Ravasio, Paola
Congratulations on passing the viva voce examination
on 26 March 2018.
Dissertation topic:
"Black Costa Rica: Pluricentric Belonging in Afra-Costa Rican Poetry."
Scholarship: DAAD STIBET fellowship
(1 October 2013 - 31 May 2014 and November 2017 - March 2018)
Contact address at the University of Würzburg:
Institute of Modern Philology - Romance Studies
University of Würzburg
Am Hubland
97074 Würzburg
First supervisor: Prof. Dr Brigitte Burrichter
Second supervisors:
Prof. Dr Heike Raphael-Hernandez
Prof. Dr Anja Bandau (University of Hanover)
Class in the Graduate School: "Philosophy, Languages, Arts"
Doctorate in the Graduate School from WS 2012/2013.
Abstract:
The dissertation examines poetry by Eulalia Bernard (Limón, Costa Rica *1935), Shirley Campbell (San José, Costa Rica *1965) and Dlia McDonald (Colón, Panamá *1965) from a historically retrospective perspective that focuses on the pluricentric aspect of belonging. This term metaphorically describes the plurality of diverse centres of cultural and historical identification possibilities and is to be understood as a (g)local socio-historical continuum that spreads across the manifold aspects of nation/diaspora dynamics. The following literary analysis aims to identify the traces of the coming-of-age development ofthe Afro-Costa Rican community in the poetry of those authors. Poetry is viewed as a reflection of global dimensions with regard to diaspora/nation dynamics, the dialectic of ethnic groups and nations, as well as processes of assimilation and the marginalisation of ethnic minorities.
The focus of this dissertation is the fundamental question of the poetic themes and the respective forms that constitute a plethora of local and global abundance. In other words, how do the texts reveal a glocal historical imagination that refers to a national uniqueness and at the same time expresses an identification with the overarching Caribbean space?
The dissertation aims to tell a story of the past. To this end, it endeavours to trace the aspects of that pluricentric sense of belonging expressed through certain rhetorical stylistic devices. The focus is on what I have called the oxymoron of modernised-nature in McDonald, skin-history metonymy in Campbell and the code-switching phenomenon in the case of Bernard. Spatial and ethnic variations as well as linguistic identity are considered as elements of a three-dimensional historical imagination. The oxymoron describes an extra-national (diasporic) past, while the metonymy at the same time proclaims a supranational (global) one. Multilingualism, in turn, refers to an infranational historical imagination (labelled 'non-Costa Rican'). This dissertation ultimately manifests - based on a philological analysis - the history of Costa Rica's past in the form of a three-dimensional narrative of spatially, metahistorically and multilingually defined notions of a black Costa Rica.
