Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
6-2025
Document Type
Doctoral Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Program
Comparative Literature
Advisor
Peter Hitchcock
Committee Members
Jerry Carlson
Jonathan Gray
Subject Categories
American Literature | Comparative Literature | Film and Media Studies | Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies
Keywords
postcolonial feminism, caribbean studies, multiethnic US literature
Abstract
This project analyzes the ways in which narratives of love, care, and intimacy support sociocultural change through cinema, literary fiction, and memoir in Indigenous, immigrant, and diasporic communities in the United States, Haiti, and Cuba. The project’s intervention revolves around how we compare and examine narratives of the marginalized, underrepresented, and misremembered in a way that does not focus primarily on pain and trauma, but on experiences that embody radical change, healing, and a shift in the colonial matrix of power. The chapters consider love as constructed through family, identity, memory, and nationhood, all in relationship to what love looks like and how it is represented in the chosen texts. The project aims to employ this as a generative and original catalyst for exploring the undoing and un/de-coloniality of these works and their epistemic double consciousness, in addition to the polysemic nature of love when portrayed through these different media.
Recommended Citation
Nicolaou, Tania, "Love and Power: Narrative Resistance in the Contemporary Literature and Film of the Americas" (2025). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6245
Included in
American Literature Commons, Comparative Literature Commons, Film and Media Studies Commons, Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons
