TRANSLATIVE CARNIVALISM: PERFORMANCE AND LANGUAGE IN THE CARIBBEAN TEXT A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Kavita Ashana Singh August 2014 © 2014 Kavita Ashana Singh TRANSLATIVE CARNIVALISM: PERFORMANCE AND LANGUAGE IN THE CARIBBEAN TEXT Kavita Ashana Singh, Ph.D. Cornell University 2014 This dissertation identifies two dominant modes of postcolonial Caribbean expression: performance and multilingualism. I propose that a relational logic underlies the region’s literature and popular culture, where the persistence of coloniality coincides with the new practice of autonomy, whether purely cultural autonomy or also political. Performance layers the desires and impulses for self-expression and self-determination upon the continuing impositions and complicities of the (neo)colonial order, while multilingualism translatively enacts a similar negotiation between standardized European languages and local Creoles, metropolitan or global standards and Caribbean cognitive and expressive logics. Within this doubling of selves and of ways of being, acting, and creating, exhibition, understood through Carnival masquerade, makes a specifically Caribbean exceptionality conspicuous. Drawing on translation theorist Naoki Sakai’s concept of the “heterolingual address,” departing from Homi Bhabha’s now classic postcolonial theory of “hybridity,” and revising Antonio Benitez-Rojo’s post-modern understanding of Caribbean performance, I present distinct moments and sites of postcolonial Caribbean expression where the mode and framework for both political action and creative expression emerge as translative performance, and achieve, in the process, an exhibitive visibility of the national or local. In the chapter on Derek Walcott’s Drums and Colours, I use Arendtian “action” to describe this speaking and acting before others in the moment of independence, a multilingual experiment in community against a vulnerable plurality. In Monchoachi’s post-départementalisation exhibition of Creole philosophical value through vehicular French, the postcolonial logic of alienation serves to initiate “freedom” and “ecstasy,” the “looseness” of excess produced in the relation between “word” and “body.” Maryse Condé’s autobiographical performance of an untraditional self that does not speak Creole overtly troubles categories of “truth” in order to expose how marginalities are engendered in a valorization of créolité as the only authentic writing. Finally, an exploration of Carnival texts and archives, both in the present and in previous centuries, demonstrates how the new Trinbagonian nation-state struggles to reconcile liberal political ideals and contradictory local practices—a duality that recalls Peter Wilson’s “crab antics,” between reputation and respectability. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Kavita Ashana Singh locates her transnational Caribbean roots in Guyana, Trinidad, and the USA. She completed her A.B. in Comparative Literature with a Certificate in African-American Studies at Princeton University in 2004. She also holds a Maîtrise in Comparative Literature from l’Université de Paris 8. v For Donovan and Ian, my dark knight and my superman vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I have many to thank, as many have made it possible for this dissertation to finally reach fruition. I begin with my family, for their unconditional love, support, and truth. My advisor, Natalie Melas, was an intellectual inspiration and model since my first days of graduate school, and an ally always thereafter. I am as grateful for your unequaled and rigorous critical guidance, as for your encouragement, faith in my unconventional methods and questions, and seemingly infinite patience. Viranjini Munasinghe, so generous and nurturing, accompanied me as I explored experiences and ideas that were not only academically exciting, but also intimately troubling. I am grateful every time you listen to my sometimes inconvenient observations and conclusions. Gerard Aching, you take my work seriously in a way that sometimes reminds me that I can too, all while your engagements always indicate how I can go further, deeper. Carole Boyce Davies, thank you for always helping me stay focused, for your ready support, and for bridging the roles of compatriot and mentor. And finally, the first person to join my very large dissertation committee in spirit, Tiphaine Samoyault, who was also the first, even before I could, to believe that I had something of my own to say, and who always reminds me to say it. Between these five mentors, I was able to imagine myself in communion with my own translative Caribbean even in the seeming wilderness of six difficult Ithaca winters. For being my Ithacan family from day one, I thank Caroline Ferraris-Besso, Milan Allan, Juan Sierra, and Guillaume Ratel. Hanh Nguyen, Amaya Atucha, and John Phan, you completed the clan and are now my extended family, however far we all may travel. Desmond Jagmohan, you brought home back to me. Beth Bouloukos vii and Marcela Romero, you are as loyal as you are beautiful. Tyi McCray, you’ve sneakily become one of the most important people I’ve left behind in Ithaca. Natalie Leger and Armando García, your gifts to me are unquantifiable, for you have been not only my most trusted friends, but also my first true colleagues—the kind I can tell anything to and learn everything from. My nephews, Donovan and Ian Singh, gave meaning to my most challenging times as a graduate student. My companion, Rodrigo Hasbún, is the pillar that saw me through to the end. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch v Dedication vi Acknowledgments vii INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1: Drums and Colours: Walcott’s Multilingual Community 40 CHAPTER 2: “We Country”: Monchoachi’s Poetics of Land and Language 85 CHAPTER 3: “On écrit d’abord pour soi”: The Autobiographical Masquerade of Maryse Condé 140 CHAPTER 4: Rewriting the National Story: Respectability and the “Carnival Mentality” 194 BIBLIOGRAPHY 281 ix INTRODUCTION “Specks of Dust” said Generale de Gaulle. “Miniature state” was Eric Williams’ evaluation. “Small countries” said Edouard Glissant. These quotes describe either one or more Caribbean country, attesting to both physical size and a diminutive global status, asserted both from afar (de Gaulle) and at home (Williams and Glissant) They echo the diminishment that centuries of colonization have enacted on the Caribbean people and present one of greatest difficulties of the postcolonial condition in the region: when colonization ends, how does a new, “miniature” country of alienated citizens and wasted resources begin to define and represent itself? Surprisingly, seemingly unaware that they are supposed to be irrelevant, people across the Caribbean have creatively shown just the opposite: writers, speakers, actors, thinkers, and all categories of creators have produced representations of themselves that are not only successful, from music to food to sports to writing, but that have also been spectacularly extraordinary enough for international visibility and recognition. Colonial history has bequeathed to the Caribbean a legacy of diminished means, yet its citizens work as if under great expectations. Postcolonial Caribbean writing has often engaged this doubled ontology, engaging the region’s history of belittlement all while creating so prodigiously as to multiply illustrations of its immanence and its value. Both examples and agents of this seemingly incongruous grandeur, those creating in the Caribbean appear to work under a conviction of either individual or local exceptionality, countering the centuries of repression and delegitimization imposed by their colonial history. 1 Defining the Postcolonial Condition The difficulty of the postcolonial condition for the region, however, does not disappear. After living under the cultural and civic standards imposed by Europe during centuries, after being separated from their own denigrated cultural and creative practices and taught that racially and ethnically they were undeserving, the diasporic citizens of the Caribbean still struggle with the problem of alienation, the concept argued by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks, through which they turn the colonizer’s gaze upon themselves and work towards external standards. With this psychological burden, they must now also solve the urgent political problem of self- determination. After centuries of colonial thingification, Aimé Césaire’s term for the reduction of colonized people irrelevance as objects, “instruments of production,” these countries still have to define their own self-determination.1 Islands of the British West Indies first achieved independence as a Federation in 1958, which later fractured into separate countries in 1962, some of which remain territories of England.2 The French Caribbean countries of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana underwent a départementalization process which absorbed them into the French state. Stripped of ancestral political and expressive forms, and displaced from the contexts in which those forms were practiced, these Francophone and Anglophone countries arrived at postcolonial status in a world dominated by very particualar governmental structures created and championed by the very colonial powers they had escaped: the liberal 1 Aimé Césaire discusses “thingification” ‘chosification’ in his Discours sur le colonialism (Discourse 2 The Federation consisted of the following territories: Anguilla,