Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

9-2025

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

English

Advisor

Peter Hitchcock

Committee Members

Amber Musser

Ammiel Alcalay

Subject Categories

Africana Studies | American Literature | American Studies | Art Practice | Classics | Oral History | Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies

Keywords

Nuyorican Poets Cafe aesthetics, Afro-Caribbean archives, Yoruba cosmology, surrealism, black classicism

Abstract

Speaking from the Underground explores the work of Lois Elaine Griffith, an Afro-Caribbean diasporic visual and literary artist of Barbadian descent and one of the last surviving founders of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, a Puerto Rican cultural institution grounded in Afro-Caribbean traditions located in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. In the common, cultural parlance, the Cafe has become synonymous with spoken word and slam poetry. Since 1973 it has been the place where artists of mostly African, Caribbean, Latinx descent gather to craft works centered around lived experiences to shape a language to counter a conventional understanding of history and a mainstream culture that subsist by erasing and silencing us. I place close readings of Griffith’s poetry, visual art, and memories collected from personal interviews and materials from her archive along with oral histories of artists and people associated with the Cafe’s founding. In doing so, I uncover the West African spiritual practices, surrealism, and black classicism rooted in Griffith’s and the Cafe’s aesthetic and a poetics that remembers and reclaims the lives, memories, histories, languages, and cultures dismembered and dis-remembered by a legacy of transatlantic slavery and colonization in the Americas. Yet despite its history as a space where artists met to cultivate freedom of expression, Griffith’s contributions to the Cafe’s legacy have been obscured because of her race and gender. Thus, Speaking from the Underground shifts and expands the current understanding of the Cafe’s history from the perspectives of its predominately, heterosexual male and/or Latinx founders.

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