Sheela Bora Hadjivassiliou,  PhD candidate, Romance Languages, 2021-22 OHC Dissertation Fellow

“My dissertation explores a series of narratives (novels, plays, and screenplays) that challenge the fictions of the utopian creole island and postcolonial multicultural success. In these alternative narratives, twentieth and twenty-first century authors from the Caribbean, Indian Ocean, and France use tropes, toponymy (the study of place names) and transgression (of normative expressions of gender, race and class) to depict how subaltern bodies—undocumented migrants, “low-caste” and “no-caste” individuals, and sex workers—destabilize the neoliberal logic of the economies in which they participate through their embodied and affective actions.”