Dissertation title: "Urban Imaginaries: The City and the Postcolonial Literary Imagination"
Abstract: In my dissertation I explore space and place in the literature of the African diaspora. I examine the relationship between urban migration and postcolonial novels from London, Paris and Fort-de-France during the second half of the twentieth century, an era of major transformations, movements of decolonization, anticolonial struggles, reconfigurations of imperial geographies that worked to preserve Western domination over former colonies. This was also an era of large scale labour migration from the (former) colonial peripheries to imperial centers, and from rural areas to cities. These transnational and translocal migrations transformed the demographic make-up of European cities and colonial centers, and were often met with racial violence. I reveal how crucial these concerns were to the migrant and diasporic literatures that emerged from this period. I show how African and Caribbean authors sought to produce anti-imperial geographies from within metropolitan and colonial centers, mapping new urban imaginaries of postcolonial futures.