Nesbitt, NickEyestone, EmilyFrench and Italian Department2025-06-272026-09-302025-06-272026-09-302025-01-012025http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01g158bm72vhttps://theses-dissertations.princeton.edu/handle/88435/dsp01g158bm72vThis project brings together two historically distinct fields: postcolonial poetry and disaster studies. It argues that geophysical hazards endemic to the Caribbean, like hurricanes, earthquakes, and volcanoes, play a central part in shaping the region’s cultural identity and literary traditions, while also shaping its current political realities. While disaster studies researchers today emphasize vulnerability as a metric for evaluating the uneven exposure of certain communities and regions to the worst effects of disaster, the inclusion of colonialism’s impacts as a specific criterion for understanding disaster has not been systematically explored.I suggest that French Caribbean poetry can enrich our understanding of the historical relation between ecological disasters and colonialism. Martinican authors like Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, and Edouard Glissant turn to geoclimatic hazards as a model from which to chart the convulsive chronology of Caribbean history, to contest Western models of dominance over the natural world, and to demonstrate the ways in which these such managerial paradigms increase disaster risk and ecological fragility. Chapter 1 explores how Aimé Césaire fashions eruption into a subversive metaphor of anti-colonial resistance and racial awakening in his poem, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939). Given the urgent political praxis of much of the region’s literature, Chapter 2 traces the historical consequences of a series of disasters, beginning with the 1902 eruption of Mount Pelée and culminating in the Vichy Occupation of the Antilles during WWII, to grasp how these events conditioned Antilleans’ support for Departmentalization in 1946. Chapter 3 considers the latent ecofeminism of Suzanne Césaire’s essays, published in the literary journal, Tropiques, “cannibalize” a tradition of gendered-exotic fantasies of Caribbean space. I show how she enlists the chaotic, destructive forces of the Caribbean climate against cultural assimilation forms of development pursued at the expense of the local environment. Chapter 4 investigates the early, under-studied poems of Edouard Glissant, from the 1954 collection, La Terre inquiète. Glissant proposes a revision of frameworks that perceive disasters as discrete, one-off events and instead insists on understanding disaster in terms of a constantly unfolding chaos. This dissertation argues that French Caribbean literature articulates an anticolonial paradigm for understanding disaster, in which the futures of marginalized communities and their environments are necessarily interdependent.application/pdfenCaribbean literatureClimate changeAfrican American studiesAcademic dissertations (Ph.D.)