Abstract
Taking as its starting point the historical colonial emplotment of the Caribbean as a transient place, this dissertation argues that interpretations of the region as temporary have persisted even into the current Caribbean literary criticism and its foci on exile and emigration, despite evidence of a constant ‘return ideology’ in Caribbean society and literature. The Poetics of Home advances that examining and centering return narratives in West Indian literature are crucial for reading against the grain of Caribbean transience and for reaffirming the region as a permanent and real place. In this dissertation, I perform a diachronic study of select texts from critical periods in West Indian literature and history to consider how authors mobilized return narratives at each of these moments to navigate the problematics of Caribbean self-conception and self-definition on the transnational stage. These narratives, I argue, serve to trace and reflect the pressure points of each critical period, and in turn, depict the complications and possibilities of defining and redefining the West Indies, allowing authors to offer up their own poetics of the Caribbean as home.
Committee Chair
J. Dillon Brown
Committee Members
Anca Parvulescu; Nathan Dize; Rosamond King; William Maxwell
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Author's Department
English & American Literature
Document Type
Dissertation
Date of Award
8-13-2026
Language
English (en)
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7936/3xmg-at51
Recommended Citation
Payne, Crystal, "The Poetics of Home: Relation and Repatriation in Caribbean Literature" (2026). Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations. 3867.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.7936/3xmg-at51