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My research interests are anchored in soundscape and musical archiving expressed in the
literary movement of recuperation of the past in recent Jewish and African diaspora literature in
Latin American and American contexts. While the necessity to retrace the past through popular
culture has been a fruitful area of study in neo-slave African American narratives and in the
literature of Jewish exilic tradition, there has not been sufficient scholarship on the common
thread of folkloric musical search for the past shared by the two diasporic communities through
literature. Scholars have established the connection of African American Civil Rights and Jewish
Holocaust survivors in the landscape of 1960s musical and literary America, however, studying
the intersection of the two traditions in Latin American literature opens an unchartered territory
of commonalities and shared experience between them. By entering the unexplored territory of
Brazilian and other Lusophone literature and musical archiving of Jewish and African diasporic
communities, it is possible to expand and revisit articulations of the need to retrace a material
expression of the past, of establishing a dialogue between public and private spheres
encompassing the body, spaces, memory, and subjectivity in the two literary traditions. When
this connection is viewed in a comparative relationship with the cosmopolitan movement in
American contemporary narratives of recovery of the past, the link assumes a character of global
post-colonial traumatic nostalgia, resistance, reimagining of the past as a simultaneously near
and distant present. I am interested in examining this cosmopolitan archiving of the past through
music and soundscapes in the literature of Paule Marshall, Cyrus Cassells, Cornelius Eady,
Israel Zangwill (especially the musical Angolan Zionist vision in his poetry), Dina Rubina, Gayl
Jones, Pepetela, Ana Maria Gonalves, Chico Buarque de Holanda, Joel Rufino dos Santos,
Paulo Lins, Conceio Evaristo.
The connection between Jewish and African diasporic music tradition in Anglophone
literature is not unfamiliar to academia. However, the connection shared by the diasporic
Anglophone and Lusophone African authors and the diasporic Jewish Russophone writers listed
requires some historical contextualization. The Brazilian authors are primarily united by their use
of Carnaval as a neo-slave narrative in their fiction. The cultural expression of Carnaval is a
product of the mid 20th century encounter of Brazilian African music with the technological
archiving possibilities during and after the world wars, especially WWII. The Good Neighbor
Policy instituted by President Roosevelt in the late 1930s offers a historical connection that
unites Latin American, African American, and Jewish culture, and that connection opens the
possibility of the shared literary expressions. The historical moment marked the birth of
radiophonic samba, a hallmark in the rise of Carnaval as a neo-slave narrative. At the same time
in the U.S., diasporic Jewish writers working in the Russian language found homes in
historically black colleges in the United States, allowing the authors t one read within a shared

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social environment even if the authors themselves did not coexist in the same geographical
constraints.
My M.A. coursework at Florida International University in Miami allowed me to develop
these interests within a strong literary and theoretical frame of thought. During my graduate
work, I explored the cosmopolitan nature of 20th century literature by gaining a strong
foundation in the Anglophone literary cannon of the period, an important step in my education,
since the conceptualization of history and national belonging against which so many of the
authors in my proposed study fight against can be traced to the canon and its longevity in
academia. I established my understanding of canon while maintaining the cultural perspective
afforded by the unique academic surroundings afforded by my institution. I explored the
political, geographical, historical, and philosophical revolutions in literature that can be traced to
WWII and The Holocaust. I am deeply influenced by the unique combination of Holocaust
scholarship, Modernist studies, Critical Theory, and Comparative Literature and Trauma that I
found at FIU. I particularly benefitted from Asher Z. Milbauers seminar on exilic literature and
society, Michael P. Gillespies seminar on Modernist literary dejection after WWII, Ana M.
Luszczynskas seminar on phenomenology and cultural criticism, and Nandini Dhars seminar on
the effect of reliving the past in contemporary literature of trauma.
My seminar projects have covered the rise of the avant-garde in the literature of
Modernism and Modernity, the task of representing the Holocaust in polemic literature, the effect
of phenomenological thought on Jewish post-Holocaust identity, the expression of flesh in
literary representation, the theater of the absurd, the rise of the novel as a medium for expressing
cultural revolution and private thought, and the yearning for the past expressed in neo-slave
narratives in carnivalesque settings.
My masters thesis explored the reconfiguration of boarders separating the public and
private spheres in character portrayals of first witnesses of the Holocaust. Instead of contrasting
material accounts, or even fictionalized material accounts of first hand witnesses, I drew a
comparative parallel between a journalist/novelist who was with the Red Army during the
liberation of Treblinka and of Eastern front camps and ghettoes, Vasily Grossman, and a civilian,
detached, anxious, canon-encrypted account of the fear of the Holocaust in Virginia Woolfs last
manuscript. Grossmans work, Life and Fate was written in the 1950s looking back at the year
1941, and Woolfs work, Between the Acts, was written during the war and finished s a
manuscript in 1941. The project drew heavily on a phenomenological study of literary
perspective in the texts, primarily through the work of Edmund Husserl. I established a reworked
and decontextualized application of his epoche within the paradigm of consciousness and
knowledge within the recent scholarly work on horror, trauma, and physical barriers to archiving
and embodiment in literature. The project also benefited from Adriana Cavarreos work on the

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theory of embodied horror in her Horrorism and Bakhtins notion of the carnivalesque and of
dialogical forms of thought in literary representation, particularly in the essays of The Dialogic
Imagination.
I should also conceptualize my interest in soundscape archiving in literature within the
intersection of flesh and representation expressed by clothing in the fictionalized representations
of Jewish and African diasporic communities. I am interested in the theorization of clothing as an
expression of private and public dialogues with the past in fictional characterization. I explored
that theme during my coursework at FIU and I expressed it in my thesis. The exploration began
with the expression of costume-making as simultaneous satire and historical expression of
colonialism in Woolfs manuscript. I presented a paper developed around those issues at the
Twelfth International Rhetoric of War Conference at Saint Louis University in Madrid.
Also connected to material archiving of the past in representation, I have found that the
intersection of spacial theory and human flesh formulate a theoretical opening on my proposed
project. I developed these ideas in an article currently under consideration for publication in The
Comparist. I presented the manuscript at the SCLA 40/ Nuance conference. The exploration
revealed a layer of physicality and boarder transgression which is now present in my thesis and
remains a strong aspect of my research interests. The material expression of soundscapes and
music is never divorced from the materiality of flesh and physical settings occupied by the
human body in representation.
My goal is to join a Comparative Literature department where I can develop my
knowledge of Latin American studies, African American studies, Jewish studies, embodied
performance of culture studies, national identity studies, and post-colonial trauma and resistance.
The University of.

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