophone Caribbean, I read Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night and Patricia Powell’s The Pagoda as offering complementary versions of accessing the sacred. While in Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms there are what Michael Warner calls “publics” and “counterpublics” where the protagonists feel safe to negotiate their identities, Powell’s The Pagoda depicts Mr. Lowe as tirelessly constructing a physical safe haven never available in the scope of the novel (66). The garden and the alm’s house in Cereus Blooms allow Mala, Tyler, and Otoh diasporic crevices that become sites for contesting their sexual and gendered identities. The Pagoda, however, does not offer Lowe a safe physical space. His efforts at belonging through erotic couplings force him to find solace through his body, the very medium of his pain and abuse. Lowe’s practice of sacred citizenship is thus sacrificial. The erotic as emancipatory is also depicted in Mayra Montero’s The Red of His Shadow, and Ana-Maurine Lara’s Erzulie’s Skirt. One distinct difference is that while the sacred functions as an evocative presence in the previous chapters, in The Red of His Shadow and Erzulie’s Skirt I examine how the protagonists practice belonging by directly engaging with traditional forms of sacred practices through Vodou worship. Both novels depict protagonists whose spiritual prowess and affiliation with loa, Erzulie, guide their physical and otherworldly realities. All the novels share a common investment in challenging linear and dominant histories that marginalize subjects. By introducing complex temporalities pregnant with sacral opportunities, the novels critique earlier discourses written on historical experiences and invest value in intimate acts usually abjected by dominant society. All the sacral moments experienced during flexible temporalities allow the protagonists to imagine inter-subjective belonging and transpersonal coalition through physical, gendered and sexual crossings as well as cosmological and mystical practices. Regardless of how the sacred is accessed and/or produced, all the novels examined reach a coming to terms with the need for an active, different, and collective understanding of self and community that prompts the sacred self to reside within a critically intimate position to other othered bodies as well as their socio-economic realities (Ahmed 109). All the examples noted above depict the protagonists as productively moving away from their initial position of marginality, and, through their multiple sacred engagements, producing a space that re-imagines socio-political belonging. For the newly minted Elejabarrieta family…and the Owl. iii Acknowledgements This project would not have been possible without the love and support of my family and friends. I would like to thank my parents, Jesus and Astrid Urbistondo, for teaching me the value of hard work. I am thankful for my aunt and godmother, Dr. Silvia La Villa who always leads by example. Without her guidance and support, I would have never imagined such a personal venture would have even been possible for me. Thank you to my husband and coffee shop partner, Josu Elejabarrieta, who has supported me at every turn. I am grateful to my faculty advisor, Dr. Patricia J. Saunders. Her support, critical acumen, and overall brilliance pushed me and helped me realize a version of my professional self I could not have otherwise achieved. Thank you as well to my dissertation committee, Dr. Brenna Munro, Dr. David Luis-Brown, and Dr. Elena Machado-Saez as they have been extremely supportive and generous with their time and expertise. I am grateful to each and every one of you. Thank you, Gracias, Eskerrik asko! iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Introduction…….…….……………………………………………………………………1 Chapter 1 “Traveling through the Flesh:” Embodiment and Sacred Spaces in Cristina García’s Monkey Hunting…………….…………………………………………………….27 2 Accessor(“I”)zing Gender and Sexing Desire in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night and Patricia Powell’s The Pagoda………………………………………...…………………………82 3 Bodies Scared Sacred at the Crossroads: Vodou and Sacral Intelligibility in Mayra Montero’s The Red of His Shadow and Ana-Maurine Lara’s Erzulie’s Skirt..........................................................................................133 4 To Dream, To Be: The Island of Eternal Love and Mythical Postmemory………………………………………………………….…184 Conclusion “Different Ones of Us: A (Re)Cognition of the Sacred”……………………….224 Bibliography….………………………………………………………...………………239 v Introduction According to Benedict Anderson, the nation is an “imagined political community” (7). Individuals imagine their belonging within the nation because those from even the smallest of nations can never all meet and acknowledge one another. Therefore, there is a creative process in constructing one’s belonging within such a space. Homi K. Bhabha argues that there is an ambiguous and constant tension between producing the nation’s mythic past and the contemporary moment of the nation’s people. He states, We…have a contested conceptual territory where the nation’s people must be thought in double-time; the people are the historical ‘objects’ of a nationalist pedagogy, giving the discourse an authority that is based on the pre-given or constituted historical origin in the