KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt
Am Marktplatz 2
85072 Eichstätt
gustavo.gutierrezhernandez@ku.de
Born in Colombia, Gustavo holds a master’s degree in The Americas/Las Américas from the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. Gustavo also holds a double bachelor degree in Cultural Studies and Literature Studies from the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia.
Gustavo’s research is informed by literature studies and more specifically issues of identity, biopolitics and migration. His master thesis Loosing Borders: Histories and Stories from and about Hispaniola drew on aspects of memory and history. Currently, Gustavo is preparing a dissertation project bearing the working title Caribbean Literature: A Place for Pluralities.
Caribbean Literature: A Place for Pluralities
Situated at the convergence of narration, history, and identity, my dissertation project, “Caribbean Literature: A Place for Pluralities,” analyzes how contemporary (post-1990) fictional Caribbean literature creates, questions, designs, or produces and imagines changing notions of Caribbean continuities and discontinuities. By taking into consideration literature’s performativity in conjunction with practices of a) historiography, b) literary genres, and c) new perspectives on identity obliterating nation-bound constructions of the self, my project focuses not only on the ways in which literature creates the Caribbean, but, more importantly, on how literature as a practice of place-making surpasses the geographical limits of the insular Caribbean to allow for a more encompassing relational concept of the place of the Caribbean, beyond its shores. Approaching literature from the vantage points of literary performativity and practice allows for a reading of historiography, gender, diaspora, and identity –among others– in Caribbean narratives in which these problematizations come afloat to destabilize hegemonical discourses, thus creating places for alterity and pluralities.