Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Hobson, Marvin Eugene

Titel

Repairers of the Breach: Representations of the Possessed Body and Neo-Ethnic Identity in the Works of Hurston, Ansky, Soyinka, and Perry

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations Publishing

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Link zum Volltext

• ProQuest

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Zora Neale Hurston, S. Ansky, Wole Soyinka, and Tyler Perry come from different locations and cultures, but the critical analysis of their work in tandem reveals connections, similarities, dissonances, and possibilities for close readings. These authors expose the breaches in their communities, and how religious possessions aim to repair those breaches. Where the secular or the scientific world may disregard religious possessions, peripheral authors place them at the center of their texts; therein, God, Jesus, ancestral spirits, the dead, the devil, or entities occupy characters’ bodies. Possessions occur within religious traditions or even outside of them. This dissertation uses comparative analysis to examine these representations of possessed bodies and religious identities. Marc Caplan states, “For both Yiddish and African Literature, one of the ways that oral, folkloric culture exerts a structural and thematic influence on written narrative is through the pronounced fantastic, supernatural character of the first books in these perspective traditions” (27). The authors above reflect this use of the “fantastic, supernatural” from their peripheral spaces, rooted either in the rural South, postcolonial Africa, or the exiled and genocidal Eastern Europe. These authors not only dramatize the conflict that the possessed body can yield, but they also complicate and redefine the spiritual quest. They offer new ways of representing their communities while they embrace a modernizing identity. Delia Konzett said, “[M]inority writing… cannot be subsumed under mono-causal explanations. In fact, the overlapping and contradictory demands of race, gender, generation, education, urbanity, mass culture, and displacement … give a more adequate approximation of the work” (7-8). This dissertation shows how these works scrutinize their peripheral foundations and simultaneously confront the dominant cultures that infringe upon their agency, independence, and co-existence. This dichotomy throws these authors’ works and characters into a liminal space, where they create unique identities and performances of cultural and spiritual expression. With an emphasis on liminality, African American, African, and Russian-Jewish theories, this dissertation will explore these authors’ representations of the possessed body and how they create new identities to repair the separation between old and new, rich and poor, sacred and secular.