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Liminal Citizenry: Black Experience in the Central American Intellectual Imagination

Gomez Menjivar, Jennifer Carolina

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2011, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Spanish and Portuguese.

Central American national literatures and social imaginaries have largely denied, ignored or, at best, minimized the long-lasting legacy of Afro-descendants across the isthmus. This dissertation examines how and why the identities of the black diaspora—mulattoes, the West Indian population that was recruited to work on the United Fruit Company’s banana plantations and the Afro-indigenous Garifuna—have been shaped historically, vis-à-vis the nation, by Central American literary discourses, from colonial times to the present day. The black diaspora is not a powerless or exploited populace, but a constituency whose local and transnational expressions of identity challenge the myths of harmony and ethnic homogeneity in Central America. Debates about ethnicity and citizenship take place in the political arena as well as literature, where canonical authors like Rubén Darío and Miguel Ángel Asturias as well as understudied writers like Paca Navas Miralda and David Ruiz Puga have intervened at different times in history. I demonstrate that questions about the black diaspora’s relevance to Central American national cultures emerge in periods of political and economic turmoil. Chapter 1 examines travel narratives by Thomas Gage and Jacob Haefkens in order to identify the opportunities for upward social mobility available to blacks in Central America during colonial times and argues that these opportunities allowed them to exercise control of their representation in Central American letters.

Chapter 2 analyzes 19th century texts by Rubén Darío and Francisco Gavidia that subject the implicit reader to an aesthetic education by supplying copious allusions to influential works, demonstrating the Central American intellectuals’ literary prowess as manifested by their ability to make blackness a sublime element in their writing. Chapter 3 examines two anti-imperialist novels by Paca Navas Miralda and Demetrio Aguilera Malta, whose novels from mid 20th century map the presence of black bodies across Central American spaces under U.S. domination. Chapter 4 magnifies the Guatemala-Belize boundary in the works of Miguel Ángel Asturias and David Ruiz Puga in order to study the indígena/negro divide that is at stake when intellectuals appeal to their historical connection to Mesoamerica to lay claims to Central American belongingness. Finally, chapter 5 probes strategies of national reconciliation in contemporary novels by Tatiana Lobo and Ana Cristina Rossi that stress the need to recover and salvage black histories in order to unearth these communities from oblivion. The different moments studied give rise to debates between insiders and outsiders of the Central American black diaspora about the relationship of ethnicity to national identity.

Abril Trigo, PhD (Advisor)
Ana Del Sarto, PhD (Committee Member)
Laura Podalsky, PhD (Committee Member)

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Gomez Menjivar, J. C. (2011). Liminal Citizenry: Black Experience in the Central American Intellectual Imagination [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1305915276

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Gomez Menjivar, Jennifer Carolina. Liminal Citizenry: Black Experience in the Central American Intellectual Imagination. 2011. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1305915276.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Gomez Menjivar, Jennifer Carolina. "Liminal Citizenry: Black Experience in the Central American Intellectual Imagination." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1305915276

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)