Containers for creation: Ifa, the Fantastic, and women in the literature of the African Diaspora

This dissertation examines the role of Yoruba cosmology, found primarily in the If corpus and its practice in Nigeria and throughout the Yoruba diaspora, in narrative strategies among select women writers in the African Diaspora. Theories of the fantastic genre by Tzvetan Todorov and of female power in literature by Theresa Washington are used to reveal the rhetorical strategies that Nalo Hopkinson, Edwidge Danticat, and Esmeralda Ribeiro have in common, and argues that their works are best understood in a dynamic, global context. This study also makes significant use of Henry Louis Gates theory of African-American literary criticism by attempting to extend it into literatures from Canada, Haiti, and Brazil. This study finds that the writers under study here transform the Fantastic mode by favoring the use of culture over the social science of psychology, and engage in partial signifyin(g) relationships through rhetorical strategies and figurations borrowed from Ifa. Examples of these are the family structure as organizing principle, and the deities as metaphors.