Date of Award
2018
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelors
Department
Humanities
First Advisor
Labrador-Rodriguez, Sonia
Area of Concentration
English
Abstract
This project is a portfolio consisting three units of independent pieces on theatrical adaptation and the literary analysis, but the pieces speak to each other through the theoretical lens of the Decolonial Imagination. Decoloniality seeks to deconstruct, resist, and vision alternatives to racist, classist, and gendered social and epistemic formations that pervade the contemporary bodies and minds of descendants of European colonization. Unit I is a reflection on a praxis of the decolonial imagination I carried out through directing a Bilingual theatrical production I adapted from Spanish short stories written by Puerto Rican women. Unit II presents two pieces on narrative formations of decolonial love in Dominican American writer Junot Díaz’s Bilingual novel The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao. I trace the origins of the Decolonial Imagination and argue that Women of Color Feminism in the late twentieth century are the pioneering works of Decolonial Theory that directly informed the fictional writing of Junot Díaz. Unit III is a contextualized close-reading of the Spanish novel Papi by Dominican writer and musician Rita Indiana. In this reading I examine the novel’s portrayal of the contemporary hierarchical world of women influenced by the past hypermasculine regime of dictator Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. Allegories of hypermasculinity and the male gaze demonstrate how its toxicity oppresses women and locates motherhood as a site to potentially move away from Papi’s Empire to cultivate Decolonial Love.
Recommended Citation
Santos, Kailah, "Imagining Decolonial Love Within and Apart from Two Worlds: Decolonizing Gendered and Racialized Identity Between the U.S. and Spanish Caribbean" (2018). Theses & ETDs. 5598.
https://digitalcommons.ncf.edu/theses_etds/5598