Decolonizing the Caribbean Borderlands: The Haitian Revolution in Contemporary Latina/o Cultural Production

In the last two decades scholars across a number of disciplines have demonstrated that the Haitian Revolution shapes our contemporary world in fundamental ways. Re-inscribing the events of Saint-Domingue between 1791-1804 into world history, philosophy, political science, and critical race, ethnic, literary, and cultural studies radically alters understandings of the early Atlantic world, of the age of revolutions, and of the origins of some of the most foundational ideas and ideals of contemporary globalized society such as freedom, equality, and human rights. Yet few scholars in Latina/o Studies have sought to trace the importance of Haiti and the Haitian Revolution in contemporary Latina/o cultural production. By bringing border thinking generated on the US-Mexico border into dialogue with scholarship on the silencing of Haiti and the Haitian Revolution, this dissertation un-silences the Caribbean borderlands exploring coloniality’s layered, fractal frontiers that connect Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the United States in order to bridge borders, unsettle entrenched nationalisms, and radically reorient the maps and timelines of contemporary hemispheric studies of the Americas.Doctor of Philosoph