Anansi love stories : autobiographical narratives of love and proper relational personhood in Jamaica

This thesis examines the love story as a window into personhood in Jamaica. Love is lived through relationships, and stories of love reveal how persons are formed, sustained, wounded, and transformed within relational life. They show how people understand themselves through their connection with others and how experiences of intimacy become part of wider accounts of care, obligation, vulnerability, and moral responsibility. The thesis develops the concept of autobiographical personhood to describe the person who emerges through the narration of these experiences. In telling love stories, narrators retrospectively organize relationships into accounts of what happened and what these events reveal about who they are. This relational formation is especially visible in kinship, where relationships between parents and children shape enduring understandings of the persons people hope to become. Within these relational worlds, narrators also present themselves as moral individuals who interpret what love requires and judge how its obligations have been fulfilled. This moral individuality is frequently mediated through spirit. The Jamaican idiom of Spirit Tek provides a means of discerning persons and relationships, while experiences involving Obeah and the Holy Spirit reveal personhood as spiritually open to the intentions and actions of others. The stories unfold through an Anansi-esque narrative sensibility in which narrators respond to uncertainty through improvisation, leading to the repositioning of the self. Through this narrative labour, relational experience is reorganized into an intelligible account of the person. The thesis ultimately proposes a Jamaican form of homo narrans: a culturally and historically situated storytelling person who becomes through the relational, moral, and spiritual interpretation of experience.