At Home in Pieces: Adaptive Encounters in Caribbean and Jewish Diasporic Literatures

Dalia Bolotnikov Mazur
English
UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation examines the poetics of fragmentation in Caribbean and Jewish diasporic literatures in Britain and the U.S. It considers the use of formal experimentation to represent and embody the tensions of diasporic experience in the texts. The project engages with contemporary theories of translation and music to produce a theory of “fragment sampling.” It views the “fragment” in diasporic literature as an embodied giving over of agency, a form of gift between generations that can be repurposed and modified for new contexts, akin to “sampling” in music. Like music, the fragmented form creates the potential for an encounter with meaning, rather than dictating a specific response, through the effects of rhythm and syntax. “Fragment sampling” refers to an adaptive aesthetic mode through which the writers engender a space of “in-betweenness” in their texts: past and present are contemporaneous, multiple narrative threads weave through simultaneously, and languages intersect and impact each other. Through tracing formal similarities, the fragments and the gaps between them, we begin to see how each writer confronts intergenerational trauma, imagines a reconstitution of home through music and language, and exposes global patterns of relation that refuse the stringent boundaries of nations and disciplines.