Intersubjective Histories in the Mediterranean and Beyond: The Poetics of Self in Postcolonial Autobiography

Abstract

This dissertation brings together autobiographies from the postcolonial nations of Saint Lucia, Cyprus, Palestine/Israel, and Algeria to highlight a rethinking of subjectivity as “islanded” in the Mediterranean and Caribbean contexts. The texts analyzed are “The Schooner Flight” and “The Hotel Normandie Pool” (Derek Walcott), Arabesques (Anton Shammas), Women of Kerinia (Rina Katselli), Afentis Batistas (Costas Montis) and L’ Amour, la fantasia (Assia Djebar). The question it asks is twofold: how autobiography responds to the Mediterranean and the “American Mediterranean” as particular legacies of empire, which are disguised as unions, and what role islands play in these unions. The dissertation engages with a critical reading of the Mediterranean histories of Fernand Braudel and Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell as grand and agentless narratives that efface the individual and instead favor a network of connectivities within which the history of the individual takes place. In this sense, the Mediterranean as a unified space, as posed by these historians, is reconsidered as a colonial category. Unions disguise the exploitation of colonial spaces by emphasizing their need to adhere themselves to unifying political and administrative entities for the sake of their survival. It finds that islands, such as Cyprus and Saint Lucia, have been especially vulnerable entities reinforcing the unionist project of empire. Beyond their geographical definition, islands are metaphors for spaces the empire has constructed as insular and dependent. As a response, the dissertation proposes that islands are the missing links on the chain of Western historical narratives. Autobiography responds poetically to the project of unions by posing the self as a riddle that seeks its own unity. The set of autobiographies analyzed are disguised as fiction and, conversely, history disguised as personal story creatively responding to imperial disguise of unions. They use the power of invention to fuse stories of personal life with national, local, and historiographical stories complicating official historical narratives but also offer a deeper sense of the lived historical experience of former colonial subjects. It contributes to the exploration of forms of personal history in the Mediterranean and the multiple histories collectively defining the rich, layered patina of life.