Prison Islands: Figurations of Carcerality in the French and Spanish Caribbean

This dissertation analyzes the emergence and deployment of the prison-island topos from the nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century in the literary cultures of the French and Spanish Caribbean. It posits that the French and Spanish Caribbean's history of colonialism, slavery, and empire led to a particular carceral afterlife that would accompany the area's idiosyncratic development. Consequently, carceral sites enter and linger in the Caribbean literary imaginary as a way to think through this history and legacy of colonial slave-holding power. Moving chronologically, this dissertation traces how the image of the prison was rhetorically mobilized to think through shifting legal regimes, turbulent political development, and crises of governance. Through a historically informed and comparative literary analysis of political essays, novels, autobiographies, and photo-essays from Cuban, Haitian, Dominican, Puerto Rican and Martinican writers, this investigation demonstrates how the image of the prison-island evolved as a response to myriad social and political conditions, while also illuminating the venues of resistance and agency articulated by those relegated to these carceral systems. By centering the site of the prison, this project reveals not only the carceral logics that undergirded the repressive political atmosphere of this period, but it also demonstrates that Caribbean thinkers relied on the image of the prison-island as a way to express an ethos of disillusionment with the various failed projects of proposed liberation and sovereignty that have proliferated from the nineteenth century. More than just a metaphor, I propose that writers emphasize the very real ways the unstable project of the Caribbean has long been managed through carceral logics.