Dirt. Aesthetics and Epistemology of a Motif in Caribbean Literatures and Cultural Theory

• Applicant: Dr. Isabel Exner
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2016 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 323857900

Predominant motifs in what could be called a literature of precarity in the Caribbean originate in the semantic field of the dirty, the excremental, litter, garbage, residue and trash. These motifs function as particular literal referents in relation to discourses negotiating ideas about impurity and contamination. My dissertation analyzes hispano- and francophone Caribbean texts from a diachronic perspective that share these motifs, but attribute different metaphorical and allegorical functions to them. 'Investigating the textual agencies that are effected by the literary evocations of 'material' dirtiness; and analyzing their relation to theoretical perspectives on contamination and impurity in cultural theory, the dissertation inquires the identifications and political subjectivities favored by narratives about dirt in the Caribbean. Naturalist novels like those by Manuel Zeno Gandia from around 1900, establish striking parallels between the representation of material dirtiness, social and moral degeneration, physical illness and biopolitical anxieties about racial impurity. This discursive constellation is found to be interconnected to 19th century knowledge-paradigms concerned with the avoidance of contamination which are expressed also in non-literary genres like the popular manuals of hygiene. In contrast to these cultural obsessions with purity, traceable to colonial constellations of knowledge, the dissertation perceives a discursive shift closed around the turn of the 21st century. Dominant paradigms of knowledge in different fields of Caribbean discourse are now shown to be privileging rather the positive than the corruptive potential of contaminations. In Caribbean cultural theory as well as in literary texts like those by Patrick Chamoiseau, recycling figures as a new productive material culture. Symbolic waste and the abject embody sources of an epistemological potential here, and the preference for 'impure' formal approaches is demonstrated to constitute a form of cultural critique. On the other hand, though, the motif of dirt is also occupying a pivotal protagonism in some Caribbean end-of-the-century-novels providing it with negative connotations. The poetics of 'dirty realism' in novels by Pedro Juan Gutierrez and Edgardo Rodriguez Julia articulate ambivalent positions towards the dominant paradigms of knowledge of their time, inducing to critically reconsider the contemporary theoretical preference for 'impurity' as an imaginative basis for cultural critique.

• DFG Programme: Publication Grants