| dc.description.abstract | This study examines how eight Afro-Brazilian, Dominican, and Haitian women from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries created fiction and poetry for aesthetic and social-justice purposes. My baseline questions are: How did Afro-Brazilian, Dominican, and Haitian female writers from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries make sense of their marginalized positions? And how do the thoughts presented in their fictional works contribute to national and international perceptions and understanding of Brazilian, Haitian, and Dominican societies? I argue that these Black female writers used their intersectional profile to underscore how the patriarchal, racist, and classist systems at the core of Brazilian, Dominican, and Haitian societies contributed to the marginalization of various sectors of their population. In each of my chapters, I forge a transnational conversation with one Black female writer from Brazil, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic to further explore their experiences and thoughts on their respective nations. To enrich this conversation, I pull from Critical Race Theorists as well as from Black Feminist thinkers from the United States, Brazil, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. Overall, the transnational framework that I employ in this study enables me to draw connections among these societies and better comprehend the efforts of a historically underrepresented community to inscribe their presence and epistemologies in dominant narratives that have dehumanized them and silenced their agency. | |
