Abstract
Dougla Dreaming examines how contemporary Caribbean writers mobilize shapeshifting as a feminist and decolonial strategy for surviving the gendered, racialized, and ecological violences historically directed at dougla girlhood and womanhood. Once used as a slur for people of mixed African and Indian descent, dougla is reclaimed here as a critical framework that foregrounds refusal and instability within Caribbean histories of slavery, indenture, and migration. Building on Gabrielle Hosein's theorization of dougla feminism as an interethnic political vision and extending it beyond the human social world, this project develops dougla dreaming as a literary method through which histories of displacement and fragmentation are reworked into relational, ecological, and multispecies forms of relation and belonging.
Pairing works by Shani Mootoo, Nalo Hopkinson, Imam Baksh, and Oonya Kempadoo, this dissertation traces how Caribbean writers rework shapeshifting tropes—animal mimicry, folkloric haunting, oceanic transformation—into decolonial grammars of endurance. The project theorizes three modes of shapeshifting that mirror and expand the three broad waves of Caribbean literary history, scaling from the intimate body outward to the planetary ocean. Chapter One examines realist shapeshifting in Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night (1996), where Mala Ramchandin's mimicry of plants and insects and her affinity with the soucouyant constitute a queer multispecies survival ethic that exceeds the frameworks of trauma studies and queer theory alone. Chapter Two theorizes fabular shapeshifting in Hopkinson's Midnight Robber (2000), where Tan-Tan's encounters with the douen and churail reconfigure violated girlhood through nonlinear storytelling and fugitive relation—reorienting science fiction's dominant frameworks through Caribbean trickster logics that exceed rational extrapolation. Chapter Three examines elemental shapeshifting in Baksh's The Dark of the Sea (2019) and Kempadoo's Naniki (2024), where ocean immersion and drift bring the Middle Passage and the kala pani into the same elemental field—holding two distinct diasporic wounds in relation, metabolizing them together rather than reading them in the separate critical traditions that have long kept them apart.
Grounded in Caribbean feminist theory and in conversation with the work of M. Jacqui Alexander, Andil Gosine, Lisa Outar, Shalini Puri, Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley, and Elizabeth DeLoughrey, this project demonstrates how Caribbean speculative fiction remixes African and Indian mythologies into fugitive feminist practices of kinship and endurance. The dissertation closes with a coda on Folkloric Futures, an Omeka-based digital archive and Digital Speculative Pedagogy workshop series that extend the project's arguments beyond scholarly journals into public-facing tools for educators, students, and community audiences. Together, these chapters and the digital archive reveal that Caribbean fiction imagines survival as a practice of shapeshifting that inhabits, rather than resolves, the fractures of history.
