Liberation Textualities: Decoloniality, Feminism, and Aesthetics in Anglophone Caribbean and Indigenous North American Resistance Literature

Liberation Textualities recognizes the connections between personal, emotional, and spiritual writing by Anglophone Caribbean and Indigenous North American women and an expanded framework of resistance literature. I argue that resistance itself is in fact a broad tradition within which many texts, representations, and ideas intersect. While this project is sensitive to the profound historical, socioeconomic, and cultural differences that shape the realities of various communities in the Americas, it also recognizes a shared decolonizing impulse and a common interest in interior and domestic life, nurtured by similar gendered and racialized experiences in settler, colonial, and neocolonial societies. This dissertation argues that decolonial, feminist, and aesthetic practices, while still overlooked in most canons of resistance literature, provide the grounds upon which to revitalize and expand our understanding of what constitutes resistance and offer representation to the extensive range of unexpected and unsung resistant textualities.

The study focuses on novels by Merle Collins and Lee Maracle, poems by Chrystos and Mahadai Das, and plays by M. NourbeSe Philip and Yvette Nolan. The Colour of Forgetting (1996) is read alongside Celias Song (2014) through the lens of spiritual resistance and marvellous realism. Not Vanishing (1988) and A Leaf in His Hear (2010) are analyzed for their representations of the body as a site of resistance. Lastly, Coups and Calypsos (2001) and Annie Maes Movement (1998) are examined for their focus on personal relationships and the dynamic interplay of resistance between individuals. This study looks at how different literary forms shift polemic and dominant understandings of resistance theory, whilst underscoring literary diversity as a principle value of resistance literature. The theoretical structure of the dissertation engages with foundational thinkers in resistance literature theoryBarbara Harlow, Frantz Fanon, and Selwyn Cudjoebut complicates, updates, and deconstructs their contributions through multiple resistance theorists, including Emma LaRocque, Leanne Simpson, and Carole Boyce Davies. These women have challenged patriarchal nationalism within Caribbean and Indigenous North American political movements and societies, but their philosophical work extends to how literary critics engage with the idea of resistance and assign value to a text.

These women, this dissertation asserts, redraw the boundaries of political and aesthetic engagement in literary studies, offering an important and revolutionary new path toward a comprehensive and pluriversal resistance literature that transcends a single movement, moment, or place.