Abstract
This dissertation examines how Afro-Caribbean women’s aesthetic practices reimagine resistance across visual, poetic, and sonic forms. It considers how artists, poets, and performers engage the colonial archive not only as a site of violence, erasure, and historical loss, but also as a space of disruption, mediation, and reanimation. In my project, Nanny of the Maroons emerges as a rebellious feminine force who engineers glitches in the colonial archive. Each chapter turns to Caribbean visual art, computational poetry, and sonic performance to argue that she dismantles the “master” narratives of technological backwardness in the Caribbean, and mobilizes glitches, errors, and erasure as sophisticated tools of resistance. Through the analysis of visual media, poetry, performance, and digital reading practices, I study how Caribbean women’s expressive forms grapple with archival silence, illegibility, and fragmentation. More importantly, I shift the plane of marronage from land-based escape to subaquatic and digital spheres, tracing how resistance moves through water, sound, code, and mediated presence as well as through geography. By developing the concept of the marronage machine, this dissertation attends to the fugitive ways Afro-Caribbean women evade capture, distort legibility, and masquerade within and against colonial systems of knowledge, making possible new forms of diasporic spiritual presence, relation, and resistance.
