Dirt. Aesthetics and Epistemology of a Motif in Caribbean Literatures and Cultural Theory

在加勒比地区被称为不稳定文学的主要主题源于肮脏，排泄物，垃圾，垃圾，残渣和垃圾的语义领域。这些母题在讨论不洁净和污染的话语中起着特殊的字面指涉作用。我的论文从历时的角度分析了西班牙语和法语加勒比海文本，这些文本共享这些母题，但赋予它们不同的隐喻和寓言功能。调查受“物质”肮脏的文学唤起影响的文本代理；并分析了它们与文化理论中关于污染和不洁净的理论观点的关系，探讨了加勒比地区关于肮脏的叙述所偏爱的身份和政治主体性。1900年左右，曼努埃尔·芝诺·甘迪亚（Manuel Zeno Gandia）等自然主义小说在物质肮脏、社会和道德堕落、身体疾病和对种族不洁的生物政治焦虑的表现之间建立了惊人的相似之处。这个话语星座被发现与19世纪关于避免污染的知识范式相关联，这些知识范式也在非文学类型中表达出来，比如流行的卫生手册。与这些对纯洁性的文化痴迷相反，可以追溯到殖民时期的知识星座，论文认为，在21世纪之交，一种话语的转变结束了。加勒比话语不同领域的主流知识范式，现在显示出是优先考虑污染的积极潜力，而不是腐败潜力。在加勒比文化理论以及帕特里克·查莫索等文学作品中，循环利用人物是一种新的生产性物质文化。符号浪费和卑下体现了认识论潜力的来源，对“不纯粹”形式方法的偏好被证明构成了一种文化批判形式。另一方面，在一些加勒比地区的世纪末小说中，肮脏的主题也占据了关键的主角地位，给它提供了负面的内涵。佩德罗·胡安·古铁雷斯和埃德加多·罗德里格斯·朱莉娅的小说中“肮脏的现实主义”的诗学表达了对他们那个时代知识的主导范式的矛盾立场，促使人们批判性地重新考虑当代对“不洁净”的理论偏好，将其作为文化批判的想象基础。

Predominant motifs in what could be called a literature of precarity in the Caribbean originate in the semantic field of the dirty, the excremental, litter, garbage, residue and trash. These motifs function as particular literal referents in relation to discourses negotiating ideas about impurity and contamination. My dissertation analyzes hispano- and francophone Caribbean texts from a diachronic perspective that share these motifs, but attribute different metaphorical and allegorical functions to them. 'Investigating the textual agencies that are effected by the literary evocations of 'material' dirtiness; and analyzing their relation to theoretical perspectives on contamination and impurity in cultural theory, the dissertation inquires the identifications and political subjectivities favored by narratives about dirt in the Caribbean. Naturalist novels like those by Manuel Zeno Gandia from around 1900, establish striking parallels between the representation of material dirtiness, social and moral degeneration, physical illness and biopolitical anxieties about racial impurity. This discursive constellation is found to be interconnected to 19th century knowledge-paradigms concerned with the avoidance of contamination which are expressed also in non-literary genres like the popular manuals of hygiene. In contrast to these cultural obsessions with purity, traceable to colonial constellations of knowledge, the dissertation perceives a discursive shift closed around the turn of the 21st century. Dominant paradigms of knowledge in different fields of Caribbean discourse are now shown to be privileging rather the positive than the corruptive potential of contaminations. In Caribbean cultural theory as well as in literary texts like those by Patrick Chamoiseau, recycling figures as a new productive material culture. Symbolic waste and the abject embody sources of an epistemological potential here, and the preference for 'impure' formal approaches is demonstrated to constitute a form of cultural critique. On the other hand, though, the motif of dirt is also occupying a pivotal protagonism in some Caribbean end-of-the-century-novels providing it with negative connotations. The poetics of 'dirty realism' in novels by Pedro Juan Gutierrez and Edgardo Rodriguez Julia articulate ambivalent positions towards the dominant paradigms of knowledge of their time, inducing to critically reconsider the contemporary theoretical preference for 'impurity' as an imaginative basis for cultural critique.