New Perspectives on Hispanic Caribbean Studies 3030514978, 9783030514976

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New Perspectives on Hispanic Caribbean Studies Edited by Magdalena López María Teresa Vera-Rojas

New Perspectives on Hispanic Caribbean Studies

Magdalena López María Teresa Vera-Rojas Editors

New Perspectives on Hispanic Caribbean Studies

Editors Magdalena López Kellogg Institute for International Studies University of Notre Dame IN, USA

María Teresa Vera-Rojas Departament de Filologia Clàssica, Francesa i Hispànica Universitat de Lleida Lleida, Spain

ISBN 978-3-030-51497-6    ISBN 978-3-030-51498-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51498-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Introduction: New Theoretical Dialogues and Critical Reflections on Hispanic Caribbean Studies  1 Magdalena López and María Teresa Vera-Rojas 2 Towards an Archipelagic Effect (): Poetics, Politics and Sensorium in the Caribbean 13 Juan Carlos Quintero Herencia 3 Inland Caribbean: A Glance into Wayuu Space 35 Juan Ramón Duchesne Winter 4 Challenging a South Red Atlantic: A Post-­Liberationist Critique of the Hispanic Caribbean 47 Magdalena López 5 Place Becoming Space: Nation and Deterritorialisation in Cuban Narrative of the Twenty-First Century 67 Nanne Timmer 6 Sea/See Fluids, Reimagined Landscapes: Looking into Lesbian Desire in Sand Dollars and Liz in September 85 María Teresa Vera-Rojas v

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7 Social Engagement and/against Creativity: Art Making, Collective Agency and the Politics of Urgency in the Hispanic Caribbean115 Carlos Garrido Castellano 8 The Queer Hispanic Caribbean: Contemporary Revisions of Its Genealogies139 Lina Martínez Hernández 9 “Holland” in the Caribbean: Voids Between the  Spanish-Speaking World and the Lower Countries165 Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger 10 The Caribbean Without a Sea: Approaches to Caribbean Immigration in Madrid185 Dagmary Olívar Graterol Index

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Notes on Contributors

Juan Duchesne Winter  is a professor at the University of Pittsburgh. He holds an MA from King’s College University of London and a PhD from the SUNY Stony Brook. He is the author of the books Plant Theory in Amazonian Literature (2019), Invitación al baile del muñeco. Máscara, pensamiento y territorio en el Amazonas (2017), Caribe, Caribana: cosmografías literarias (2015), La guerrilla narrada: acción, acontecimiento, sujeto (2010), Comunismo literario y teorías deseantes: inscripciones latinoamericanas (2009), Del príncipe moderno al señor barroco: república de la amistad en Paradiso, de José Lezama Lima (2008), “Equilibrio encimita del infierno”: Andrés Caicedo y las utopías del trance (2007), Fugas incomunistas (2005), Ciudadano Insano (2001), Política de la caricia (1996), Narraciones de testimonio en América Latina (1991), and numerous articles related to twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin American literature in its cultural and political contexts. His recent research and publications focus on indigenous literatures and Amazonian thinking, as well as West Indian Creole Caribbean expressions in Spanish-dominant contexts. As part of his fieldwork, he has travelled in the Guajira Peninsula (Colombia and Venezuela), the Mirití-Paraná River basin, the Upper Putumayo and Old Providence Island, Colombia. He directs the Revista Iberoamericana and its book series. Carlos Garrido Castellano  is lecturer in Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at University College Cork, Ireland. He completed his PhD on Contemporary Caribbean art and politics of space, and has taught vii

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widely on Spanish, Lusophone and Latin American visual culture. His research interests focus on visual culture, critical theory, activism and collaborative artistic practices in postcolonial contexts. He has authored two books on contemporary Caribbean art, and is preparing a monograph on socially engaged art and coloniality for SUNY Press. He has lectured and organized conferences and seminars in several American, African and European universities. Magdalena  López is a research fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame, USA, and Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, ISCTE-IUL, Portugal. She holds a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh. She specializes on culture and literature in the Hispanic American Caribbean. She is the author of El Otro de Nuestra América: Imaginarios Frente a Estados Unidos en la República Dominicana y Cuba (2011) and Desde el Fracaso: Narrativas del Caribe Insular Hispano en el Siglo XXI (2015). She has published more than 20 articles on Caribbean literature and cinema in edited volumes and journals such as the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Latin American Research Review, Revista Iberoamericana and Iberoamericana América Latina-España-Portugal. Lina  Martínez  Hernández is an assistant teaching professor in the Global Studies Department at Drexel University. She holds a PhD in Hispanic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. She is the co-editor of Poéticas, Archivos y Apuestas: estudios culturales del Caribe (2018). She specializes in Contemporary Queer and Race Studies in the Caribbean and in developing community-based pedagogies with Latinx communities in the Philadelphia area. Other publications include “Sana que sana: ciudadanía dominicana: el proyecto multimedia de Rita Indiana” (2015) and “Desafío a la conciliación: antagonismo y negatividad en imaginarios históricos del Caribe” (2014). Dagmary  Olívar  Graterol  (PhD, University Carlos III, Madrid) is a researcher and cultural manager. Her research focuses on the management of differences in intercultural environments, gender and minority studies, the relationship of immigration and culture, as well as cultural politics. Since 2008 she has been a founding member and coordinator of YoSoyElOtro Cultural Association, a non-profit organization whose mission is the diffusion of Caribbean culture in all its diversity in Spain and Europe. She also collaborates actively in the Transatlantic

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Network of Latin American and European Cultural Managers. She edited La comunidad dominicana en España: de una aproximación histórica a perspectivas de futuro (2019) and co-edited El mito de la mujer caribeña (2011). Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger  is specialized in cultural histories of Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America. She has studied in Leiden and Berlin and held university positions in Germany, the Netherlands and the USA. She has worked as a guest professor in Chile, Brazil, Venezuela, Angola, Costa Rica and Puerto Rico and is an honorary member of Socare (Society of Caribbean Research). A special focus of her research is the influence of Dutch expansion in contemporary literature and visual art outside Europe. Her most recent research project consisted in a comparative approach to Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking literatures in Africa and Latin America, in relationship to their memory of (modern) slavery, at the Humboldt University in Berlin and the RWTH Aachen. Juan Carlos Quintero Herencia  is a poet, essayist and critic. He is the author of Fulguración del espacio: Letras e imaginario institucional de la Revolución cubana 1960–1971 (2002) Latin American Studies Association Premio Iberoamericano; La máquina de la salsa: Tránsitos del sabor (2005); and La hoja de mar (:) Efecto archipiélago I (2016). His poetry books are El hilo para el marisco/Cuaderno de los envíos (2002) Pen Club of Puerto Rico Poetry Prize; La caja negra (1996); Libro del sigiloso (2012); and El cuerpo del milagro (2016). Quintero-Herencia has held fellowships from the Ford and Andrew W.  Mellon Foundations, the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña/National Endowment for the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He teaches at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Maryland, College Park. Nanne Timmer  is a Universitair Docent 1 in cultural analysis and contemporary Latin American literature at Leiden University. She holds a PhD from Leiden University (2004). She has lectured before at Utrecht University, Antwerp University and Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil, and published mainly within the field of Caribbean and Cuban Studies. She has recently published the volumes Ciudad y escritura: imaginario de la ciudad latinoamericana a las puertas del siglo XXI (LUP, 2013) and Cuerpos ilegales: sujeto, poder y escritura en América Latina (Almenara, 2018). She is finishing a manuscript on the

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recent Cuban novel to be published soon. She is also the t­ranslator of Gerard Fieret’s Los hombrecitos hasselblad (Kriller, 2019) and the editor of La isla de Cuba: Twaalf Verhalen en een Revolutie (Marmer, 2017). María Teresa Vera-Rojas  is adjunct lecturer in Latin American Literature at the Universitat de Lleida, Catalunya, Spain. She holds a PhD in Cultural and Gender Studies from the Universitat de Barcelona (2016) and a PhD in Hispanic Studies from the University of Houston (2007). She is a research member of ADHUC–Research Center for Theory, Gender, Sexuality at the Universitat de Barcelona, and Editor of 452°F. Revista de Teoría de la Literatura y Literatura Comparada. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, postcolonial feminism, and cultural and literary studies, with a particular interest on contemporary Hispanic Caribbean and Venezuelan literature and culture, as well as on the study of early twentieth-century Hispanic culture, literature and feminism in the USA.  She has published several journal articles, book chapters and encyclopedia entries on these subjects; she is the editor of the book Nuevas Subjetividades/Sexualidades Literarias (Egales, 2012) and the author of Se conoce que usted es ‘Moderna’”. Lecturas de la mujer moderna en la colonia hispana de Nueva York (1920–1940) (Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2018) Premio Victoria Urbano 2020 “Mejor monografía crítica”, awarded by the Asociación de Estudios de Género y Sexualidades (AEGS).

List of Figures

Fig. 6.1

Sand Dollars (2014). Dir. Laura Amelia Guzmán and Israel Cárdenas94 Fig. 6.2 Sand Dollars (2014). Dir. Laura Amelia Guzmán and Israel Cárdenas95 Fig. 6.3 Sand Dollars (2014). Dir. Laura Amelia Guzmán and Israel Cárdenas97 Fig. 6.4 Sand Dollars (2014). Dir. Laura Amelia Guzmán and Israel Cárdenas97 Fig. 6.5 Sand Dollars (2014). Dir. Laura Amelia Guzmán and Israel Cárdenas99 Fig. 6.6 Liz in September (2013). Dir. Fina Torres 102 Fig. 6.7 Liz in September (2013). Dir. Fina Torres 103 Fig. 6.8 Liz in September (2013). Dir. Fina Torres 104 Fig. 6.9 Liz in September (2013). Dir. Fina Torres 107 Fig. 6.10 Liz in September (2013). Dir. Fina Torres 107 Fig. 7.1 Untitled. 2017. (Photograph by Abraham Cruzvillegas. Image courtesy of Sofía Gallisá) 117 Fig. 7.2 Untitled. 2017. (Photograph by Sofía Gallisá. Image courtesy of Sofía Gallisá) 118 Fig. 7.3 Untitled. 2017. (Photograph by Juanky Álvarez. Image courtesy of Sofía Gallisá) 125

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: New Theoretical Dialogues and Critical Reflections on Hispanic Caribbean Studies Magdalena López and María Teresa Vera-Rojas

Introduction What are the main contributions of Hispanic cultural products and practices today? New Perspectives on Hispanic Caribbean Studies explores new critical trends to the analysis of recent cultural phenomena. It offers an update on the state of Hispanic Caribbean studies through the discussion of theoretical perspectives around notions of affect, archipelagic thinking,

M. López (*) Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame, IN, USA e-mail: [email protected] M. T. Vera-Rojas (*) Departament de Filologia Clàssica, Francesa i Hispànica, Universitat de Lleida, Lleida, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. López, M. T. Vera-Rojas (eds.), New Perspectives on Hispanic Caribbean Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51498-3_1

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deterritoriality, queer experiences and subjectivities, eccentric Caribbean and aquatic imaginaries instead of merely those circumscribed to identity, nation, insularity and colonial epistemologies derived from these conceptions. This volume pursues two aims. Firstly, it examines diverse modes of experience in literature, film, visual arts and other cultural productions that impel us to re-evaluate the approaches of Hispanic Caribbean studies in the twenty-first century. And secondly, it explores the scope and limitations of transnational dialogues between Hispanic Caribbean studies and theoretical perspectives like postcolonial and decolonial studies, gender and sexuality studies, the posthegemonic turn and diaspora studies. We contend that, due to its cultural and historical specificities, the Hispanic Caribbean constitutes a focus of study crucial to re-thinking global dynamics today. Being the inaugural place of the multiples intersections and economic, imperial, ethnic, geographic and cultural flows that defined Western modernity, the Hispanic Caribbean outlines the complexity of the processes of so-called globalisation and its ambiguous consequences in vast segments of the world population. Area studies emerged from the geopolitical knowledge dynamics of the Cold War. Starting in the 1960s, Latin American studies became an essential part of US and European academic landscapes. While area studies seem to suffer some exhaustion since the end of Cold War, we have witnessed in recent years a renewed interest in the analyses of the sociocultural dynamics of the Hispanic Caribbean. This has resulted in an increasing number of university courses and the funded research projects in this field, as well as expanding of congresses and dossiers in academic journals. As a location where diverse colonial, national, racial, gender, sexual, diasporic and even ecological issues converge, the Caribbean is today a particularly effective lens through which to consider complex and ever-changing cultural relations at both local and global levels. The burgeoning interest in the Hispanic Caribbean contrasts with, and in a way responds to, the marginal position it has occupied in academia up to now. Traditionally, studies of the Hispanic Caribbean have been subsumed under the scope of Latin American Studies in the United States, and Hispanism in Europe. In both cases, and with the exception of Cuba, analyses of Hispanic Caribbean cultural productions have been overshadowed by other sources of interest, such as literature or audio-visual productions from Spain, Argentina or Mexico. Within the broader field of Caribbean studies, the cultural dynamics of Spanish-speaking territories

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have often suffered the same fate vis-à-vis their Anglophone and, to a lesser extent, French-speaking counterparts. Something similar occurs in postcolonial studies. Although the works of Anglo and French Caribbean authors such as C. L. R. James, Aimé Césaire y Frantz Fanon were key in the establishment the field, the Hispanic Caribbean region has been almost completely bypassed in critical debates, with notable exceptions, like Shalini Puri’s The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity (2004). Such invisibilisation responds to Anglo-­ cultural hegemony, but most importantly to the historical-cultural specificities that differentiate this region from most of its Latin American and Caribbean counterparts. A central issue for the different contributions in this volume is the need to avoid the ontologisation of the Caribbean by means of different identitarian proposals. In this sense, it offers a critique to the different cultural categories under which the region has been defined, while it examines possible ways to think about the Caribbean in contingent, open-ended and mobile modalities. New Perspectives on Hispanic Caribbean Studies presents varied analytical approaches that de-territorialise conceptual frameworks for the study of the Hispanic Caribbean and its cultural productions. The different authors share a problematisation of the trends towards essentialisation, which has traditionally characterised approaches in area studies, and share the goal to conceive a Hispanic Caribbean “in relation to.” In his well-known book, Poetics of Relation (1997), Martinican writer Édouard Glissant proposes a “relational concept of being” to conceive the Caribbean away from any fixed notion, a sort of deconstruction of insularist and nationalist notions that have framed studies on the Caribbean. In line with Glissant, the different chapters of this book are informed by alternative notions to conceive Hispanic Caribbean studies, such as those that take into consideration bodies and affects, the unexpected and the sensorial, or even the materiality of a landscape to account for a different Caribbean, such as the “archipelago effect” as posited by Juan Carlos Quintero Herencia (2016); the notion of an eccentric Caribbean glimpsed by Juan Duchesne Winter (2012); and the experience of failure discussed by Magdalena López (2015). These authors propose a departure from the archive of the hegemonic Caribbean criticism, including its (de)colonial or insular determinants, the sugar plantation machine, the locus of mestizaje and the utopia of emancipation. In this regard, contributions from the so-called posthegemonic, postsovereign or infrapolitical turn help us to delve into the Caribbean and its

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diverse cultural practices from a posthumanist, sensorial perspective from which to consider its politics beyond notions of representation, sovereignty and identity. In blurring geographic or national boundaries, the different chapters of this volume focus on the different networks and interrelations, with the effect that literary, conceptual and aesthetic debates, and debates about gender and sexuality, politics and social issues on the Hispanic Caribbean are also relevant for Latin America, Africa and the so-called Global South.

Identitarianism, Insularism and Liberationism in Hispanic Caribbean Studies Latin American studies have often placed centre stage the colonial experience in America since the sixteenth century. A telling example is the by now canonical text El Caribe, frontera imperial (1970) by Juan Bosch, in which the region is determined by the imprint of European colonialism and US imperialism. More recently, so-called decolonial studies have updated an understanding of the colonial experience through “the coloniality of power,” a notion by Peruvian socialist Aníbal Quijano (1992) by which he accounts for the impact of the matrixes of global power of modernity on Latin American societies. In discussing the Caribbean, issues like the plantation economy and the related slave trade have been considered keys to unlock its sociocultural composition (Benítez Rojo 1992; Mintz 1986; Moreno Fraginals 1978) and its entry into global capitalist modernity (Buck-Morss 2009). These theoretical approaches are useful to understand the different historical power asymmetries in the system-­ world, but they have also implied certain degree of ontologisation, which in the Caribbean case has manifested in two ways: first, in the formulation of national, racial and insularist categories of identity, which solidify cultural dynamics; secondly, in the epistemic dependence of the Caribbean from Europe and in the historical development of the liberationist myth. Alberto Moreiras (2015) has adverted about the identitarian obsession of Latin American literary and cultural studies, which answers to a humanist conception that understands the subject, and politics, in unitary and closed terms. The notion of a clearly defined Caribbean identity, even when the definition has embraced the region’s diversity, has permeated proposals that range from Martí’s mestizaje, Carpentier’s (1996) lo  real maravilloso and Ortiz’s (1987) transculturación to Puri’s hibridity,

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Buscaglia-Salgado’s (2003) mulataje and Hall’s (1994) creolisation. These last three, the most recent of them, have certainly tried to provide certain dynamism but do not dispense from the defining notions often associated with national identities and racial paradigms. Usually framed within debates about the nation and national identity (i.e., La raza cómica de Rubén Ríos Ávila (2002); Gay Cuban nation by Emilio Bejel (2001); and Escrituras del desencuentro en la República Dominicana by Nestor Rodríguez (2007)), Hispanic Caribbean studies have seldom concentrated on the social imaginaries that do not fit neatly into geo-territorial boundaries—not even when focusing on the diaspora. To the extent that analyses of race and diaspora also engage with national identity as a primary concern (see, for example, Miami’s Forgotten Cubans: Race, Racialization, and the Miami Afro-Cuban Experience by Alan A. Aja (2016); The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move by Jorge Duany (2002); and El retorno de las yolas by Silvio Torres-Saillant (1999)), a focus on national identity and, consequently, on the colonial restrictions of the Spanish language cuts off the study of the Hispanic Caribbean from the rest of the region. Insularism is another factor that contributes to the isolation of Hispanic Caribbean studies. Juan Duchesne Winter (2012) has written about the deep colonial roots of insularist imaginaries, and the way these have encapsulated cultural dynamics in closed and controlled units. The tendency to homogenise the cultural and territorial vastness of the Hispanic Caribbean via the Island model—as exemplified in Antonio Benítez Rojo’s classic work, The Repeating Island (1992)—has led scholar Silvio Torres-Saillant (2006) to denounce an “epistemic violence” in academic studies, which tends to ignore the broad cultural diversity of the region and to elude the continental territories that have formed, with the Antilles, the large network of material and cultural exchanges of the Great Caribbean for some centuries. Even fundamental studies on the diaspora, such as Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel’s The Coloniality of the Diaporas (2014), continue to associate an original Caribbean identity with its insular borders. Decolonial studies have aimed to account for the cultural specificity of colonised countries in order to underscore the epistemic violence on which Latin American nations were founded. However, and with some exceptions like Ramón Grosfoguel (2003), the majority of decolonialists have focused on communities that are still somehow connected to their ancestral cultures, as in the Andean region, in order to certify an “authenticity” clearly different from the West. A similar motivation is at play in

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Silvio Torres-Saillant’s Intellectual History of the Caribbean (2006), which proposes a vision of the Caribbean that is delimited, not so much by imperial languages but by an exercise of depuración from Western theoretical contributions. The section “The Endless History: The Caribbean Versus Western Discourse” in Torres-Saillant’s book reveals an antagonistic vision of the Caribbean trapped in a binary logic. The problem of identifying the authenticity or original purity is certainly not new in Caribbean intellectual history. For instance, they can be traced back to Roberto Fernández Retamar’s Calibán (2003, [1971]) as well as to Juan Bosch’s above-mentioned text. Fernández Retamar joined the anti-colonialist tradition of Antillean thinking, including George Lamming, Edward Braithwaite, Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon. In his well-known essay, the Black or mixed Cimarron slave, in its rebelliousness from European colonialism and US imperialism, becomes the paradigm of Cuban, Caribbean and Latin American identity: Caliban becomes determined by racial difference and by his capacity to call names in the adopted imperial language at the Master Prospero. For his part, Dominican writer Juan Bosch imagines the Caribbean as a space of struggle among different empires, turning the region into a mere extension of imperial history. “To Bosch in 1970 the main issue in the Caribbean was imperialism, first from Europe and then from United States” (Maingot 1992, p. 156). Similarly, and for all its singularity, Ramón Grosfoguel’s Colonial Subjects. Puerto Rican in a Global Perspective (2003), a book framed in decolonial studies, reduces Puerto Ricans to peripheral subjects who do not affect the power dynamics of the system-world. Undoubtedly, a trend of Black Marxism was key to frame the Caribbean within the binary and antagonistic determinants that set a historicist teleological matrix. These approaches gave rise to the “Caribbean liberationist myth” (Duchesne 2019) according to which the Caribbean reaches its historical apex by means of revolution. Strongly influenced by Marxist teleologism since 1970, for Bosch the Caribbean sealed its own history with the Cuban revolution. Under this light, and according to a sensibility that continued and continues to be humanist, “the Caribbean liberationist myth” has fixed the revolutionary experiences of Haiti and Cuba as privileged historical axes of the Caribbean, as observed in the classic works of C. R. L. James and Juan Bosch.

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New Perspectives on Hispanic Caribbean Studies Taking a different direction, this volume proposes to uproot those structures of thinking of a single origin denounced by Deleuze, Guattari and Glissant, so as to be able to analyse diverse experiences from the perspective which Puerto Rican historian Carlos Pabón (2014) terms an aesthetics of contingency. With this aim, we approach the Hispanic Caribbean from a postnational sensitivity and positioning, which allows us to analyse types of knowledge produced by cultural phenomena that relate to processes rather than to categories. The following chapters refer to historical, political and cultural processes that allow sketching the Caribbean, and in particular the Hispanic Caribbean, from the mobility of contingency. Thus, we map different fluxes, arising from an astonishing heterogeneity, from which it is possible to analyse the cultural dynamics and political intersections of the contemporary global order, either in North-South relationships or in the Global South. Through the exploration of different experiences and literary practices, New Perspectives on Hispanic Caribbean Studies proposes theoretical alternatives such as the el “archipelago effect” (Quintero Herencia) and the “eccentric Caribbean” (Duchesne Winter), which reconsider the geographical, historical and political limits of the colonial epistemology that has framed studies on the Hispanic Caribbean. In “Towards An Archipelagic Effect (): Poetics, Politics, and Sensorium in the Caribbean,” Juan Carlos Quintero Herencia presents an English rewriting of the essential La hoja de mar (:) Efecto archipiélago I (2016) in order to think about the Caribbean from “the unstable complexity of any evidence, be it racial, socio-economic, political, telluric or even cultural, that could conjugate such an archipelago.” By means of an analysis of text by Virgilio Piñera, Julia de Burgos, Luis Palés Matos, José  Lezama Lima and Áurea María Sotomayor, Quintero’s essay explores the location of the political and the potentialities of language from the kind of sensorial experience that allows the Caribbean’s archipelagic condition. For his part, Juan Duchesne Winter in “Inland Caribbean: A Glance into Wayuu Space” starts from an acute challenging of hegemonic epistemologies, in which Cuba is the model of a “concentric insularism” to conceive the Caribbean. From there, he proceeds to counter it with an “excessive Caribbean” different from the “object-island,” in which we can trace “the indigenous legacy which the colonisers aspired to reduce to an

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erasure, and which is reproduced by the colonising epistemologies.” Thus, taking into account the indigenous legacy reveals a plurality of networks and connections that shows continental spaces as well as invisible substrata in the Caribbean. In line with these eccentric and sensorial kinds of thinking, many of the articles in this volume effect critical revisions of certain national, racial and even sexual categories, such as mestizaje, cubanidad or the representation of Caribbean women as nature. In doing so, they expose the limitations and disciplinary character of such approaches, while proposing alternatives such as deterritorialisation, the fluidity of sea imaginaries or inoperative communities (Timmer, Vera-Rojas and López). Magdalena López in “Challenging a South Red Atlantic: A Post-­ Liberationist Critique of the Hispanic Caribbean” proves that “the negation of the constitutive rootlessness of Caribbean identity translates into the imposition of a unitary identity inherited from hierarchical structures of colonial origin.” She does so by paying attention to the strategies of the Cuban regime to naturalise the notion of a transatlantic mestiza identity. López exposes how such notion was instrumentalised in Angola and Cuba to impose a hegemonic nationalist identity but also how different works, such as Dulces guerreros cubanos (1999) by Cuban writer Norberto Fuentes and Estação das Chuvas (1996) by Angolan writer José Eduardo Agualusa, problematise that notion of an egalitarian community. Also taking a detour from national hegemonies, Nanne Timmer’s “Place Becoming Space: Nation and Deterritorialisation in Cuban Narrative of the Twenty-First Century” analyses different recent works of fiction from Cuba that are left out of official channels of diffusion of literature. In her study of texts by Ena Lucía Portela, Pedro de Jesús López Acosta, Margarita Mateo, Ahmel Echevarría, Legna Rodríguez, Carlos A. Aguilera and Jorge Enrique Lage, Timmer reveals an autonomous kind of literary writing in which experience, community or space are somewhat freed from the signifier Cuba, and the concurring insularist and nationalist approaches. In “Sea/See Fluids, Reimagined Landscapes: Looking into Lesbian Desire in Sand Dollars and Liz in September,” María Teresa Vera-Rojas problematises the exoticisation and sexualisation of female bodies in colonial literary and artistic representations of Hispanic Caribbean femininity, and their naturalisation as part of the imagined landscape projected by the imperial and male gaze. According to Vera-Rojas, films such as Liz in September (directed by Fina Torres, 2013) and Sand Dollars (directed by

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Israel Cárdenas and Laura Amelia Guzmán, 2014) transgress the representation of women’s subjectivity beyond their body limits. In addition, they also resist the imperial/male gaze and the materialization of male desire in female bodies by depicting lesbian desire as sea fluids, giving another meaning to the relationship between women and marine nature as well as creating a language that defies neocolonial representations of Caribbean women’s sexuality. In “Social Engagement and/against Creativity: Art Making, Collective Agency and the Politics of Urgency in the Hispanic Caribbean,” Carlos Garrido Castellano questions the representativity of art and its normalising role in the Hispanic Caribbean. Avoiding any idealisation of its ideological stance and activist resistance, Garrido Castellano exposes tensions and contradictions of Caribbean collaborative art. He studies the ambivalent role of alternative artistic institutions, and focuses on “modes of intraregional maritime creative articulations,” from an “archipelagic” approach that connects Puerto Rico and the Canary Islands. The resulting alternative artistic platforms explore new paths for discussion and debate around aesthetics and the role of art in social transformation. A similar purpose animates Lina Martínez Hernández’s “The Queer Hispanic Caribbean: Contemporary Revisions of Its Genealogies.” In her chapter, Martínez Hernández demonstrates the necessity of a revisionism to problematise activisms from the past and to inquire on the impact of the civil rights movement and the 1970s left on contemporary queer art in the Hispanic Caribbean: “How do contemporary queer artists and communities relate to the genealogies of what we now call queer identities?” and, most importantly, “Can queerness continue to be transformative and bring liberation?” By means of a comparative study of a series of interviews by Frances Negrón-Muntaner to women with central roles in the consolidation of the feminist and lesbian movement in Puerto Rico in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as recent literary texts by Ena Lucía Portela, Rita Indiana Hernández and Raquel Salas Rivera, Martínez Hernández evinces the 1970s influence in the writings and stories of these authors, and she does so to understand “the ways in which the aesthetic and political come together as a form of historic revisionism and contemporary political/ economic critique around queer experiences in the Hispanic Caribbean.” Last but not least, this volume expands the understanding of the geographic limits of the Hispanic Caribbean by revealing its relationships with the Dutch Caribbean (Phaf-Rheinberger), as well as the modes of cultural

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and social activism and the resulting transformations of urban space generated by the Caribbean diaspora in Madrid (Olívar Graterol). In “‘Holland’ in the Caribbean: Voids Between the Spanish-Speaking World and the Lower Countries,” Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger highlights the diversity of the Caribbean by paying attention to the networks of social actors and political practices concealed by national discourses and their concurrent linguistic borders. Attending trajectories, genealogies and texts written in the creole languages of Suriname and Curaçao, Phaf-­ Rheinberger traces a literary history of the Hispanic Caribbean to evince the relationships and circulation of “Holland” in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean imaginary and to advocate for the expansion of the geographical and linguistic limits which have framed the critical understanding of the cultures and geographies of the Hispanic Caribbean. For her part, Dagmary Olívar Graterol updates studies on the Caribbean diaspora and transatlantic displacements in “The Caribbean Without a Sea: Approaches to Caribbean Immigration in Madrid,” in which she undertakes an interdisciplinary study that revises the notion of “creolisation” to think about the ways in which continental and insular migrants from the Hispanic Caribbean negotiate communities in Madrid. She does so by setting three “coordinates”—Caribbean spaces, the Danceable spaces and the Collective/Associative spaces—that reflect displacements and urban transformations in the Spanish capital, which are particularly represented in the entrepreneurship driven by the “migrant nostalgia industry,” social organisations and the cultural initiatives of groups of migrants of the Caribbean diaspora. In this sense, Graterol Olívar takes Jaron Rowan’s (2017) notion of “eccentric institutions” to introduce the idea of experimental, non-normative spaces as the framework to understand the inclusions and resistances in cultural, social and artistic proposals of this community. All in all, New Perspectives on Hispanic Caribbean Studies is conceived as an analytical opening through a series of emerging interpretative approaches, which fed on innovative conceptual tools, on political-cultural phenomena of the Hispanic Caribbean, to make possible alternative forms of analysis in consonance with the complexity of actors and processes that take place today and which does not fit in the unitary parameters of mainstream Caribbean studies.

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Bibliography Aja, Alan A. Miami’s Forgotten Cubans: Race, Racialization, and the Miami Afro-­ Cuban Experience. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Benítez Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992. Bejel, Emilio. Gay Cuban Nation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Bosch, Juan. De Cristóbal Colón a Fidel Castro. El Caribe, frontera imperial. Madrid: Alfaguara, 1970. Buscaglia-Salgado, José F. Undoing Empire: Race and Nation in the Mulatto Caribbean. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Buck-Morss, Susan. Hegel, Haiti and Universal History. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009. Carpentier, Alejo. “Prólogo.” In El reino de este mundo. Montevideo: Arca, 1996. Duchesne Winter, Juan. “Más allá del liberacionismo caribeño: Juan Carlos Quintero Herencia, Hoja de mar (:) Efecto archipiélago I (2016).” Cuadernos de Literatura XXIII, 45 (enero–junio, 2019): 146–156. Accessed September 5, 2019. https:// revistas.javeriana.edu.co/index.php/cualit/article/view/27722. ———. “Caribe interior excéntrico: un asomo aun espacio wayuu.” Aguaita 24 (2012): 100–109. Duany, Jorge. The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move. Identities on the Island and in the United States. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Fernández Retamar, Roberto. Todo Calibán. San Juan: Ediciones Callejón, 2003. Glissant, Édouard. Poetic of Relation. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997. Grosfoguel, Ramón. Colonial Subjects. Puerto Ricans in a Global Perspective. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Hall, Stuart, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” In Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, 227–237. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. López, Magdalena. “Failure: A Conceptual Proposal to Rethink the Caribbean.” Revista de pensamiento, crítica y estudios literarios latinoamericanos 12 (2015): 15–29. Accessed September 5, 2019. https://revistes.uab.cat/ mitologias/article/view/v12-lopez. Maingot, Anthony P. “Politics and populist historiography in the Caribbean.” In Intellectuals in the Twentieth-Century Caribbean, edited by Alistair Hennessy, 145–174. Vol. II. London: The Macmillan Press LTD, 1992. Martínez-San Miguel, Yolanda. The Coloniality of Diasporas. Rethinking Intra-­ Colonial Migrations in a Pan-Caribbean Context. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Mintz, Sidney Wilfred. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. London: Penguin, 1986.

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Moreiras, Alberto. “Posthegemonía o más allá del principio del placer.” In Poshegemonía. El final de un paradigma de la filosofía política en América Latina, edited by Rodrigo Castro Orellana. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2015. E-book. Moreno Fraginals, Manuel. El ingenio. Complejo económico social cubano del azúcar. La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1978. Ortiz, Fernando. Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1987. Pabón, Carlos. Polémicas: política, intelectuales, violencia. San Juan: Ediciones Callejón, 2014. Quijano, Aníbal. “Colonialidad y Modernidad/Racionalidad.” In Los Conquistados: 1492 y la población indígena de las Américas, compiled by Heraclio Bonilla, 437–449. Quito: FLACSO/Ediciones Libri Mundi, 1992. Ríos Ávila, Rubén. La raza cómica. Del sujeto en Puerto Rico. San Juan: Ediciones Callejón, 2002. Rodríguez, Néstor. Escrituras del desencuentro en la República Dominicana. Santo Domingo: Editorial Nacional, 2007. Rowan, Jaron. “Cultura, experimentación e innovación: una defensa de las instituciones excéntricas.” Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte, 2017. Shalini, Puri. The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Torres-Saillant, Silvio. Intellectual History of the Caribbean. Gordonsville: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. ———. El retorno de las yolas. Santo Domingo: Librería La Trinitaria, 1999.

CHAPTER 2

Towards an Archipelagic Effect ( ): Poetics, Politics and Sensorium in the Caribbean Juan Carlos Quintero Herencia

Introduction The difficulty of writing La hoja de mar (:) Efecto archipiélago I (2016) has not been insurmountable. The predicament of organising it as an ensemble, bound to the difficulty of arranging its sensible constellation of texts, arose from a denial and a previous work. In some way, the beginning of this book is related to a—as of today—distant premonition which was, years ago, anchored in a certain pause among a multitude of different enthusiasms. I am referring to the very moment of typing, of writing, in which I expose my desire for a theory about the sensorial logics in the Caribbean, drawn from a reading of poetic and literary experiences triggered by what I call an archipelagic effect.

This is an abridged translation and partial re-writing of “1.a. Introducción. Por un efecto archipiélago ()-(a): Poéticas, políticas y sensorium en el Caribe,” in La hoja de mar (:) Efecto archipiélago I (Leiden, Netherlands: Almenara Press, 2016). I want to thank Chris Lewis for his help during the translation process. J. C. Quintero Herencia (*) University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. López, M. T. Vera-Rojas (eds.), New Perspectives on Hispanic Caribbean Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51498-3_2

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And yet, I never imagined that this project would end up being a book about the sea and its imaginary, or about viewing the sea off the coasts of Caribbean literary production. Even less I imagined that my reluctance to present the text to a publisher would turn to be so revealing of my own condition regarding the sea. Back then, I considered that it was better to let it sit and marinate for a while, rather than randomly putting together a collection of essays. My book does not want to mediate nor settle the disputes and polemics on which theory best defines the Caribbean, the theory that “best represents it,” being an insular, geopolitical or continental-terrestrial theory. La hoja del mar disavows this scenario and proposes a metaphorical theory, a theory of the image that arises from a certain literary experience that approximates, and works with, the Caribbean.1 “caribbean” and “caribbeanness,” as singular modes of such archipelagic effect, will be written in lowercase, to avoid a subjectivist confusion or a totalisation, and to underscore that the notion of the archipelago is a text, a trace.2 Since I began my research about the institutional discourses and imaginaries of the Cuban Revolution, I have dedicated myself to reading poetry written, edited and discussed in the Cuba of the 1960s and 1970s. In truth, my research was but another avatar of my chronic condition as a reader. I believed it possible to devote a chapter of the book Fulguración del espacio. Letras e imaginario institucional de la Revolución cubana (Spatial Flares. Poetics and Institutional Imaginary of the Cuban Revolution, 2002) to the effects of the revolutionary triumph in Cuba on the poetics of the period. My reading of poetry acquired as a companion this other kind, affected by revolutionary intensities. In these texts, I tackled with the ardent prose of warriors and officers, with the obligatory nature of sacrifice as a (false) image of revolutionary politics. Reading these poems, I gradually grew apart from my research; additionally, they generated a series of very precarious notes about what, in that moment, I perceived as the inciting flicker of a—completely unoriginal—intuition. I discovered, between the lines of certain poems, a few essays and certain narratives, images and bodies that partook of different forms of participation and political sensibility generated by literature. I glimpsed other literary ways of saying and doing politics which even abandoned conventional politics; inaudible, perhaps even insensitive or insensible, literary forms amid the hegemonic ways of the political discourse and endeavours of those intense years. These signs, however, were and were not there, between the lines of texts I read and the context from where they emerged.

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My notes fluttered around a fragile certainty. I sensed that the political quality of these texts asked to read them in a different way, to savour them with other senses. This contradictory feeling, this intuition to read these texts from another constellation of resonances, led to my setting aside, for a while, a study of the Cuban Revolution. Later on, when I published my “Cuban treatise” (Ricardo Piglia’s term) and took up those old notes once again, the necessity to specify my idea of “the political” compelled me again to stop writing about these poems and resume my investigation about the binomial “poetry” and “politics.” With this insight, I would open my eyes and taste other bodies, in an attempt to register the ways in which certain writings are dedicated to generate their own perspectives and to assemble political subjectivities that are difficult to verify—that are, perhaps, unverifiable—in the Caribbean archipelago, as well as to defy the ways of generating subjectivities in the archipelago. This opening my eyes also meant to intervene and become saturated by other senses, to seek to unhinge the perceptible signs that certain disciplinary scenes have constructed in postulating images of the Caribbean. This giving and opening the body to certain literary experiences which would operate, even if only for an instant, on a sensorium affected by the archipelago, would also answer to a desire to incorporate (as I do not attempt to merely gloss over) Caribbean propositions which, for decades, have been posing the following: that the imaginary of Caribbean lands is not always the exact figuration of the isolated or fixed, of that which is unconcerned with its immediacy or that forsakes its distance. Countless pages have been written by essayists, as diverse as they are provocative and even polemical, such as Antonio Benítez Rojo, Édouard Glissant, Jamaica Kincaid C.L.R. James or George Lamming, among others, who have underscored the indecisive interconnectivity, the atomisation, even the impossibilities between “waters and shore” of the archipelago; the unstable complexity of any evidence, be it racial, socio-economic, political, telluric or even cultural, to embrace such archipelago.3 Nevertheless, I would fantasise about the ways in which some writings display (on the dark sands of a poem, in some narrative passage or in the voice of a performance) another order of what is sensible for the political. In short, I dreamt (how else can I put it?) about the possibility of stumbling upon a hidden treasure. Over time, the notes I had written acquired the form of essays or, in other cases, functioned as a trampoline to read poetic and literary texts, including songs produced in dissimilar contexts to those of the Cuban Revolution. However, in the midst of so many

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readings, I began presenting essays marked by that distant intuition. Those who heard me or read what I had written told me that there was a book in the making there, but I could not quite make out of its shape. Something was still keeping me from cooking those essays: they were still marinating. After publishing Fulguración del espacio. Letras e imaginario institucional de la Revolución cubana (2002) and La máquina de la salsa. Tránsitos del sabor (The salsa machine. Transits of flavour, 2005), I decided that my next book of essays would be an exercise in freedom. Easy to write: exercise and freedom. With them, I intended to unleash a potentiality for reading, not the simplicity of the catchphrase. I also wanted to move away from those frequent implications that often go without saying—to exercise freedom as a way to rehearse, to practise freedom and not simply to obtain modes of liberation; to free ourselves from certain rhetorical gesturing in front of literature: there are acts of thought that this work desires to expand upon in light of the texts. Criticism as an exercise in freedom does not seem to me an entelechy, cut off from the here and now of my body, or from the context where I live and work. It is rather an activity that enables, at least as a possibility, a sense of community or a community of senses: an ensemble of readers and imaginaries focused on another way of living and a different way of relating to the act of thinking. The freedom of reading supposes a wager on the power to exist (to quote the title of the resounding work by Michel Onfray, with whom I do not always agree), to take a chance on the slow savouring that certain texts demand.4 Reading as a means of inhabiting, of struggling with and relishing the present; criticism as a means of reconsidering the relationship between literary knowledge and life, and the infinite potentiality of daring to think in a different way from the different temporality that images offer. I am not certain of my success. I have striven, at least, in this contemporaneity dominated by hype, idiocy and speed rather than by conversation, for a work based on my passion for poetry, theory and literature, with all their challenges; in a way, to expound upon my critical desires. The fantasy continues, I will not deny it, on that impossible beach formed in part by the intensities and fractures that drove the writing of my book. I have a sense that, up to this point, I have only achieved to turn my fantasies into a register much, much less than moving. What is more, this beach does not shelter me from anything. Which would be the way to present the archipelago as an experience that (happily) ignores the claim of geographic—even demographic—nomination, as a condition of the Caribbean to attain historical visibility and

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representation? Why should the archipelago be an experience? When or how is this presentation of the archipelagic condition also a meditation on the image of the Caribbean? As a sensorial experience, the archipelago is a means of exposing the body to the ways in which the sea invades the land, the body of land before and over the effects of the sea. This sensorial experience is not that of an isolated citizen, who enjoys pleasures or secret delights, nor the vitalist healing of a tourist in the Caribbean. The archipelago experience that I am concerned with does not want to represent a Greater Caribbean, an ethnic inventory of the region, the cultures and the world-views created by slavery. It does not even intend to produce an idyllic defence of insular exceptionality. La hoja del mar rejects the above, not because it is not relevant, but rather because, in the interior of the communities and of the archives devoted to these representations, a new Caribbean political and affective contract has not yet been generated, a contract among languages that would produce far-reaching effects in the daily experience and imaginary of these communities. The archipelago experience that La hoja del mar wants to be a means to unravel the naturalisations, the perceptual and subjective subjugations, which stabilise the present in the Caribbean.5 Before anything else, the archipelago effect is an experience that makes language possible, an experience that precedes the literary by unlocking it, inasmuch as it serves up a Caribbean temporality for a corporeal and historical imaginary. The archipelagic element does not salvage, vindicate nor redeem anything—let us leave that to priests, ministers, professors, poets and writers with invisible cassocks. The sensorial experience that the archipelago triggers is an aesthetic activation of beauty as contradiction, of beauty as fracture, of the beauty of parts, of that which is divided or broken, the beauty of ruptures unsubmissive to a totality, even the beauty of floods, of cultures and lands overwhelmed by unrelenting waters. It is important to be consistent with the polemical impression that betrays the political and not favour martial or sacrificial ethics, to neither idealise nor dismiss revolutionary insurgencies or the epic pursuits for the golden fleece of identity. I am not interested in making identities, any of them, auroral scenarios where some Caribbean community would better exhibit the images and the language of their politics. The archipelagic exhibition is what records, for the first time, the unconscious work of the waters on the peoples of the Caribbean. This is an ominous and immediate discovery. In Virgilio Piñera’s paradigmatic poem, “La isla en peso” (“The Weight of the Island”), the poetic voice besieges a truism of identity that

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has rendered his political work invisible. For Piñera, the seawater on the island, the tropical water is not only a limit, an imprisoning circumference, a border, but, above all, it is a ubiquitous circumstantial effect. This circumstance of the sea does not remain at the edges of the shores, but it extends everywhere: “The accursed circumstance of water everywhere”6 (Piñera 2000, p. 37), questioning the forms of sameness and glory that cover the formal hall where trite platitudes are paid in the Cuban cultural house: The tropic erupts and its flow invades my head pinned fast to the crust of night. The original piety of gold-bearing sands resoundingly drowns the Spanish mares, the whirlwind disorders the best-kept manes. I can’t see through these dilated eyes. No one knows how to watch, to study, to strip a body. It’s the dreadful confusion of a hand in the greenery, stranglers traveling at the edge of sight. We didn’t know how to fill the lonely course of love with glances. (Piñera 2000, p. 41)7

The essays that make up my two-volume book seek to disrupt and disavow the power relations that certain discourses about the Caribbean have fortified in the Caribbean archive. The resulting knowledge would not have to conform to the map, to the paper, to counter-travel itineraries, or to an ideological transformation. The archipelago experience aspires, inspires and breathes an unidentifiable communitarian space in which taste is nevertheless savoured, in which the complex affectivity, and intensity, of being alive is savoured. The archipelagic image unleashes a struggle and a disagreement with that which has become crystallised (whether at the hands of the market, of capital or of Jurassic leftism) as the only horizon for Caribbean happiness. The aesthetic sense of the archipelago is the imagination that triggers the positioning of the body in the Caribbean as an incessant process of corrosion, of porificación. It should not be imagined as a new geographical determinism or as the aural ascent of a new subject, but rather as a new condition for the determinant, in both experience and corroboration, of

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the finite or infinite in the Caribbean. It is about the Caribbean exploration of its own expiration, its passage through time, its being always there, immediate and compelled towards death. What does the archipelago contribute to this logic of human meaning? Its seasoning with salt, the thought of salt, the techniques of iodisation, the detritus that compose sands, the thought of light, the shadow in the storm, the volatile minerals that pass through our bodies and our spaces. A polemical scene among these waters can be, in effect, a constellation of political forces in which neither chance nor contingencies are absent. In this sense, the political implications of such archipelago effect are embedded in the constant challenges and complexities it poses to conventional ways of perceiving and understanding meaning and sense, meaning and sensoriality, meaning and existence, when working through a Caribbean seascape. The potentiality of these political apparitions should not be understood as mere affirmations, projections of models or aural evidences, but in relation to the shadows, in relation to an impotence that also acts and interrupts, in the shadows, in all that can be made or sensed in a different way. The political potentiality that I fancy archipelagic is the capacity to transform simultaneously oneself and the fabric of one’s singularities. These transformations could turn an alternative mode sensible, another sensorial and historical temporality from where to experience the Caribbean. In the thinking of Édouard Glissant (2005) and his embrace of Caribbean opacity, we find all the potentiality of such a movement. In Caribbean Discourse, Glissant proposes that opacity is necessary to perceive the “dark trauma” where the silence of the people speaks. This opacity is not an obstacle to overcome, nor a contrariness to explain away and much less idealise. “Opacity” is, simultaneously, a demand for decolonising justice, as well as the outline of a poetic specificity lodged in the objects of the archipelago. However, to decolonise a culture or a community requires something different from an archival cleansing or a mere ideological pronouncement. This opacity is not the affectation or hermetic quality of some aesthetics, and it is surely not a magic formula to confront our political challenges. In the absence of some form of consent in the face of the opaque, the desire that runs through the reading of this book mobilises a sort of weirdness that resists the evident or obvious which mobilises certain disciplines as a hermeneutical horizon. Similarly, it would be necessary to continue questioning if the historical pretensions of epistemological clarity and transparency, which Glissant sees as crystallised in the coloniser Other, have been, or are, as “clear,” or if they include more obscure areas. The political is the irruption

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of a conflict that ethically, as an unpublished apparition, disorganises, pokes holes in and obstructs the arrangement of the parts of the social order that have been agreed upon by institutions in order to manage the conflicts between the islands, the shores and their sea. What “would be common for us” in this territory, in this or that departure, in this or that crack? An archipelagic commons is not a telos, a communicative ability. It is not a kind of content, identity, blood or pigmentation; it is not an ideology, the absolute or transcendental assumption attributed to us in this space, in the arena of the discussion. The appearance of the “communal” is not located in some present State nor in a forthcoming subject. What makes the political an opportunity for the communal, an event for the community, is the disposition to contend for, and with, that which can be sensed, the particular potential of the sensible that emerges once some ethical gap appears that demands justice, to not be excluded. Specifically, it is an aesthetic battle (aisthaesis=sensation) because it struggles to make sensible, to expose and affect the body of a singularity that has barely allowed itself to be sensed; that which perhaps resists and has still not yet become sensible in the democratic arena. This aesthetic struggle is always involved in the manifestation of a negative event and is affected by some wound or ethical injury that the community has yet to convert into a meaningful experience. Several questions arise: What type of knowledge does the coastlines of literature (to give one example) expose? Does that which is uncovered constitute a way of knowing? The political demands that would historically single out some community in the Caribbean, which form would they take? When a perspective opens to the procession of its gaps and open wounds, which bodies can be sensed in the archipelago? What is, and is not, an archipelago? An archipelago is not an identity nor a referential, cartographical concept that totalises the reality that gathers the lands and waters of the islands. An archipelago is not the exact opposite of a continent. It is the consequence of the activities and experiences that interweave interpretations focused on islands and their waters, on lands and their seas. It should be noted that the archipelago is already materiality and form, magnetically attracting and dispersing; it is the intermittent sensorial that enables the consequences of a varied saturation of open moments, of cracks in meaning, where a Caribbean community presents itself. When the archipelago is tropical, it is the open sea to tropical redundancies, the sea where the tropos (from the Greek, “to turn” or “to change”) exposes (or exposes itself to) the heterogeneity of its figures,

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where the metaphoric potentiality of the seas materialises, even over land. Likewise, this sea is a permutation of impossible volumes, of implausible imaginary cohabitations where the emotion of the strange truth of the archipelago is perceptible. As Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos establishes: The sea, the true sea, […] the sea, the strange sea […] wants to be the supermarine sea… (Burgos 1981, p. 11)8

A tropical archipelago is the bodily register of the intensities of those changes. Bodies register the swaying and swinging of communities, the transformation of spaces; they are subjects and non-subjects exposed and subjected to the outside, to the opening of the waters (). The archipelago effect, occasionally tropical, is a sensorial reverberation in tension and calmness, an imitation or radical difference from the atmospheric condition of its waters obstructed by the shore (). The effect is also a sign of the platform of assemblages that historically facilitate, and are, every archipelago. In Palés Matos’ epoch-making Tuntún de pasa y grifería, the sea produces aesthetic objects and performances, thanks to the gift of the sea sponge. His sea endures and again replicates the performances occurring on its surface: Give me that sea sponge and I will have the sea, The sea in blue overall Buttoned with islands and patched with continents, struggling to get out of his hole, arms stretched out pushing the coasts. (1995, p. 608)9

In “Canción de mar” (Sea Song), the sponge takes the form of the sea, since it allows the emergence of images where the poetic subject inscribes the capillarity of the archipelago, the formidable openings of these aesthetic waters. In Palés Matos’ poetry, the sponge is an excellent image of the archipelago’s effect as it represents the political and aesthetic sensorium delivered by the archipelago. Nothing has more holes than a sea sponge; it is a creature that absorbs and expels in multiple directions. This

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is why the poetic voice demands, “Dadme esa esponja y tendré el mar” (“Give me that sea sponge, and I will have the sea”). Holding a sea sponge, the poet encounters the truth of the sea. Therefore, where the eye imagines auratic origins from the seabed, the sea will impose its horizontal and paradoxical body of relations with the land. More than just a horizon, the archipelago magnetises the necessity of the subject that, from the shore’s edge, can only aspire to reach it with some sense. The archipelago is the parenthesis () that emerges from the sensorial utopia that brings together the zenith and the marine horizon. Perhaps it is an impossible underwater ability, a mollusc whose savage ethics hide aerial ambitions that lie beyond the sea. In other words, the real and imaginary work of the sea damages or makes it impossible to discern the boundaries between the island and the continent, the land and the waters, the body and its perspectives. The failure of any protocol of epistemological precision is the sign that expels any claim to authenticity at the time of imagining the Caribbean as archipelago, and then unleashes the opening of any beginning. About an island, Deleuze says, “It is an island or a mountain, or both once: the island is a mountain under water, and the mountain, an island that is still dry” (2005, p. 20). Without a doubt, the marine body, or the body of the sea, rejects exactitude and, in the same way, communicates a difference ()-(t) to any territory touched by the waters of the sea. The body of the sea, and its violence, does not stop at the edge of the shores, for example, of the island. The island is a multiverse when it gathers the archipelago, the truth of the sea, as the Mediterranean Sea in Massimo Cacciari’s The Archipelago.10 The initiation in the tours, in the dissemination is the sensorial possibility that distinguishes an archipelago as a trace that “sensitises” the historical and poetic body of the lands exposed to the labour of the sea, to its forces, discharges and fluxes. Open fields, horizons without land, the strokes and traces scattered on the waters: all these unveil how these marine extensions give shape to caesuras, to openings that constitute the history between the islands. The open sea, the sea outside which is also every archipelago, would allegorise11 that which always disappears, that which is and is not perpetually there; that which maybe has already been incorporated. Even when it becomes some sort of emblem, this opening or gap (something which is always lacking in the great histories, or theories, of the Caribbean), despite the authors’ emphasis, leaves this shared archipelagic space and becomes allegorical flow. Now, when the archipelago presents itself as an outside externality—rayada, something barred, as Eduardo Lalo (2005) would

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say—from a perspective that “fastens” the production of a Caribbean sign, the emergence of a Caribbean image formalises (there) the potential trembling of some singularity between the islands. The capturing of what is distant, offered by the horizon-archipelago, alters bipolar frameworks that have dominated the ways of perceiving the spaces, both the interiors and the exteriors, of a Caribbean materiality. This archipelagic effectiveness in front of what is distant is a historical practice with considerable works in the history of the Caribbean. Manuel Ramos Otero explains it as follows: “all distance is a sea, an outburst of the heavens” (Ramos Otero 1994, p. 14).12 A figuration of the immediate-distant and of the indistinct, the materiality between the waters of the archipelago prepares a sensorium that will re-inscribe the artificiality of the same archipelago in texts, songs and performances. An archipelagic perspective, but also its acoustics and flavours, shapes that place exposed by corrosion. Every situation in which the archi-pélagos exerts the capabilities it stimulates (suddenly or in waves) the affective fabric of some subject. Before this significant opening (), one cannot help to perceive the cartographic and realistic distinctions that have polarised the particularities of the land and sea of the Caribbean breakdown ()-(a). What, then, will the archipelagic signify as a preparation of the senses, as a sensorial seasoning for the subject between waters? Where, or how, does the body feel, and connect with, the significant consequences of its sensation? The archipelago collected in certain texts and aesthetics disposes something like the dissolution and overturning of the causalities that would belong to the conventional Caribbean imaginary. As a display pierced by indifference (the oceanic horizon is as indifferent, luminous or gloomy as the darkness that covers its abysses: the faults or trenches against which the Antilles rise), the archipelago saturates the logics of communication and hermeneutics, irruptions and alignments, silences and dissonances. Here opacity, apart from participating in a decolonising will, is the negative glyph that stirs up its waters. The form of its fluidity is un-representable in maps; it is an indisputable challenge to bodies because the plane lends itself to quantify dimensions or volumes, and not to represent agitations or fields of force. Yet, it is the archipelago that places islands in the map. Above all, the archipelago insinuates the means, ships and bridges that would connect the subjects, or islands, that compose it. The means, the intervals, that remain between () are prefigured in the open sea as an indifferent invitation that dilates its extension. As in front of a coastline:

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I think: —If this crepuscular hour were to stop eternally, as an island, tanned by the sun that agonises, between its two oceans of shadow. (Palés Matos 2013, p. 86)13

In front of the archipelagic image, we find ourselves facing the very limits of the conventional protocols of representation, in as much as such display refuses to cancel the multiplicity of temporalities of its sensations, of its senses. Moreover, the archipelago image always poses a liminal and paradoxical situation. The—misunderstood—singularity of the marine image, with its fluctuations and metamorphic eagerness of its swells, is not a scholarly example that may crystallise in some poetics of “authenticity.” One could not say that this is a true image of the archipelago and that one is not. On the contrary, the image is the archipelagic condition, insofar as it unleashes its aesthetic situation, its sensorial bait. Every image effected/ affected by the archipelago exhibits its condition as corporeal, of becoming meaning and aesthetics. In the archipelago, one cannot say that, in the beginning, was the word, or a small plot of land, or a boat or a canoe, neither the act of writing nor the machine that would dis-cover our Caribbean existence. With the archipelago, the first thing one needs to confront is the body. The archipelago is not. The archipelago is (not); the archipelago emerges when something or someone gives body to its openings (), or when, in the opening, a body asks for a passage. Its image is the condensation of a discontinuity, the fixity of a skylight, a perceptive dissolution that does not begin with the solitude of some sensitised “personality” in front of the coast. The beginning of the image-archipelago is given by the cantazo (a blow, a hit, the beat of a song), the sea discharge on the bodies and objects of history ()-(a). It is a paradoxical situation, the limiting nature of which is not exhausted by negative situations. For there, on the coast, just when the limit of the territory is perceived, something opens up to the wastelands of the sea, to the extensive edge of the waters. To look there is always to situate oneself before a distance that refuses to specify a profile, which undulates the forms of the nearby and the coming, ebbing and withdrawn. Perhaps it is a matter of the marine materialisation of a contemporary perception, given that, in the savouring of that distance, the immediate environment becomes a platform of affectation, escape and estrangement. The archipelagic-negativity, its propensities for ineffectiveness, failure and dispersion, does not cancel the emphasis of realistic protocols. This negativity is a way of appreciating the closeness and lack of purpose of the

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aesthetic persistence of some of its objects, the destruction of the teleological zeal of some of its imaginaries. A culturalist protocol has become hegemonic among Caribbean theories, even though the adjectives used to describe it are fantastic, wonderful or transcultural. In other words, the Caribbean archipelago has been read, in too many cases, as a fact that, ontologically and geographically, precedes any interpretation. Thus, a realistic archipelago becomes the ultimate determination of the disciplinary representations of the Caribbean. Against this image (which in fact does not name itself as an image), “truths,” “authenticities or “falsehoods” are qualified as they contend with their representations. In short, the rhetorical or tropical apparatus that is implemented as some disciplinary template is used to carry out a version of the archipelago, and never function as a way of acting or being in it. The topographic fact of this archipelago, afflicted by reality, irreparably causes a discourse of verisimilitude. Before any work or aesthetics, the veristic archipelago gives rise to a discursive order as a causal effect of its truths. Between the waves, and in the wave, there appears that pause, that rotating surface, the rotating opening that prepares the scene for the next image. This incisive, parenthetical paradox is a movement of the archipelago (it is not the only one) and some texts deal with it as they generate their poetics, politic and the very limits of sameness. In fact, the parenthesis as a breach places the terms of the equation-(archipelago) in another perceptual plateau. Therein it swings them, it exhibits and hides them, disrupts them between currents, salt residue and undertows. In its tides and surges, caresses and abrasions, the archipelago amalgamates and corrodes; it allows us to sense (to rethink) the rhetoric of the Caribbean, yet not as a means or an instrument for the representation of a Superior or Original truth of the same archipelago. The archipelagic effect is a textual apparition of discharges unsubordinated to any metaphysical originality. If desired, this archipelagic effect in particular, like any consequence that emanates from the use of language, effects a moment, is the effect/ actuality (effect(a)ctuality) of its images. It effects the actuality of a moment for the image, a present that distinguishes it from a contemporary sensorial in the Caribbean. This appearance of their moments equally entails aesthetics as historical detritus. Thus, texts and performances marked by the tropos of the archipelago carry traces of the rhetoric and aesthetics that have made them possible as they bear the marks of the negative (−) faults, openings that also over determine them.

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Unlike a culturalist-identitarian consideration that reduces the archipelago to a gentilic condition ruled by some Absolute Governing Principle, the fabric of corrosion, its salt-covered word forged by tides, is the unstable presentation, full of holes () abandoned to its own fluctuating appearance. The metaphor-archipelago is not the verbal ornamentation that frames some geographic or historical sense of the Caribbean, divorced in perpetuity from the matter of language. The metaphor-archipelago is the sensorial horizon that leads the archipelago effect to action, never to its resolution or its equivalence, but rather to the distended space between the enunciation of the image—the archipelago—and its possible effects. The archipelago effect is what is caused by the metaphorical discharge of the Caribbean tropos, not the sense of it but the potentiality of a knowledge, an affect or sensorial discovery that only reverberates from the metaphor que se sabe mareada (seasick and turned by the sea), between tides mobilised by un sujeto en marejada (a subject struck by the sea). La hoja de mar is a theory of the image, a theory of the coast that is a theory about some of its marine poetics, never a word about its Ultimate and Final Truths. So it happens in “Playas del árbol,” part of Tratados en la Habana: “Poetry? A nocturnal snail in a rectangle of water” (Lezama Lima 1977 [1975], p. 510).14 Submerged or diagrammed by the aquatic rectangle, this image of the poetic exposes, in a contradictory way, its darkness in the humid trail left among the visible traces of the watery slowness of the snail. More than the description of its attributes, poetry is the encounter of forms and sensations that withdraw, like the movement (unnarrated in extremis) of Lezama’s snail. Poetry is not perceptual facility, the easy understanding of an evidence or a historical reference. Poetry is not the only way, but one more way, among others, of rethinking a sensorium in the Caribbean. The archipelago effect is an effect without cause. The marine opening is a sinking or a loss, a condition without pivot, called forth from the flesh of the swell. Under a tree on the beach, at night, the archipelago accentuates a shadow that excites nocturnal animals. Tides, rough seas, nausea caused by a lack of light, the aesthetics of the waves: these are some of its disguises, since they record that this theory of the sea pathos, of seasickness, is not a simple dysfunctionality. Rather, they are a mark of a sensorial order exposed to its waters, the forms of confusion in water, rectangle or slime, or that moment when all of the above become indistinguishable from one another. To face the sea is to become the sea, a porous body permeable to the intensities of the open waters. This is how the archipelago generates an

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image of itself and of the subject affected by its presence. This subjective situation produces a mode of perception, a sensorium, in a state of retreat. Áurea María Sotomayor, in her collection of poems Diseño del ala, addresses this nautical awareness, caught up between the logics of submersion and floating that characterises gazing the land from the sea. In her poem “Poseer (sustraer) disfrutar” [To possess (to sustract), to enjoy], the poetic subject looks at the Island from the sea, on the pliable mirror of the sea: The only possibility of contemplating oneself lies on holding on to that exterior […] To gaze at the island from the sea. (Sotomayor 2005, p. 13)15

To deal with the damage in(between) the islands is, why not, to look into instances where reason raves and does not agree about arguments or convictions in order to take the floor in the public arena. Equally, it would not be necessary to de-metaphorise ad-infinitum the imaginary character that enables the geographic fact called “island,” or that which all land with a coastline suffers, thanks to the effects of the sea. Isolation (a-isla-miento) is both a becoming-island and a relationship with the fictions of the island, with the classifications of the island. The politics that the archipelago makes possible is constituted when a subject inscribes perceptive experiences through the metaphorical fabric that the archipelago has assembled or dispersed. Archipelagic politics is not a historical irruption decanted from the aesthetic effects that mould the subject or the community that has made it sensible. The effect, or its metaphors, is just an attempt to inscribe something that will never be the same as the content of its representation. Moreover, the relation community-image-Caribbean should not be thought of in moral terms. The effectiveness of this relationship goes beyond the customary dichotomous, identitarian disposition that places a “good” versus a “bad” image of the Caribbean archipelago in enemy camps. A community body in the Caribbean will refer to the collective condition in which a shoal of images comes to a boil, where something is transformed that does not cease in its restlessness or in its astonishment. The archipelagic condition of the Caribbean community is inextricable from the crossing of sensorial devices that produce us as contemporary subjects: a relay in the transit of relations between the sensible, the thinkable and that which can be enunciated. This being in common of

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the archipelago would be the effect of some trace that causes the opening offered by the sea, and the possibility to sense and incorporate, assume or escape from, the images that stir outside of the dominant perceptive administrations. This archipelago, as a phenomenon of human sensoriality, is better perceived as the outline of some form of existence rather than a precise region on a map; the text, the voice or the body that perceives it is the very relationship that makes it sensible, that gives body and matter to its images. Situation and subjectivity in archipelagic state, given to the continuous experience of a protean body, of another sensorium heading towards that gap () that somehow says no to its originality. What makes the archipelago appear is the dissolution of its extension or cartographic exactitude; what would be affirmed from the coast is, for example, just how it denies the unequivocal. The Caribbean aesthetic exposes the uncertainty of an archipelagic state from the material conditions that erect this uncertainty, not in spite of it. The real of the archipelago is the irruption of the impossibility of some jurisdiction over identity. However, this appearing in negative flight is only visible once the particularist trust, in giving us a common name, is suspended. This double suspension of crystallised identities, or of some obligatory common task, is registered as a saturating force that infuses strangeness and remoteness to everything that has always surrounded us. There, where the familiar and neighbouring dissolves in its apparent opposite, is what we call the archipelago. Poet Aurea María Sotomayor, while swimming in the beach in her Diseño del ala, gathers archipelagic effectiveness under the logics of subtraction (Sotomayor 2005, p. 14).16 In order to perceive the appearance of this body and its images, it is not necessary to surrender the primacy of its register to the calendar of wars of independence, to the truth of numbers, to  demographic inventory and charts, or to debatable institutional achievements in the Caribbean. However, it is important to emphasise that practices of colonisation, the dismantling and slaughter of “original” populations and their territories, the relocation of languages and cultures in the creation of a new colonial order, and above all, the atrocious and complex discursive machine that drove the trafficking of black Africans, irreparably marks the poetic inscriptions of the Caribbean archipelago. The world that emerges from this complex experience, however, does not have to live what was received (and will yet receive) as a result of that experience, as a condemnation or a destiny. Neither would the Caribbean ways of knowing, dedicated to

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thinking and transforming it, have to rehearse perpetually invocations, idealisations or lamentations before or after working on this historical experience. It is important to be consistent with the polemical impression that betrays the political and avoid the privileging of martial ethics; to neither idealise nor dismiss the great revolutionary insurgencies or epic pursuits for the golden fleece of identity. I am not interested in making identities, any of them, auroral scenarios in which some Caribbean community may better exhibit the images and the language of their politics. The archipelagic exhibition is what records, for the first time, the unconscious work of the waters on the peoples of the Caribbean. This is an ominous and immediate discovery imbued with potentiality. To totalise (to masculinise) some event, or to “authenticate” this or that logic, is not the motivating factor in La hoja del mar. More than a profile of the qualities of an author, literature or aesthetics affected by this archipelago would do politics when they facilitate, among their images, the stimulation of a sensorium, a perception where a body17, in the present of its reading, materializes another way for the historical appearance of those signs that distinguish it in the midst of violence, damage, or disasters of all kinds. The constitution of this sensorial experience is inseparable from a constellation of negative images, of drownings, evictions, disagreements saturations or voids. The archipelagic politics that I am passionate about would be the one that clash with what has already been identified and, perhaps, as an effect of this exposition, would turn against its own convictions. Not so much a matter of discovering, this archipelago un-covers discomfort. It is the texture of a sensorial revolt at odds with what has been agreed upon as reality, and as an experience that singles out the Caribbean. The disagreement between reality and experience does not arise from the simple confrontation of enemy positions or stories, which are wrapped up in some war of superiorities that would end up cancelling the productivity of the conflict. The forms of disagreement that appear in the literature of the archipelago (indeed in all literature) are mobilised whenever what is discussed is not an inventory of opinions, but the conditions that would enable a sensorial experience which, among the waters of the archipelago, would allow for the emergence of an ethical and political space for its demos. The politics of its literature, for example, persists where communication never imposes its fantasy of transparency, force or clarity. Literary politics is activated where something happens beyond, or in spite of what, in reality, is been understood. An example: a disagreement can be

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crafted from techniques that stress how certain objects and images deliver and do not deliver their senses. Moreover, among the images articulated by those who dissent from each other, the same dissension provides rafts of understanding and small islands of non-understanding. This politics, turning to Rancière, will insists on the aesthetic challenge that the word and technique that (the) (an)other interposes as an object of disagreement. The politics of aesthetics is not the contents of a disagreement, or the ability to elucidate it as a horizon. The submersion into the aquatic abyss, or the possibility of linking, from among the debris, the bodies of the archipelagic horizon, is the real dialogical power, the interlocution and the becoming space of disagreement amongst the islands. That obstructed word (), that interposed figure, perhaps submerged or floating among perspectives, is the multiplicity of writing the same disagreement that enables literary politics. A reading that besieges these barely sighted panoramas stops where a character, a subject, understands and does not understand what the other, that body over there, or this landscape, tells him/her. This situation should not be confused with the logics of hermeticism, with theories of reception, or with the complexities specific to some systems of thought, although these may be implied on more than one occasion. Moreover, some scenes open to experiencing a political event may be the product of literary writings that work upon language from a realistic pact, and effectively reconcile what has been said with the ways of saying it. Even there, on occasions, it is possible to find something that never fully stops to perceive itself: that object which, being always there, presents another to us. A horizon in the archipelago is a page aimed at rendering sensible that object that resists being perceived. It is made to resonate, to taste, that other, even within the very argument, and even with the language of that which has been agreed upon by the “experts” and the common sense with which it struggles. Politics, as the emergence of voices in disagreement, effects a configuration of the always specific and sensible when it hinders the normality of the consensus of the moment. Disagreement in some literary terrain, being the Caribbean or in another type of location, does not have to be a simple clash between two utterances, between two wills of enunciation. This literary act inaugurates another temporality once it accelerates the perception of that “new part” which is inexistent, invisible, insensible, senseless, until the moment of its appearance among what has been expressed. Literature, let us say its politics, could be read as an archipelagic condition when the body of its images and the work that it causes on tongues leave secretions and signals that

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excite other modes for the disposition of the senses. The politics of this literature will insist on giving body to some secret, to sensitise the secreted by some inaudible part. This secretion—a thing of holes, cavities, pores— will cease to be something exact in order to become literary knowledge or thinking about sensing, from the moment it emerges as a possibility for another life, another sense, another path or another action. In short, another way of distended (explayado) living, another way of proceeding, of being anchored, like the breeze, in its dilations and unremitting end.

Notes 1. This metaphoric impetus does not consider “metaphor” as a magical device that would expel undecidability, misunderstanding and uncertainty. It is a constant effort of reading and deconstructing what “metaphors” do and presuppose. 2. “The notion of trace or of text is introduced to mark the limits of the linguistic turn. This is one more reason why I prefer to speak of ‘mark’ rather than of language. In the first place the mark is not anthropological; it is prelinguistic; it is the possibility of language, and it is everywhere. There is a relation to another thing or relation to an other. For such relations, the mark has no need of language” (Derrida and Ferraris 2001, p. 76). 3. See Benítez Rojo (1998); Glissant (1997); James (2013); Lamming (1991). 4. See Onfray (2007) and Agamben (2007), p. 293. 5. “Subjectivism in politics is always exclusionary, always particularistic, even where the subject is postulated as a community subject, and even where the subject self-formulates as a representative of the universal. In fact, the claim of universality is always a symptom of political priesthood, because it establishes the outside of such universality as always already inhuman, and thus marked for its conversion or liquidation” (Moreiras 2006, p. 14). 6. “La maldita circunstancia del agua por todas partes”. 7. “El trópico salta y su chorro invade mi cabeza/ pegada duramente contra la costra de la noche./ La piedad original de las auríferas arenas/ ahoga sonoramente las yeguas españolas,/ la tromba desordena las crines más oblicuas.// No puedo mirar con estos ojos dilatados./ Nadie sabe mirar, contemplar, desnudar un cuerpo./ Es la espantosa confusión e una mano en lo verde,/ los estranguladores viajando en la franja del iris./ No sabría poblar de miradas el solitario curso del amor”. 8. “El mar, el verdadero mar,/ casi ya mío…/ el mar, el mar extraño/ en su propio recinto…/ el mar/ ya quiere ser el sobremarino…”.

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9. “Dadme esa esponja y tendré el mar./ El mar en overol azul/ abotonado de islas/ y remendado de continentes,/ luchando por salir de su agujero,/ con los brazos tendidos empujando las costas”. 10. Massimo Cacciari points out: “Neither vines nor olive trees are born out of the Sea, but islands, which give their roots. This Sea is not abstractly separated from Earth. Here the elements appeal for each other, they have nostalgia for each other. And the Sea par excellence, the archi-pélagos, the truth of the Sea, in a certain sense, will manifest, then, there where he is the place of the relationship, of the dialogue, of the confrontation between the multiple islands that inhabit it: all different from the Sea and all intertwined in the Sea, all nourished by the sea and all at risk in the sea” (Cacciari 1999, p. 23). 11. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 2003. 12. “toda distancia es un mar, un arrebato de cielos.” 13. “Pienso: —Si esta hora crepuscular se detuviera eternamente, como isla dorada por el sol que agoniza, entre sus dos océanos de sombra”. 14. “¿La poesía? Un caracol nocturno en un rectángulo de agua.” 15. “La única posibilidad de contemplarse/ radica en aferrarse a ese afuera/ a ese flotar o a esa estrategia/ de recorrer la tierra desde el mar.? Mirar la isla desde el mar.” 16. “Sustrayéndome de la firmeza del territorio,/ el vaivén del mar, que no del agua,/ me situará siempre en el corazón/ de aquel recorrido delirante buscando huellas,/ pistas, razones del acaso, seducciones, carnadas.” 17. “The body is just as fluid and gaseous in the rhythmic exchange of breathing, an incessant exchange of the intangible through the bronchial tubes and the nostrils—breath, the infrathin suspension in the most volatile state of the substance (nature, thing, the real). It is fluid at the heart of the exchange, flowing through the vein in the arteries, circulating throughout, impregnating and soaking into flesh and tissue […] The body is a field defined by spreading [épandage] and a network of sources, a streaming, trough, backwater, pumping, turbine, and waterworks machinery that together keep life wet—in other words, passage, permeability, sliding, floating, swimming, and bathing. It is not only in the same river that Heraclitus bathes twice; it is in the same body. He is never himself without also already being soaked in strangeness, dripping with new moisture” (Nancy 2016, pp. 13–14).

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Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. La potencia del pensamiento. Ensayos y conferencias. Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo Editora, 2007. Benítez Rojo, Antonio. La isla que se repite. Edición definitiva. Barcelona: Editorial Casiopea, 1998. Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. London: Verso, 2003. Burgos, Julia. El mar y tú. Otros poemas. Río Piedras: Ediciones Huracán, 1981. Cacciari, Massimo. El archipiélago. Figuras del otro en Occidente. Translated by Mónica B. Cragnolini. Buenos Aires, Argentina: EUDEBA, 1999. Deleuze, Gilles. La isla desierta y otros textos. Textos y entrevistas (1953–1974). Valencia: Pre-Textos, 2005. Derrida, Jacques, and Maurizio Ferraris. A Taste for the Secret. Edited by Giacomo Donis and David Webb. Translated by Giacomo Donis. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001. Glissant, Edouard. Traité du Tout-Monde. Paris: Gallimard, 1997. ———. El discurso antillano. Translated by Aura Marina Boadas and Amelia Hernández. Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores Latinoamericana, 2005. Kincaid, Jamaica. A Small Place. London and New York: Virago Press & Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988. James, C. L. R. Modern Politics. Oakland: PM Press / C.H. Kerr Company, 2013. Lalo, Eduardo. donde. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Editorial Tal Cual, 2005. Lamming, Georges. The Pleasures of Exile. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1991. Lezama Lima, José. Obras completas I, II.  México; Distrito Federal: Aguilar, 1975, 1977. Moreiras, Alberto. Línea de sombra. El no sujeto de lo político. Santiago de Chile: Palinodia, 2006. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Intoxication. Translated by Phillip Armstrong. Fordham, NY: Fordham University Press, 2016. Onfray, Michel. La potencia de existir. Manifiesto hedonista. Buenos Aires: La Flor, 2007. Palés Matos, Luis. La poesía de Luis Palés Matos. Edición crítica. Edited by Mercedes López-Baralt. San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1995. ———. Litoral. Reseña de una vida inútil. San Juan: Folium, 2013. Piñera, Virgilio. La isla en peso. Obra poética. Barcelona: Tusquets Editores, 2000. Quintero Herencia, Juan Carlos. La hoja de mar (:) Efecto archipiélago I. Leiden: Almenara Press, 2016. Ramos Otero, Manuel. Invitación al polvo. Segunda edición. Río Piedras: Editorial Plaza Mayor, 1994. Sotomayor, Áurea María. Diseño del ala. San Juan: Ediciones Callejón, 2005.

CHAPTER 3

Inland Caribbean: A Glance into Wayuu Space Juan Ramón Duchesne Winter

Introduction: Beyond the Island The field of Hispano-Caribbean literary and cultural studies is structured around the paradigm of the island. One could think it can be no other way, given that the largest archipelago of the northern hemisphere vertebrates this sub-region of the Latin American space. But one could also ask why the need to add the operational model of the island to the abundance of concrete islands, which results in power devices and tropes. As if the topographic feature was not enough, we generate metaphors and segmentations that over-determine and subsume the geocultural space and impinge on the field of Caribbean discourse. What is the specific productivity of the island model in the colonial/neo-colonial system defining the Caribbean and Latin America? My aim here is not to answer this question, but to state several minimum considerations which impinge on it. A short review of recent interpretations will offer some keys about the issue.1 In his essay, appropriately titled La isla que se repite (The Repeating Island), Antonio Benítez Rojo

J. R. Duchesne Winter (*) University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. López, M. T. Vera-Rojas (eds.), New Perspectives on Hispanic Caribbean Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51498-3_3

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offers the climax and hypostasis of Caribbean insularism. Benítez Rojo tells us that the Caribbean is, above all, an island formation, and that the island is omnipresent. The now proverbial multiplicity of the pelagic basin where Abya Yala’s colonisation began is thus reduced to the ideal island which, as if lifted from Plato’s dialogues, is all islands and none, one single island repeating itself: “This origin, this centre-island, is so important to fix—warns the author—as that hypothetic Antilia, which reappeared again and again, always furtive, in the portulan charts of cartographers” (Benítez Rojo 1989, p. v). It is well known that the island model, of ancient genealogy, has captured the Western colonial imaginary. In this imaginary, the island of the far away south is a miniature model for the colonisation project. Thus, in Western literature and iconography, all islands, inhabited or not, are frequently translated as a desert island, an open screen for the projection of the White man’s desire. The Western imaginary works by deciphering the island model as a hypothesis of conquest. This, of course, is buttressed by the segmented nature of the model. As is well known, power colonises by segmenting, dividing and excluding the other. Insular  territory, rigidly segmented by water perimeters, functions as the ideal device for the exclusion of undesired bodies. The fortress island excludes otherness by leaving it outside, while the prison island excludes by retaining it inside. But fortress and prison may well be indistinguishable. Even utopianism avails itself of the island model, as in Thomas More’s story. Whatever the egalitarian intuitions of European utopias, we should not forget their participation in an imaginary centred on the exclusion of the “non-civilised” other, considered as an impermissible excess; thus, Utopia is set as a space closed on itself, regulated and sanitised with neurotic precision in the repetition of itself. Therefore, when the supposedly non-civilised other is accepted, it is first sanitised as a good savage, and stripped of all otherness, as in several fabled islands of Western literature. The example of Shakespeare’s The Tempest will suffice here: Prospero domesticates and sanitises the native Caliban before allowing him to continue living on his own island, which is now ruled by the renaissance magician. Dara Goldman has pointed out that in discourses about the Caribbean, the island is a trope of hegemony, of discursive configuration of state power—and I add, of colonial power— marking the limits of the cultural discourse of the region (Goldman 2008, p. 17). She also points out that the trope of the desert island goes hand in hand with the general civilisation project (Goldman 2008, p. 11). Apart from the strictly discursive aspect of hegemony, the island, more than a

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mere trope, is articulated and, given its dimensions and geological limits, as a devise for the bio-political control of bodies, as illustrated in the role played by Puerto Rico, as a colony of the United States, as a laboratory for population control techniques, chemical warfare and genetically modified organisms. The dominant epistemological hierarchy in literary and cultural studies of the Hispanic Caribbean is shaped as a series of concentric rings. In the centre of the first ring is Cuba; in the second ring, we have the Puerto Rican and “Dominican” Antilles (enclosed in quotation marks because it excludes Haiti) and a third ring, rarely touched upon, includes the literary and cultural spaces of the coastal regions of Venezuela, Colombia and Central America. This third ring is almost totally removed from the dominant trope of the island.2 We have quoted Benítez Rojo here because he exhibits with exceptional sharpness, the symptom of this prevailing trend.3 His case shows precisely how the trope of the island serves to reproduce Western epistemology in the field of Caribbean studies. Firstly, the ideal island imposed as a metaphor for all the Caribbean is an abstraction repeated compulsively, not without a reason. Benítez Rojo has no qualms about asserting that the multiple experiences of the Caribbean peoples are but repetitions of a single island. He thus buttresses an epistemology based on the reduction of differences in favour of an abstract single model. Secondly, this elusive Antilia, supposed to be everywhere and nowhere as an omnipresent entity, abstracts socio-historical clichés from a very particular island implicitly set as a central paradigm for the region. Cuba, according to Benítez Rojo, is ultimately the island which repeats itself all over the Caribbean. This is openly stated in the first chapter of his book, which sets the slave sugar cane plantation as a cultural and social modelling device, and raises the Cuban case to an ideal paradigm applicable to the rest of the region. This is justified, according to the author, because Cuba represents the most complex development of the defining characteristics of the Caribbean: multiculturality, mestizaje or syncretism, Western assimilation, plantation society, Africanness, and the erasure of the indigenous element. Significantly, the Caribbean country best adjusted, notwithstanding the obvious lack of synchrony and the discrepancies, to the Eurocentric model of civilisation and hegemony, becomes a paradigm for the whole region. There is no need to document here the numerous interpretative essays, compilations and proceedings of academic conferences that reflect in their programmes and contents, the centrality of the Cuban model, from a variety of perspectives, in the socio-historical, cultural and

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literary reality of the region. It is certainly understandable that the largest of the Antilles, the one where the modern capitalist-colonial formation was implemented with most strength, and where a great part of the population was homogenised and assimilated to Eurocentric civilisational axioms, should occupy a dominant place in Caribbean studies. What is questionable is the epistemological price of such centrality when gauging the strength of societies and peoples of the region to be something different from the perpetual repetition of the dominant model. Interpretive exercises such as the one performed by Benítez Rojo suffer obvious overdoses of “Cubacentrism” (Duchesne Winter 1991, pp.  315–319), but how  a specific nationalist  perspective may  deform a hermeneutics is not the main issue here. What is at stake here is the underlying epistemological problem. Even an interpretative exercise as carefully plural and inclusive as the one shown in the proceedings of the Pan-­ Caribbean Conference, organised by the Institute for the Study of Ideologies and Literature of the University of Minnesota in 1983, imposes an Eurocentric model of analysis by  reproducing the hegemonic bio-­ political insularism dominant in Caribbean studies. The editors of the volume, constructing a detailed and broad-reaching account of the socio-historical and cultural features which, according to them, define the Caribbean as an object of study, reproduce reductionist methodological principles. The editors deploy principles such as totality and dominance (Rodríguez and Zimmerman 1983, pp.  20–38), applying  conceptual models taken from European reality that result in the pigeon-holing and reduction of the rich and undeterminable Caribbean reality. According to them, for example, all studies of Caribbean cultural and literary forms should be ruled by dominant elements and trends, and only those variants or differences based on them may be considered. This, of course, adds to an epistemological insularism not very different from the one advanced by Benítez Rojo. If in the context of a given socio-political situation, specific forms of capital accumulation as well as models of power and rhetorical regimes prevail, that is, if they are present as constants, then these factors are set as a starting point from which any variation or deviance is considered. This may be a correct procedure, but if it is carried out to the extreme, in that the same is placed at the centre of causality, it results in the exclusion, suppression or marginalisation of that which is assumed to be indeterminate. If, for example, the dominant trend is the one established by the bio-political and hegemonic formations in Cuba, such as mestizaje as a bridge of Occidentalist assimilation, Africanness as an expedient for

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de-indigenisation or insularity as a rigid segmentation of corporal and imaginary flows, then what is left outside—as simply inconsequential and non-determinant variances—are the events producing subtle segmentations which reveal other realities or possibilities of the Caribbean experience. To assume the exclusive perspective of the dominant totality reduces or annihilates difference and sentences hermeneutical praxis to the empire of the same. The perspective advanced by Ileana Rodríguez and Marc Zimmerman at the 1983 congress remains, however serious and broad in its hermeneutical exercise, within what Deleuze and Guattari have called the “science of state” (1987, p. 361).



Inland Caribbean

As a reply to this concentric insularism, I propose an ex-centric, excessive Caribbean, which would be an open addition—not a totality—exposed to sequential conjunctions (and … and …) and not subjected to disjunctions (or … or …), nor to conceptual subordination; a Caribbean where the out of place announces the event, in which exceptions trace the paths to knowledge, in which all levels of reality are comparable and no datum is more positive or objective than any other. This opens the possibility for an approach to the Caribbean as an object of a savage mind, which does not comply with the performance and accumulation of positive results; a Caribbean different from the island-object which assumes only the constants of the phenomenon and discards the variations (Viveiros de Castro 2010, pp. 26–27).4 This Caribbean finds its imaginary roots in the openness to the indigenous legacy which the colonisers aspired to reduce to an erasure, and which is reproduced by the colonising epistemologies. A hinterland, an inner and marginal Amerindian, lurks in the Caribbean turned desert island and promises to reoccupy it as an inland Caribbean. A sort of re-indigenisation of the Caribbean imaginary would give us access to that inland population of the region separated by imperial segmentation. Instead, we find the predominance of interpreters who propose de-­ indigenisation, the total eradication of the indigenous legacy, as one of the features of contemporary Caribbean society. But a hermeneutics of suspicion would question such an expedite procedure of erasure. There are indigenous communities in the Caribbean bearing testimony of survival and of an alternative to colonising segmentation, uprooting and dispersion: (1) the Garifuna in Belize, Honduras and Guatemala, descendants from the Carib rebels of Saint Vincent who merged with Maroon blacks;

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(2) the Miskitos in Nicaragua; (3) the indigenous peoples in the Atlantic coast of Costa Rica; (4) the Kuna and Embera in Panamá and the Maya in Yucatán; (5) the Caribs in the Guyanas; (6) the Caribs of the islands of Saint Vincent and Dominica; and (7) the Wayuu in the Guajira, among others. They all breathe the same Caribbean air and are all bearers of Caribbean literature, both in the broad sense of Amerindian textuality,5 and within  the restricted framework of Western literature. As notable anthropologists have already pointed out, all indigenous peoples of the Caribbean belong to the Mesoamerican and South American continental matrix from which they never separated, forming a cultural continuum.6 In sum, with this displacement from the island concentric to the continental ex-centric, we want to unlock the insular imaginary, rigidly compartmentalised, based on the priorities of European powers, in correlation with the fact that modern Caribbean peoples, deprived of the network of links and transcontinental corridors of pre-Columbian times, now coexist as isolated bubbles, directly plugged to Western  cultural consumption, without knowing each other at all.



Wayuu Space

I propose to consider here the Wayuu literature of the Caribbean Guajira peninsula as an alternative, ex-centric imaginary. The Wayuu are an outernational people, in the sense given to the term by Paul Gilroy meaning places that not only reach beyond the national, in transnational and international  terms, but also constitute an outer-space standing beyond  the nation-state itself (1993, pp.  16–17). A glance at the region’s map will show that the traditional Wayuu territory traverses Colombia and Venezuela, and projects itself towards the Caribbean Sea as a ritual phallus. In geographic terms, you don’t get more Caribbean than that. The Wayuus have an oral literary tradition as rich as that of other indigenous peoples of the hemisphere, and have also created a literary corpus in the restricted sense of verbal writing, supplementing their traditional heritage. There is a vibrant cast of Wayuu writers with published works going back to the second half of the twentieth century. Most of these texts have been published in Spanish, although there are some bilingual Wayunaiki/Spanish and monolingual Wayunaiki. Several Wayuu writers have followed the strategy of publishing bilingual editions of their works which, more than mere translations, function as hinge texts, creating an interlinguistic and intercultural space which broadens the register of what is literary by

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offering a passage between the oral tradition and the more conventional literary writing. The version in two languages does more than merely translate and duplicate the text: it adds a new facet to the text. The written text turns into a hinge that articulates the verbal tradition with the restricted writing practice considered “literature” in the West. This is the case because Wayuu authors seek, rather than assimilation to the modern Western literary model, to establish horizontal and decolonised relations with that model. Notable Wayuu intellectuals place a wager not only on creating a Wayuu reading public for modern texts written from their own culture, according to the standard modernisation project, but also on the links and exchanges established by these texts in order to broaden the living space of Wayuu verbal art, which is mainly oral. Wayuu intellectuals consider that the strength of their people is based on the persistence and transformative creativity of their multiple verbal arts, and that the practice of conventional writing acts as a complementary dimension of these arts. This awareness permeates the title of the first collection of poems published by a Wayuu author: Contrabandeo de sueños con alijunas cercanos (I smuggle dreams with nearby alijunas, 1992). The alijuna, in the wayunaiki language, is the “civilised” subject, foreign not only to the Wayuu people but to the entire Amerindian world. The poet Vittorio Apüshana, according to Gabriel Alberto Ferrer and Yolanda Rodríguez, establishes in this text a dialogic writing, or in other words, a writing in between forms of enunciation: (1) firstly, that of the rhapsodist speaking to his inner self and to his people, not as a modern author entertained by an individual expression of incidental experiences, but rather as the updater of the traditional space of participation formed by the multiple voices of his people; (2) secondly, that of someone writing for the outsiders by “assuming the role of spokesperson of the community for a new type of contact, different to the one which has historically marked the loss of identity of his people” (Ferrer and Rodríguez 1998, p. 120). As noted by Ferrer and Rodríguez, this practice results in a bi-vocal enunciation because: the resort to a combination of two languages does not just fulfil a metalinguistic function of simple translation of words; both forms, in Wayunaiki and Spanish, belong to the structure of meaning of the poem and both forms are brought in order to reaffirm a reality named twice, i.e. a reality which possess a double existence, in the Wayuu and the alijuna universes; this is the way the poet reconciles both worlds. (1998, p. 116)

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This double existence is manifested in the two-faced Janus figure of the poetic enunciations posed by Apüshana, one side facing inward and the other outward. Nonetheless, as pointed out by Ferrer and Rodríguez, the poet reconciles the two worlds without implying a fusion or a mestizaje, but an articulation that sustains plurality as a potential asset. The remarkable poem “Culturas” (Cultures) establishes the two enunciation positions mentioned here: Tarash, the jayechimajachi from Wanulumana, has arrived to sing to those who know him… I smuggle dreams with nearby alijunas. (Rocha Vivas 2008, p. 372) [Tarash, el jayechimajachi de Wanulumana, ha llegado para cantar a los que le conocen. Contrabandeo sueños con alijunas cercanos.]7

Smuggling and dreams are not metaphors here; instead, they denote a displacement and a re-dimensioning of the historical and existential experience of the Wayuu. The Wayuu people pride themselves in never having been totally  conquered by the Spaniards (Rocha  Vivas, p.  189), and in having  kept  a measure of practical  control of their ancestral  territories, thanks, in part, to their profitable  smuggling of global goods from the Caribbean, South America and Europe. The Wayuu juggled with the contradictions among imperialist powers in order to maintain an autonomous space in which the camouflaged traffic of goods, nomadism, and continuous movement beyond state controls and laws, allowed them to create a subtle space, a dimension that is invisible to the alijuna. This space became an unassailable inland  realm, in the geographic, cultural and psychical sense. The Wayuu forged an inland Caribbean, a rear-guard of anticolonial resistance which went beyond the insular model (Rocha Vivas 2008, p. 188; Acuña 2005, pp. 81–123). This rear-guard is the space of Wayuu dreams. For the Wayuu, dreams are not visions or experiences happening in the intimate video-library of individual psyche. Rather, dreams are collective events happening in what Perrin called the “world other” (“mundo otro”) inhabited by this people. Ferrer  and Rodríguez comment on Perrin’s notion of the world other, called pülasu in Wayunaiki: “it is a kind of powerful and hidden side, complementary and essential for the world here, never equivalent to the imaginary that makes its reality questionable” (1998, p. 27). It is worth noting that the definition of pülasu is not tied to the Western notion of the

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fantastic, as it rather corresponds to a real other. The pülasu is only strange or uncanny for the Wayuu as it impacts the world here of everyday life in an extraordinary way, but not in the Western sense of “fantasy” as a product of individual psychic events. Dreams give access to the time-space of the world other, which hosts its own series of events, linked by complex synchronic mediations, causal reversions, substitutions and displacements of identity onto the world here. Michel Perrin explains: The world [thus conceived] is formed by two complementary parts, or by two series between which there are permanent relations. […] In the world other we find the truth of this world, subjected to the world other. The world other anticipates this world, and it is its supposed double—its soul, its shadow (sa’ain)—, as someone once told me. (1997, p. 71)

“Dreams are for the Wayuu an everyday presence. They order the past, decide the future,” categorically claims Perrin, after living many  years among the “practitioners of dreams.” Morning conversations, good night words, every aspect of everyday life is permeated by this tradition of telling and interpretation of dreams, to the extent that dreamers, possibly because of cultural conditioning, share dreams, meet each other in dreams and turn these encounters into collectively shared anecdotes. Dreams turn into another space of everyday reunion, socialisation and interaction, where conflicts are solved and all types of transactions are made. You can virtually set a meeting with your neighbour in a dream for any purpose (1997, pp. 73–87). In sum, when the speaker of Apüshana’s poem declares “I smuggle dreams with nearby alijunas,” he establishes a place of enunciation which does not subsume the voice of the jayechimajachi (the rhapsodist or practitioner of the oral tradition), but rather complements it with smuggling, with savage trafficking, (in the sense of not being part of the “civilising state”),  of goods from the world other, or better said, of worlds other belonging to both the Wayuu and other indigenous peoples, as well as to the alijuna. This would be a smuggling of the Wayuu dream’s goods (jayechis songs and other verbal art forms, and symbols and experiences in them) as well as of the goods of the alijuna dreams (literature in its learned, restricted sense). The poem advances another way of buttressing a subtle space of Wayuu life, smooth and invisible (for the alijuna), establishing links with others, with a foreign modernity (alijuna), and conveys experiences, without complying with the mestizaje models of the civilising-­statist

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project, that is, it remains open to difference and plurality as elements of coexistence and reconciliation, in order to claim autonomy and agency without losing them again. A single poem does not represent all of a literature, but it can be a doorway to that literature. These verses, taken from the two-decades-old first printed edition of a poem collection by a Wayuu author, are an invitation to think of another Caribbean. These verses are an access to an alternative imaginary far removed from today’s dominant insular model. What is at stake is the conception of a space of multiplicity, not compartmentalised by the rigid rationality of the modern Western state, in short, a space understood as a passageway to a different place from the one imposed by colonial territoriality, a space beyond the closed rationalist imaginary, and open to an inner space paradoxically constituted as exterior and out of place. Translated by Hugo Antonio Pérez Hernáiz.

Notes 1. Dara Goldman examines the proliferation of the island trope in literary and meta-literary discourses about the Caribbean in Out of Bounds. Islands and the Demarcation of Identity in the Hispanic Caribbean. 2. Even a relatively inclusive landscape, such as the one in the Hispanic section of A History of Literature in the Caribbean, responds to this hierarchy. 3. A notable exception to this trend is the book by Silvio Torres-Saillant, Caribbean Poetics. Toward an Aesthetic of West Indian Literature, which, as noted by Goldman, does not resort to the paradigm of the island. Goldman finds this absence of the island model in Torres-Saillant’s book inexplicable. I, however, find it in consonance with the author’s search for a theory developed by Caribbeans themselves, independent from Western theoreticians. 4. I am making reference here to Viveiros de Castro’s ideas about the savage mind in his introduction to Pierre Clastres’ Archeology of Violence. 5. In La América indígena en su literatura: los libros del cuarto mundo, Gordon Brotherston advances the notion of an indigenous American literature as the result of a complex grammatology and an integral textuality which include oral, sound, graphic and textile forms in a performative contextuality. 6. Even the Carib, icons of savage insularity, bear testimony of communicating vessels with South American matrixes, specifically Amazonian. On the fallacy of the insularity of the Carib, Neil Whitehead says: “First, the Island Carib were, and are, part of a continental context, and cannot be analyzed as if they were solely an insular population”; and further on he notes the ­existence of “continuities across the Island Carib/Arawak (or Taino) conceptual frontier, the plurality of ethnic affinity and prescription in the pre-­Columbian

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Antilles and the symbiosis of these ‘island’ populations with continental South America” (1995, pp. 12 and 15). 7. Tarash, el jayechimajachi de Wanulumana, ha llegado para cantar a los que le conocen… su lengua nos festeja nuestra propia historia, su lengua sostiene nuestra manera de ver la vida. Yo, en cambio, escribo nuestras voces para aquellos que no nos conocen, para visitantes que buscan nuestro respeto… Contrabandeo sueños con alijunas cercanos. (Rocha Vivas 2008, p. 372)

Bibliography Apüshana, Vittorio. “Contrabandeo de sueños con alijunas cercanos.” Woomainpa 2. Riohacha: Secretaría de Asuntos Indígenas/Universidad de la Guajira, 1992. Acuña, José Polo. Etnicidad, conflicto social y cultura fronteriza en la Guajira 1700–1850. Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes/Observatorio del Caribe colombiano, 2005. Benítez Rojo, Antonio. La isla que se repite. Hanover, New Hampshire: Ediciones del Norte, 1989. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaux: Capitalism and Shizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Duchesne Winter, Juan. “Europa habla, Caribe come.” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana XVII, 33 (1991): 315–319. Ferrer, Gabriel and Yolanda Rodríguez. Etnoliteratura Wayuu: Estudios críticos y selección de textos. Barranquilla: Universidad del Atlántico, 1998. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993. Goldman, Dara. Out of Bounds. Islands and the Demarcation of Identity in the Hispanic Caribbean. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2008. Perrin, Michel. Los practicantes del sueño. El chamanismo. Caracas: Monte Ávila, 1997. Rocha Vivas, Miguel (comp). El sol babea jugo de piña. Antología de las literaturas indígenas del Atlántico, el Pacífico y la Serranía del Perijá. Bogotá: Biblioteca Básica de los Pueblos Indígenas de Colombia, 2008.

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Rodríguez, Ileana and Marc Zimmerman (eds.). Process of Unity in Caribbean Society: Ideologies and Literatures. Minneapolis: Institute for the Study of Ideologies and Literature, 1983. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. “Introduction.” Archeology of Violence. Pierre Clastres, 9–52. Translated by Jeanine Herman and Ashley Lebner. Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2010. Whitehead, Neil (ed). Wolves from the Sea: Readings in the Anthropology of the Native Caribbean. Leiden: KITLV Press, 1995.

CHAPTER 4

Challenging a South Red Atlantic: A Post-­ Liberationist Critique of the Hispanic Caribbean Magdalena López

Introduction In Introduction to a Poetics of Diversity, Édouard Glissant described genesis and filiation as the principles that sustain “atavistic” identities (2002, p. 60) providing legitimacy and serving to identify and delimit a community: “within the cultures that I call atavistic, the notion of identity revolves around filiation and legitimacy; it is, in the deepest, the sole root that excludes the other as a participant” (2002, p. 63; all translations are the author’s own). The Martinican poet considered that Caribbean culture was different from European or Asian ones precisely as it could not claim a fixed genesis or filiation.1 Understanding the Caribbean as a space alien to the notion of a single root, Glissant affirmed that “any concept of a

M. López (*) Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame IN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. López, M. T. Vera-Rojas (eds.), New Perspectives on Hispanic Caribbean Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51498-3_4

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genesis is but a result of a loan, an adoption or an imposition” (p. 37). Similarly, Cuban writer Antonio Benítez Rojo went as far as to affirm that “any Caribbean person trying to reach the origins of his or her culture will eventually find him or herself on a desert beach, alone and naked, emerging from the salty water as a shaking castaway, with the only ID of an uncertain and turbulent memory inscribed on the scars, the tattoos, on the very colour of the skin” (1989, p. 241). The Caribbean subject has often been described with the metaphor of a naked castaway, of illegitimate, fragile and uncertain memory; a nakedness that established a constitutive uprootlessness in the place of legitimising origins. Nonetheless, Caribbean identity has often been forced to fit Eurocentric parameters of the nation via the construction of foundational myths that have secured a legitimate origin over a territory. The most recurrent of these myths has probably been the “liberationist myth” (Duchesne Winter 2019) derived from the Haitian and Cuban revolutions. Since 1959, in particular, nation and revolution have become intermingled in a sole identity, supporting the anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggle in Cuba. This chapter argues that the negation of the constitutive rootlessness of Caribbean identity translates into the imposition of a unitary identity inherited from hierarchical structures of colonial origin. From Cuba, where it was adapted to nationalist requirements, such identity expanded to Angola to legitimise a new transatlantic identity of mestizaje that tended to erase cultural singularity and conflict. In the last part of the chapter, and by means of a reading of Dulces guerreros cubanos (1999) by Cuban Norberto Fuentes, and Estação das Chuvas by Angolan José Eduardo Agualusa, I propose a sort of uprooted critique to take apart official discourses and even glimpse forms to think “inoperative” or “unpolitical” communities beyond identitarian parameters (Nancy 2000; Esposito 2003).

Racial Mixing and Luso-Tropicalism in the South Atlantic As shown by Eleuterio Santiago-Pérez (2007, p. 43), Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) did not include one particular type of difference. As a good part of the criticism to the book has argued, Gilroy made invisible a South Atlantic region within the global network of cultural fluxes. Such omission, which had the effect to reaffirm Anglo-(and to a lesser extent, Franco-)phone epistemic hegemony, also

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affected practices of contestation that responded to power discourses different from the bi-racial polarisation behind identity discourses in the North Atlantic. In particular, a criticism of power in the South Atlantic asks us to reveal racial and social conflicts suppressed even in anti-­colonialist discourses of conciliation in Cuba and Angola. Europe has its own South in the Iberian Peninsula2 and the Peninsula did not export discourses based on bi-racial absolutes to its colonies. Scholars like Ángel Rosenblat (1954) and Iris Zavala (1989) have examined the caste system imposed in Latin American by the Spaniards, which structured colonial societies hierarchically along degrees of racial miscegenation: a number of categories, between the extremes of the positive-white (originally that of cristianos viejos) and negative-black (of African slaves) regulated social privilege depending on the distance from the extremes. The colonial caste system prefigured the ideologies of mestizaje which, in many parts of Latin America, provided cohesion to the young nations. But given the imperative to legitimise an autonomous identity, racial mixing was reformulated in positive, universalising terms, and thus avoided the explicit inequalities of the caste system. The foundational stone of the ideology of mestizaje in the Hispanic Caribbean was laid by José Martí’s “Nuestra América” (1985 [1891]), an essay in which the Cuban poet establishes a synthetic identity of racial harmony to contest the racial dichotomy of US imperialism. Today we can detect how the discourse of mestizaje was the South’s proposal to include a Latin American specificity in its identity, going against the currents of scientist thought which blamed climate, landscape and race for the region’s civilisational backwardness. But we can also detect how this ideology, in considering the racial mix, preserved some of the Western hierarchical attributes to different races, for example, obeying—a sweetened version of—the teleological logics of progress for colonial castes in positing that whitening “improved the race”. By the 1930s, the ideology of mestizaje was actualised in Afro-Cubanism, a cultural avant-garde movement that emphasised the black elements of Cubanness as part of the mixed matrix of the Cuban ajiaco, a culinary metaphor that served anthropologist Fernando Ortiz to describe the processes of transculturation producing the “crisol de razas” of Cuban society (1940, p. 11). As independence movements in the African continent emerged in the twentieth century, the intelligentsia in the Portuguese colonies was conscious of the inequalities behind the Luso-Tropicalist colonial ideology. By then, the Pan-Africanist movement, négritude and negrismo, had burst in transnational political and aesthetic vanguards, making explicit the

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historical conditions of oppression of black people while celebrating their identity. But it proved complex to gather these claims and apply them to the Portuguese colonial domains to construct an official discourse, as to do so it was necessary to celebrate a racial mixing different from the one of the other European or American colonies. Formulated by Brazilian scholar Gilberto Freyre, Luso-Tropicalism posited that the adaptability of the Portuguese to the tropics was due to the age-old contacts of people from the Iberian Peninsula with other cultures and the benign climate of the tropics (Castelo 2011, p.  262). As a place of convergence between Africa and Europa, Portugal was defined as a mobile and open nation, unprejudiced against the mixing with other races deemed inferior (Castelo 2011, p. 262). Defined in and for Brazil, Luso-Tropicalism is a clear expression of transatlantic ideological flows. In 1933, Gilberto Freyre delineated a patriarchal order of harmonious convergence of natives, black and white people, which responded to the specificities of the Portuguese colonial plantocracy of the Brazilian northeast. In doing so, Freyre was, in fact, taking part of the same Latin American intellectual tradition inaugurated by José Martí, even though his proposal was later instrumentalised for a colonial, rather than nationalist, agenda. His proposal in Casa-Grande y Senzala (1977) can be thus considered as an example of the ideology of mestizaje that aimed at a self-affirmative alternative to confront the racial determinism of the North. The “Luso-Tropicalising” way, which Freyre discovers in the Brazilian northeastern and from where he derives it to any area of Iberian colonisation (Portuguese and Spanish in O Mundo que o Português Criou, 1940), illustrates the articulation of a transatlantic mixed identity that preserves its defining axis in the idealisation of an imperial South. As a result, and in spite of the fact that Freyre’s proposal was relatively democratic in the ideological international context of the early twentieth century, Salazar’s dictatorship co-opted it to legitimise its domination of Africa in the 1950s. Moreover, as Cláudia Castelo has explained, the Portuguese government had to take recourse to Freyre’s ideas to justify their presence in Africa and Asia only when the international scenario began to favour the self-determination of the colonies after World War II (Castelo 2011, p. 272). In 1968, and following Freyre’s steps, the Angolan essay writer Mário António Fernandes de Oliveira coined the term crioulidade in his Luanda “Ilha” Crioula (1968). About the book, Roquinaldo Ferreira notes:

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According to Oliveira, the “bio-social amalgamation that the Portuguese carried out in the tropics” presupposed Africans inevitably adopting European cultural traits—a kind of civilisational process whose hegemony would reside on the Portuguese side. Thus, in the typically Luso-Tropicalist view of this Angolan historian, Portuguese culture would have an inherent plasticity—already existing even before its arrival on the African soil—that would have created the conditions for the cultural and social synthesis defined as creoleness. (2006, p. 18)

Although debates around crioulidade have been heated and scholars like Mário António Fernandes de Oliveira, José Carlos Venâncio, Luís Kandjimbo and Victor Kajibanga have not always agreed on a definition and evaluation of the concept, it is interesting to follow the genealogy started by Fernandes de Oliveira, who posited that the biocultural mix in Luanda and Benguela extended to the rest of the country. As in Ferreira’s previous quote, such racial mixing is framed by a Eurocentric (and urban) matrix, which “privileges the impact of colonial culture, which is implicitly considered superior” (Kajibanja 2001, pp.  150–151). Thus, Kajibanja concludes that crioulidade is an Angolan variation of Luso-Tropicalism and constitutes a nostalgic and apologetic exercise of Portuguese colonialism (2001, p. 150). As an ideology of colonial legitimisation, African progressive elites contested Luso-Tropicalism, including intellectuals such as Mario Pinto de Andrade, Eduardo Mondlane and Amílcar Cabral. These thinkers had to undertake a task of demystification to denounce the political and economic dimensions behind the “good intentions” of Portuguese colonialism and its practices of discrimination and racial exploitation. But it was above all a strategy that tended to reveal the social conflictivity that justified political self-determination. In so doing, the discursive dismantling of the Luso-Tropicalist racial utopia became the first step in the fight for national liberation. The second would be the definition of their own identity.

Black and Red Atlantics Keeping in mind that Glissant’s notion of “atavistic” identities implied the exclusion of others, and that Portuguese colonialism became the antagonistic other to the discourse of liberation, which elements should sustain the identity to confront Portuguese nationalism? Which would turn out to

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be the identity that was solid enough to legitimise the new African nations? In the context of anti-colonial struggles, critical references were found in the so-called Black Atlantic as formulated by Gilroy, that is, a North Atlantic. A narrative of black self-affirmation and African liberation emerged in big metropolis like Paris, London and New York, which had an effect in the struggles for self-determination in the Portuguese colonies. The importance of the poetry of Léopold Sédar Senghor and Aimé Césaire for the Mensagem generation or Fanon and Césaire’s ideas for leaders like Amílcar Cabral and Mário Pinto de Andrade are good examples of transatlantic intellectual networks that contributed, on a first moment, to the emergence of a proto-national identity and later, to the definition of the armed struggle of leftist groups like the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) and the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO). However, as noted, these anti-colonial critical references have originated in contexts of binary racial models. The originality of Luso-Tropicalism and crioulidade lay in avoiding this binary and trying to establish a discursive matrix that could assemble and dissolve difference. While it is true that these two ideologies concealed inequalities in the Portuguese colonies, and that social value was placed on the proximity to a Western model of a white, male subject (as in the Hispanic-­ American caste system), it is also true that important processes of biological mix were undertaken. The essentialised black subject of the négritude discourse, as defined by the historical experience of Anglo and French colonialism, did not easily fit the Portuguese colonial subject. Most of the leadership that founded or joined the soon-to-become hegemonic MPLA were not black or peasant, but rather educated urban mulattos. Therefore, when they imagined a national identity that vindicated black metropolitanism, they risked losing their own legitimacy as leaders of the anti-­ colonial struggle, even of being excluded from the new social order they were trying to establish. Indeed, deconstructing the official Luso-­ Tropicalist discourse while avoiding the binary logics of black nationalisms created a paradoxical situation. Difficulties like this framed the process to institute an Angolan anti-colonial identity, as well as the different conflicts, dissonances and ruptures between different factions of the MPLA. It also determined the MPLA’s strategic limitations and lack of popular base during the independence and civil wars vis-à-vis other armed groups, which were more cohesive around ethnic, rural, regional or even historical filiation (i.e., the historical memory of the ancient realm of Congo), such as

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the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). The critical reference to a Red (rather than a Black) Atlantic offered a way out of the problem of racial identity. David Armitage mentions the concept in passing in connection to cosmopolitan Marxism (2004, p. 12), while Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker (2000) refer a Red Atlantic as defined by a sort of transatlantic subalternity of the system of colonial expansion from the fifteenth and up to the seventeenth century. These authors are interested in the different forms of resistances of this subaltern position unregistered by mainstream historiography. With these antecedents, I propose the notion of a Red Atlantic to account for the fluxes of people and ideas connected to Marxism during the Cold War, which shaped a large meta- and transatlantic network. Let us remember that MPLA elites borrowed from Marxist bibliography and created networks of cooperation and solidarity with other socialist countries and groups. Particularly relevant was the support of the Soviet Union in the MPLA fight against other Angolan factions (in turn supported by South Africa, Congo-Brazzaville and the US), which supposed the local adaptation of communist ideas. Susan Buck-Morss has noted that the Soviet Union based its supranational sovereignty on the notion that “class belonging transcends nationality” (2000, p. 26): racial, cultural or ethnic categories were irrelevant and subsumed by social class. Establishing the people-­ subject of nationalist rhetoric in terms of class bypassed ethnic or rural separatism in the construction of the desired Angolan nation. However, the appropriation of the class discourse was not a mere Marxist assimilation from a so-called periphery. For example, in order to legitimise a revolutionary African elite—not exactly composed of proletarians or peasant—Amílcar Cabral salvaged the bourgeoisie’s role in “Libertação nacional e cultura” (2011, p.  1970). By displacing the racial discourses towards culture, Cabral appealed to the re-Africanisation of the Luso-­ African bourgeoisie to close the ethnic and class divide and reaffirm national unity. Nationalist discourse (as Luso-Tropicalism, now antagonistic, had done before) solved in this manner both racial difference and social inequality. The value placed on class (and sometimes, also on culture) over race allows us to refer of a Red, rather than a Black, Atlantic of the South, often ignored by postcolonial studies and the grand narratives of the Cold War. Christine Hatzky has called attention on the ways narratives about the Cold War have obscured the role of the local and the regional, as well as

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the transatlantic nexus, which were at play beyond the will of the superpowers (2012, p.  4). For their part, postcolonial studies have focused mostly on the experiences under Anglo and French colonialism. With the intention to fill these voids, then, I am interested in approaching the articulation of a global revolutionary geography by the elites of the so-called Third World. Specifically, I am interested in examining how a mestiza, crioula and Latin African identity was constructed as an alternative identity based on the connection between Angola and Cuba.

Cuba in Angola The origins of the Cuban intervention in Angola can be traced to the 1960s context of anti-colonial movements and guerrilla effervescence, when some African, Asian and Latin American countries tried to consolidate a third “non-aligned” block with respect to Cold War powers. The Cuban government tried to lead the global left by means of the First Tricontinental Conference (1966) and the establishment of the Organisation of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America (OSPAAL), both in Havana. About this, Hatzky affirms that: According to plan, Cuba, Algeria, Central Africa, Vietnam and Indonesia were to be the geopolitical centres, with Havana as the “capital” of the global revolutions. The Cuban revolutionaries were also convinced that they could empathize strongly with the tricontinental Countries and therefore had a special role to play: the Cuban people were not “white” but rather represented a mixture of ethnic, cultural, and psychological traits from Latin America, Africa, and indeed even Asia. (2012, p. 61; emphasis added)

Starting in the 1960s, the ideology of mestizaje that established the foundations of the Cuban nation was resized to the scale of a Global South crossed by Marxism. At that moment, and via Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the island’s government established the first contacts with some African anticolonial movements. Cuban military support to Angola, however, arrived in the mid-1970s, during the last months of colonial war. By then, the process of institutionalisation of the Cuban revolution had re-­elaborated Martí’s ideology of mestizaje. In 1971, Roberto Fernández Retamar published the manifesto Calibán, which consolidated, within the official discourse, the notion that Africa was a constitutive element of Cuba’s national identity. The figure of a mixed or black, rebellious slave provided Fernández

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Retamar with a metaphor for the struggles against European colonialism and North-American imperialism. The epic stance of Caliban was dramatically materialised between 1975 and 1990. It is estimated that only in 1975, Cuba send between 4000 and 5000 soldiers to Angola and, at its peak, the internationalist collaboration reached 50,000 units (Peters 2012, p. 82; Sawyer 2006, p. 61). According to Jorge Domínguez, more than 50% of those soldiers were black, a proportion above the ratio of AfroCubans in the army (in Sawyer 2006, p. 61). In the repressive context of the Cuba of the 1970s, when the authorities did not tolerate any expression of black identity, the intervention in Angola was paradoxical. On this, Sawyer affirms that the Cuban revolution could externalise racial conflict by means of the intervention in Angola, which also ratified, at an international level, that racism did not exist in the island anymore (2006, pp. 43, 50). The image projected to the outside was precisely that of a country which had adjusted to the Latin American exceptionalism of racial democracy. In the leftist imaginary of the period, Cuba became a social and racial utopia, and its support to African struggles, a projection of that very utopia. Fidel Castro posited a legitimising origin for the intervention in Angola in transatlantic slave trade, which the 20th “export” of an emancipatory order would revert. In the closing of the First Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba in December 1975, the leader declared: The imperialists seek to prevent us from aiding our Angolan brothers. But we must tell the Yankees to bear in mind that we are a Latin-American nation and a Latin-African nation as well. African blood flows freely through our veins. Many of our ancestors came as slaves from Africa to this land. As slaves, they struggled a great deal. They fought as members of the Liberating Army of Cuba. We’re brothers and sisters of the people of Africa and we’re ready to fight on their behalf! (2014)

Hatzky affirms that with the use of the term “Latin African” Castro invented a tradition, in Eric Hobsbwam’s sense, “in establishing a continuity with a suitable historical past as well as symbolizing the membership of a real or artificial community” (2012, p. 11). We witness here the configuration of what Glissant referred to as the principles of origin and filiation characteristic of  unitary identities. However, this was not a case of invention of a tradition so much as an insertion in a pre-existing one.

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“Latin African” would thus be the last step in a genealogy of mestizaje by which black elements are owned in a synthetic mixture that erases racial and national inequalities and give rise to a Global South united on a common struggle—a struggle that acquired full meaning fighting against South African Apartheid.3 In the Cuban context, the official discourse of a transatlantic South-South community was sanctioned under a tradition of mestizaje that legitimised the fight in Africa. It is easy to grasp the convenience of “Latin Africanness” for the MPLA. The notion of a shared identity with Cuba rebuffed accusations of foreign interference by the Soviet Union, the US or China and allowed the refutation of ethnic and regional separatism of rival movements such as FLNA and UNITA. But above all, it offered a possibility to set the basis of a Western-style nation different from the bi-racial model of the North. In this manner, the concept of modern nation put at work by MPLA’s elites offered some degree of continuity with Luso-Tropicalism in ignoring ethnic and racial inequalities. The discursive specificity of Portuguese colonialism coincided with Cuban mestizaje in the need to homogenise the conflictive ethnic and cultural diversity of these societies. In spite of the differences across time between these ideologies, it is possible to detect the same identitarian matrix in Cuba and Angola, which aims to silence hierarchies and difference by means of the unity of a synthesis. The confluence of Luso-Tropicalism and the ideology of mestizaje in the context of the Angolan Civil War did not necessarily eliminate the former (once it had conveniently been creolised) but rather reframed it in the transnational revolutionary narrative of Latin Africanness. The attempt to erase ethnic and racial singularities was evident in military praxis and in the imagining of the nation. As late as 1987, in Uma perspectiva etnológica da literatura angolana, Angolan sociologist José Carlos Venâncio considered that the Cuban presence in the country had produced a second moment of biocultural mix. Angolanidade would not only be determined by the Portuguese imprint but also the Cuban (Kajibanja 2001, p. 151). For Venâncio, the Cuban component came to reaffirm the crioulidade of the African nation. In the official narrative of an alternative global community—the result of both a Southern and Red Atlantic, it is thus possible to glimpse certain translocal colonial imprint, which may have determined the authoritarian traits of the projects of both countries.

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Counter-Narratives The collapse of revolutionary identities in Angola and Cuba became evident in the 1990s. In Cuba, the breakdown of the Soviet block and consequent cuts to subsidies unleashed the so-called Special Period in Time of Peace. Shortages in food, drugs and services brought about the questioning of the official grand narratives, among them racial democracy. In 1966, Fidel Castro had assured that discrimination “disappeared along with class privileges and the country solved this problem” (in De la Fuente 2001, p.  21). However, with the opening of the country to tourism and the restricted access to foreign currencies to those with relatives abroad, social and racial differences in the Cuban society became acutely discernible. In Angola, the MPLA abandoned the tenets of Marxism-Leninism in 1992 and instituted a neoliberal economy. Economic liberalisation, plus the devastation caused by decades of war, intensified age-old inequalities. These two contexts have produced a postutopian literature that targets unitary national identities. Dulces guerreros cubanos by Norberto Fuentes and Estação das Chuvas by José Eduardo Agualusa are good examples of the dismantling of the Latin African identity upon the collapse of the ideas that sustained the revolutionary transatlantic filiation, and call attention on the historical continuity from colonial to postcolonial periods of inequalities and authoritarianism. The trial, conviction and execution under charges of drug dealing of Cuban general Arnaldo Ochoa, a hero of the Angolan War, was, in 1989, a turning point from an epic sensibility to a sensibility of disenchantment. The scandal generated by the fall of such a high official, shortly before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, had devastating effects for the revolutionary mystique. In 1999, Fuentes published Dulces guerreros cubanos in exile, a chronicle of the well-known “Causa 1” against Ochoa and the twin brothers Patricio and Antonio de la Guardia. Very close to the author, Antonio had been a commander in the Interior Ministry and his brother a general deployed in Angola. Dulces guerreros cubanos is a bleak novel written by the “undisputed chronicler of the Cuban revolution” (Fuentes 1999, p. 347). Indeed, during the 1980s, Fuentes travelled to the African front on different occasions commissioned by the Cuban government to write a chronicle. His experience in Africa and his proximity to the circles of power served him to fulfil his duty, publishing El último santuario (1992), but also allowed him to write a sort of counter-chronicle that revealed the corruption that lurked behind Cuban internationalism. With a hyperbolic,

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cynical and conceited style, the narrator does not spare details about the lucrative businesses he and the “best of the best within the fraternity of Cuban fighters” conducted in and out of Angola. Drugs and ivory trafficking, benders with local prostitutes, luxury, male chauvinism, extreme violence, conspiracies and a militarist fascination are but a few of the elements that characterise the internationalist elites in the book. Far from any transatlantic solidarity, the author narrates how the war generated opportunities for bountiful profits. The approach of the text to race it is highly relevant, as it contradicts the official narrative of Latin African identity. Exposing a scenario of degradation, the narrator describes the origins of the Cuban nation in a way that radically departs from official discourse. It is worth citing at length the narrator’s characterisation of the Cubans: When Cubans of any stock find themselves trapped, they begin to protest against criminals with better luck than themselves, that is, those who have escaped justice, this is a custom inherited from the Spaniards who emptied their jails and settled in the island, but first they slaughtered the natives—in truth they only needed to blow softly to make them fall, as they had been previously weakened by syphilis and starvation, which is baffling in those forests and rivers and seas with plenty of fruit and fowl and fish […]—, such a mixture of the Spaniards with the litter of slaves, the workforce for the plantations that arrived from places with a diffuse (if at all existent) sense of property, the unending, resonant African plains without a single fence, a single pen marking out ownership and you never know to whom it belongs even the dumbest hen, it was a mejunje (brew), the concoction that enamelled a scorn for the rest of human beings and thus—from the hound dog of the Spanish empire and the ignorance of African villagers about alien property— Cuban integration turned envy into the rule of behaviour for all the different ethnicities of its nationality, envy in all its degrees. (1999, pp.  60–61; emphasis added)

The rant about the ethnic origin of the envy of the Cubans is framed by a discussion about “lost” dollars, which would have been the real reason behind the manoeuvring against Ochoa. The issue of private property and profit reappears later on in the book, when it discusses the absurdity of “Che” Guevara’s agrarian reform in Congo, a place without fences delimiting the land (1999, pp. 239–240). The narrator sees the absence of large landed estates, which should have been a positive trait, with contempt. In the mejunje of nationality—that reminds of Ortiz’s ajiaco—blackness becomes a symptom of the Cuban civilisational backwardness that is

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extended to the Angolans, who are yet to know private property. Under this light, envy is a by-product of a deficient racial mix in which its components, far from creating a harmonious blend, oppress and exterminate each other. In spite of such mejunje, or by virtue of it, Ochoa, the De la Guardia brothers and the narrator enjoy a civilisational superiority because they are ethnically and teleologically remote from the Africans. Their grafting is a piece of evidence for their civilisational “vanguard” vis-à-vis the Angolans, and the black elements are excluded from their identity. A Southern transatlantic racism appears here, reaching its climax when the “true” reasons for the Cuban intervention in Angola are explained: Cuban society endures an “undeclared civil war” in which Afro-Cubans are often executed by civil servants (“all of them well-fed whites”), as in the colonial period (1999, p. 141). The true intention of the Cuban leaders would be to “get rid” of these unwanted ethnic elements by sending them to war, instead of executing or locking them up. The Latin African struggle thus turns out to be a process of racial cleansing in which Afro-Cubans are cannon fodder. The narrator underscores the fact that the bulk of the combatants in Angola were black and mulatto, under the pretence that their skin colour would facilitate their passing for Angolans. For them, the cost of nationality was immolation, “Five centuries enduring lashings and the unending hacking with machetes of stifling sugar cane fields and now blacks have to pay again a price in blood and humiliation for their Cuban nationality and, at the end of the road, yet again at the orders of arrogant, harsh sons of Spanish coloniser” (1999, pp. 235–236). Fidel Castro, one of the “arrogant, harsh sons of Spanish coloniser,” is ultimately the one who determines the death of Ochoa, a mulatto general who, according to the author, had ascended too high in a military hierarchy in which only whites reach the upper echelons, even overshadowing Castro. Taking racial conflict to the extreme, Dulces guerreros cubanos demolishes the myth of Fernández Retamar’s revolutionary mestizaje and the shared transatlantic identity. As in Dulces guerreros cubanos, Agualusa’s Estação das chuvas retakes the past with autobiographical traits. The novel is a story about the failure of the national utopian project, but it also sets a challenge to the foundations of that very utopia. The result presents very few certainties and complex characters that elude moral binaries. It is narrated from the perspective of a generation, which like the author’s did not fight for independence but was affected by civil war. The narrator is a journalist who reconstructs the life of the poet Lídia do Carmo Ferreira, one of the first MPLA’s activists

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who mysteriously disappeared in 1992. The narrator intertwines his vital trajectory and that of others around him with different passages about Lídia’s life, fragments of interviews and some of her poems. A comment by the narrator, “I would like to know what happened to Lídia” (1996, p. 180), could serve as leitmotiv of the text, as it is a wish that goes beyond the literal referent and, with Lídia, the author allegorises the lost utopia. The narrative itinerary is framed by clashes, disagreements and ruptures within the MPLA and, in particular, by the obscure episodes of massive repression and purges, between 1977 and 1979 under the government of Agostinho Neto, against youth of the Communist Organisation of Angola (OCA), intellectuals of Revolta Activa and fraccionistas who supported Nito Alves. The OCA opposed what considered Soviet “social-­ imperialism” and demanded the end of “South African and Soviet-Cuban aggression” against Angola (Ramos 2000). For them, the Cuban intervention was one more colonial violation of the country’s sovereignty. For its part, Revolta Activa was a faction led by the historical leader Mário Pinto de Andrade, who demanded a greater democratisation of the movement. Lastly, Nito Alves conducted a coup in 1977 on the grounds of the racial elitism of the Party’s structures and the need to radicalise the regime in a Marxist-Leninist direction. It is estimated that around 30,000 people were executed in the resulting purges, a historical fact that remains a taboo in official historiography (Pawson 2014, p. 5). Estação das chuvas takes off with the declaration of independence in Angola with Cuban soldiers fighting next to the FAPLA—the MPLA’s army—against former Portuguese commandoes, troops of Zaire’s army and the guerrillas of Daniel Chipenda and Holden Roberto, leaders of the FNLA (1996, p. 19). The central Cuban character of the tale is not captain Rodríguez, an internationalist combatant only mentioned in passing, but Ángel Martínez, a white exile mercenary, hired in Miami to find some diamonds hidden by a FNLA leader in a northern city, who detests communism and whose grandma’s stories kindled his nostalgia for Havana. Ángel supposes a radical opposite to the Cuban revolutionary paradigm, but in the African country, he experiences a series of events that divert him from the initial mission. After receiving a gunshot wound, he unmistakably states his distance from the Angolans: “Who told you to get into this black people war?!” (1996, p. 142). However, he rapidly closes the racial divide and is integrated in the African context. As a sort of wartime pícaro, Ángel poses as a Cuban internationalist, falls in love with a mulatto girl, covertly joins a group of young OCA members, endures jail and tortures

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along with the main character and finally traffics with exotic birds. The absurd of violence and wartime turns any ideological or racial difference irrelevant, as declared by one of the repressors: “We’re going to kill you all. Be fraccionistas, esquerdistas, racists, tribalistas. Everyone! Do not think that I like this but someone has to do it” (1996, p. 226). Such flattening in the way violence is exerted paradoxically produces the only kind of community in the novel: that of the defeated. At the end of the tale, the experience of prison offers a politics of relation that depart from identity norms, in the context of the total dissolution of the country and of the foundations of its identity. It is procedural dynamics, not morality, which allows the interrelation of different characters: black, white and mulatto; thieves, electricians, doctors and lawyers; young leftists, an MPLA commander, UNITA activists, European and Cuban mercenaries, Angolan intellectuals, a Boer lieutenant and a Portuguese colonel. Suffering terrible jail conditions, executions and tortures, these characters organise free courses of math, accounting, Kongo language or classical music, and even manage to produce an imaginary television news programme that “broadcasts” invented local and international news in a wooden box. The failure of the normative nationalist-revolutionary identity determines the emergence of a precarious postnational and multicultural community. I understand this jailhouse’s community as the expression of a politics of relation that cannot be homogeneous in terms of race, politics, morality, nationality or ideology. There is no origin to claim, nor filiation that can justify one against another. Agualusa has often been identified as a crioulidade author, but his interest on creole elites in other novels has not necessarily aimed at representing national identity, as he noted in an interview: “The charges raised against me in Angola, that is, to defend a Creole model for the country, do not correspond to the truth. What I am advocating is the existence of a Creole segment, with a Portuguese mother tongue, a very significant minority of white, mestizo and black Angolans, who have the right to express their culture, along with all others” (Agualusa et al. 2007). Let us add that, in contrast to Luso-Tropicalist crioulidade, Agualusa emphasises power asymmetries in colonial and postcolonial Angolan society and its conflictive heterogeneity.4 Hence his critique to the MPLA: “when the Angolan leaders shouted ‘one people, one nation’ […] they were actually suggesting (they believed) that it was impossible to build a modern country respecting the different nations of Angola” (Agualusa in Gonçalves de Castro 2011, p.  192).5 In his next novel, Barroco Tropical, Agualusa insists on this issue when one of the characters

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identifies the fight of the Angolan State against diversity with totalitarianism, and concludes that it was a way to maintain the colonial model (2009, p. 279). I have already detected the same phenomenon in the coincidence between the ideology of Cuban revolutionary mestizaje and the Spanish caste system. The official discourse bans any diversity that may challenge official control. In Estação das chuvas, the community in the jailhouse is made of characters as rootless as the Cuban mercenary Ángel, including those who are in their own country. In contrast with previous works by Agualusa, this novel does not focus on an elite, but on a community sustained on the incidental circumstances of a series of individuals who share the experience of loss in a postcolonial context. The issue of crioulidade and its national representativeness is also addressed in a dialogue between Lídia and the fictionalised writer Mário Pinto de Andrade, in which they discuss an anthology of Luso-African black poets coordinated by Pinto de Andrade. She comments: I understand the negritude, I am supportive of blacks of the whole world and I like very much the poems of Senghor and the tales of Diop, but I feel that our universe is another. You, like me or Viriato da Cruz, all of us belong to another Africa; that same Africa that also lives in the Antilles, Brazil, Cape Verde or São Tomé; a mixture of deep Africa and the old colonial Europe: Pretending the opposite is a fraud. Mario de Andrade looked at her, at once indignant and victorious: “That is Gilberto Freyre!” He assured, “this is the damned Luso-Tropicalist mystification!” (1996, p. 83)

The conflict between the two positions marks the thin line that separates the acknowledgement of racial and cultural crossings from a homogenising identity such as Luso-Tropicalism. Further on, Lídia recognises herself in the paradigm of Latin American mestizaje: “In Lídia’s opinion, the Cuban inclusion defined the book in its essence, and it was not about blackness: ‘Guillén’s genius was to bring to educated poetry the Creole soul of Cuba; he did not recover the Yoruba traditions. It reproduced, rather, the models of miscegenation that for centuries had taken place on the island. It merged the African tradition with the European tradition’” (1996, p. 86). The fragment confirms the South-South connection with the transit from Nicolás Guillén’s Afro-Cuban poetry to Angolan literature. Doubtless, it shows an aspiration to think about identity beyond the binaries of the North such as the one that Pinto de Andrade would be

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replicating. Indeed, the Afro-Cubanism of Guillen’s first period put the accent and vindicated the black component within the Cuban ajiaco, but—in addition to the limitations of any fixed identity, including the black—this component was progressively diluted in the conciliatory matrix of mestizaje, with Guillén ending up the official poet of the revolutionary government. His life and works actually exposed the difficulties to sustain an identity without it being eventually engulfed by homogenising logics. Back to Estação das chuvas, this danger appears in a conversation between the narrator and Lídia about the historical role of the MPLA. She does not shun the fact that the party is composed by the sons of colonists, the same colonists who, although were the founders of the American nations, were also the ones that had first exterminated the natives (1996, pp. 112–113). Thus, she problematises the figure of the crioulo, with which she nonetheless identifies in speaking later to Mário Pinto de Andrade. Estação das chuvas constitutes a complex work that demolishes the nationalist identity of the MPLA while suggesting the possibility of an alternative, non-idealised community. The uprooting of the characters, derived from their experience of loss, produces a “community of singularities” (Nancy 2000). The lack of foundation defines this sense of community for both Nancy and Esposito. The provisional nature, as well as the absence of a common essence, substance or identity among the characters of Agualusa romance, suggests what Nancy describes as an “inoperative community” (2000). It is a matter of conceiving a “being-in-common” (Nancy 2000) marked, precisely, by lack, voids and incompleteness—an “unpolitic” community, according to Esposito (2003). This provisional community, sustained on experience rather than identity, origin or finality, allows us to pull apart the narrative of the South Red Atlantic in Cuba and Angola, but also to preserve the possibility of a politics of relation with the others. This chapter has examined the revolutionary articulation of a transatlantic identity of mestizaje put to use to legitimise Cuban military assistance to the MPLA during the Angolan Civil War. The paradox lays in the fact that such Latino-African articulation largely stemmed from colonial epistemological frameworks, and thus silenced cultural singularities and socio-racial historical inequalities. The collapse of the official transatlantic, South-South identity coincided with the change of an epic sensibility to one of disenchantment. However, such affective regime did not bring about the substitution of one normative historical finality for another. Agualusa’s novel supposes the reconfiguration of an inoperative community, which does not arise from identitarian drives. Thus, I propose a

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critique of uprootedness, both of the Caribbean and Africa, which renounces any legitimising origin and makes it possible to consider Cuba and Angola in terms of dynamic networks of relationships, in constant fugue from the principles of the nation, geography, ideology, race and class.

Notes 1. Glissant acknowledges that any culture is composite in its origins, but as times goes by, some of them, like Europe’s, become “atavistic” (2002, p. 24). 2. In the essay “Entre Próspero e Caliban. Colonialismo, Pós-colonialismo e Interidentidade” (2003), Boaventura de Sousa Santos maintains that Portugal has a dual, intermediate position, both a coloniser and a subaltern to English colonialism. 3. During the Angolan Civil War, South Africa provided military support to UNITA’s struggle against the MPLA. 4. I take the notion of “conflictive heterogeneity” from Peruvian scholar Antonio Cornejo Polar. 5. In another of Agualusa’s novels, a character states: “One people, one nation. That is, according to comrades, that in order to build a country is necessary to destroy ethnic identities. Pure colonial ideology” (2009, p. 279).

Bibliography Agualusa, José Eduardo. Barroco Tropical. Alfragide: Publicações Dom Quixote, 2009. ———. “Eduardo José Agualusa homenageia Eça de Queiroz em Nação Crioula.” Bemparaná, March 7, 2007. Accessed July 25, 2016. http://www.bemparana. com.br/noticia/21202/jose-agualusa-homenageia-eca-de-queirozem-nacao-crioula. ———. Estação das Chuvas. Lisboa: Publicações Dom Quixote, 1996. Armitage, David. “Tres conceptos de la historia atlántica.” Revista de Occidente 281 (2004): 7–28. Benítez Rojo, Antonio. La isla que se repite. Barcelona: Editorial Casipoea, 1989. Buck-Morss, Susan. Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2000. Cabral, Amílcar. “Libertação nacional e cultura. 1970.” In Malhas que os Impérios Tecem, edited by Manuela Ribeiro Sanches, 355–375. Lisboa: Edições 70, 2011. Castelo, Cláudia. “Uma incursão no lusotropicalismo de Gilberto Freyre.” ICT | bHL | blogue de História Lusófona VI (2011): 261–279.

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Castro, Fidel. “Fidel Castro: ‘We shall defend Angola and Africa!’.” The Militant 78 (2014). Accessed July 28, 2016. https://www.themilitant. com/2014/7845/784549.html. de Castro, Léo Mackellene Gonçalves. Identidades imaginadas ou Agualusa vs. Agostinho Neto: A falência do projeto original da identidade nacional angolana. MA thesis. Brasilia: Universidade de Brasília, 2011. Accessed September 5, 2019. http://repositorio.unb.br/bitstream/10482/9253/1/2011_Leo MacklleneGoncalvesdeCastro.pdf. De la Fuente, Alejandro. Una nación para todos: raza, desigualdad y política en Cuba. Madrid: Editorial Colibrí, 2001. Duchesne Winter, Juan. “Más allá del liberacionismo caribeño: Juan Carlos Quintero Herencia, Hoja de mar (:) Efecto archipiélago I (2016).” Cuadernos de Literatura Vol. XXIII, 45 (enero-junio, 2019): 146–156. Accessed September 5, 2019. https://revistas.javeriana.edu.co/index.php/cualit/article/view/27722 Esposito, Roberto. Communitas. Origen y destino de la comunidad. Buenos Aires: Amorrortu, 2003. Ferreira, Roquinaldo. “‘Ilhas Crioulas:’ O significado Plural da Mestiçagem Cultural na África Atlântica.” Revista de História 155 (2006): 17–41. Freyre, Gilberto. O mundo que o português criou— aspectos das relações sociais do Brasil com Portugal e as colônias portuguesas. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1940. ———. Casa-Grande y Senzala. Edited by Darcy Ribeiro. Translated by Benjamín de Garay and Lucrecia Manduca. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1977. Fuentes, Norberto. Dulces guerreros cubanos. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1999. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1993. Glissant, Édouard. Introducción a una poética de lo diverso. Translated by Luis Cayo Pérez Bueno. Barcelona: Ediciones del Bronce, 2002. Hatzky, Christine. Cubans in Angola. South-South Cooperation and Transfer of Knowledge, 1976–1991. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2012. Kajibanja, Víctor. “Crise da Racionalidade Tropicalista e do Paradigma da Crioulidade.” África: Revista do Centro de Estudos Africanos 22–23 (2001): 141–156. Linebaugh, Peter and Marcus Rediker. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. London and New York: Verso, 2000. Martí, José. Nuestra América. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1985. Nancy, Jean Luc. La comunidad inoperante. Santiago de Chile: Universidad Arcis, 2000. Oliveira, M.  A. F. de. Luanda, “Ilha” Crioula. Lisboa: Agência Geral do Ultramar, 1968.

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Ortiz, Fernando. Los factores humanos de la cubanidad. La Habana: Molina y Cía, 1940. Pawson, Lara. In the Name of the People. Angola’s Forgotten Massacre. London: I. B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 2014. Peters, Christabelle. Cuban Identity and the Angolan Experience. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Ramos, Rui. “Angola: a extrema-esquerda há 25 anos.” Público, February 5, 2000. Accessed September 5, 2019. https://www.publico.pt/espaco-publico/jornal/angola-a-extremaesquerda-ha-25-anos-139607. Rosenblat, Ángel. El mestizaje y las castas coloniales: La población indígena y el mestizaje en América. Buenos Aires: Editorial Nova, 1954. Santiago-Pérez, Eleuterio. Escritura afropuertorriqueña y modernidad. Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2007. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. “Entre Próspero e Calibán. Colonialismo, Pós-­ colonialismo e interidentitidade.” Novos Estudos CEBRAP 66 (2003): 24–29. Sawyer, Mark. Racial Politics in Post-revolutionary Cuba. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Zavala, Iris M. “Representing the colonial subject.” In 1492–1992: Re/discovering Colonial Writing, edited by René Jara and Nicholas Spadaccini, 323–348. Minneapolis: The Prisma Institute, 1989.

CHAPTER 5

Place Becoming Space: Nation and Deterritorialisation in Cuban Narrative of the Twenty-First Century Nanne Timmer

Introduction In this chapter,1 I argue that the Cuban narrative of the last two decades explores notions of experience that aim to break with the insularist and nationalist approaches so embedded in the island’s tradition of politics and writing of the twentieth century. This contemporary rearticulation in literary writing also opens up the way Cuba has been conceptualised as a place of exception within area studies in general, and Caribbean Studies in particular. As a point of departure, it is useful to note that nations can be thought of as “places” in the sense that they are locations, material things with a concrete form (although they can be imaginary), and they are related to subjective and emotional attachments (Agnew quoted in Creswell 2014, pp.  15–18). I will take into account these layers in the analysis of Cuban cultural production to argue that contemporary

N. Timmer (*) Universitet Leiden, Leiden, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 M. López, M. T. Vera-Rojas (eds.), New Perspectives on Hispanic Caribbean Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51498-3_5

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literature delocalises, deforms and detaches aspects related to the symbol of the nation, and that fiction can help academic knowledge to reflect upon politics and the social contemporary imagery within the sphere of “the redistribution of the sensible” (Rancière 2005) that may bring us closer to an understanding of experience. Academic knowledge often displays, even nowadays, a heritage of positivism clearly separating subject from object and compartmentalising theory and case studies. This is especially true for area studies, which defines and explains territories and regions through their specific cultural practices. In these denominations, diverse identity politics go hand in hand: the desire of the great powers to recodify the world territorially in order to know and dominate it better, and the local desire to solidify the covert image of its collective being. Moreover, as Magdalena López (2020) states, there is a primary concern in Latin American cultural criticism, and particularly in the Hispanic Caribbean part of it, with elaborating the notion and project of identity, as has been the case within state politics. To initiate this voyage towards the problematisation of identity politics in scholarly writing, I would like to frame these thoughts by combining two contradictory quotations from Antonio Benítez Rojo. The first illustrates that, even in such rhizomatic texts as those by Benítez Rojo, where you least expect it to appear, you can find a kind of essentialisation: Non-Caribbean readers might enjoy the text of Hundred Years of Solitude, but they cannot be transformed by it—in that certain way. What I am trying to say is that this novel can be received positively by post-industrial society; but for Caribbean readers, its reading will be a transcendental experience: an experience of being. (Benítez Rojo 1986, p.  128; all translations are the author’s own)2

Although Benítez Rojo is an icon for an understanding of the Caribbean in a dynamic way, formulations like this still fall into identitarian oppositions in terms of origin. Whereas area studies present themselves as a particular knowledge of a place, of practices and of identities, literary production often goes in the opposite direction. International economic dynamics in the transnational editorial world, though, also play a role in a branding of nations in parallel with the marketing of the academic knowledge of area studies. In the case of Cuba, the international market from the nineties onwards has demanded a kind of testimonial fiction of Cuba’s Special Period in order to satisfy the appetite of foreigners for knowledge

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of the place. A group of novels functions almost as alternative journalism and conforms to the demand just described via chronicles, autobiographical writings and testimonials about the struggles of daily life in the island. Although these novels offer interesting testimonies, they serve the logic of selling knowledge of place, a practice parallel to the culturally and economically powerful tourist industry. In this text, I would like to comment on a different group of texts, which are marginalised by the market and aim to break the link between sign and referent in search for a new kind of autonomy of literary writing. I will show in which ways literary production tries to avoid the trap of essentialism, how some contemporary works of fiction think of “place” differently and how they conceptualise the nation as a problem. The focus of these works is placed beyond the nation, and they centre experience on dislocation, on the demystification of symbols and the expunging of the gravity of History and on deterritorialisation. To understand such expunging of the nation, it is fundamental to relate it to other elements beyond the spheres of cultural studies and the market. In the case of Cuba, official state rhetoric is heavily related to processes of nation-branding. The nation, with its history and heroes, has an enormous symbolic presence in the daily life of the island. It is therefore not surprising that contemporary Cuban narrative is satiated with the weight of the nation in official rhetoric as well as the stereotypes of international tourism. The literature I will discuss presents something like an urge to find a new language uncontaminated by nationalist rhetoric or the romantic self-­ exoticisation so present in the whole twentieth century. Walfrido Dorta states that Cuban literature has constantly pivoted around the same axis, around the appropriated signifier: Cuba (2012). He also formulates the necessity to free cultural production from this obsession, so much present in state discourses: The question is to forget Cuba. To gradually erase the meanings associated with that signifier, whatever they are, material, spectral or that of a ‘dictator’. The matter  lies in decentring the literature written by Cubans. It is about dispossession. (Dorta 2012)3

Fiction diverts this weight through parody and irony and the visible erasure of the name of the nation, through the construction of an in-between space beyond the island, and the construction of an artificial and deterritorialised space. It is a challenge to study the way this literature imagines a community other than the immanent model of nation and “the common”

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(Nancy 2000), and to try to understand how it does so. Rafael Rojas and Walfrido Dorta stress the importance of “a new temporality” in Cuban literature of the twenty-first century which “narrates futurist, technological, global or personal stories from new connected and interchangeable communities that aren’t thought of as isolated or exceptional anymore” (Rojas 2014). Both scholars stress the role of the writers of Generación Cero who blew up the closed territory claimed by the rhetorics of the Nation. In addition, Walfrido Dorta (2012) marks out the role of the group Diáspora(s) as the literary predecessor of escaping and deterritorialising the nation in the field of Cuban literature. I agree with Dorta that we should understand these contemporary texts of the twenty-first century in line with the opening up of the post-nineties narrative. In very diverse ways, we see that the nation is rethought in a more open way, in which exteriority and relationality are important features. This vision transforms the immanent model of community organised around an oeuvre or a symbol. Some of these critics have been discussing about the existence of a “post-national literature” in Cuba, although the meaning of this “post” still remains ambiguous and oscillates between an anti, an erasure, an escape or an after, and it is frequently associated with the abandonment of testimony or the topos of the island. Writers like Jorge Enrique Lage and Carlos A.  Aguilera have also stressed the importance of time and space as rupturing axes in their narratives. Lage refers to a “surrealist space-time” (2015, p. 161) and Aguilera about an “indefinite time or kitsch time” with no chronological order, with no respect or coherent references to “periods, nations, languages or places” (Aguilera 2015, p. 143). These factors deconstruct the traditional idea of testimonial narratives. Actually, some of the works I am going to discuss blow up the idea of narrating reality at all. In the following pages, I will comment on some novels that break away with ideas of testimony and referentiality, novels that problematise the nation and transform places into spaces. I detect three intertwined features that allow for a playful handling of the different layers of the definition of place mentioned before: locations, material things with concrete forms and the “sense of place” in its subjective and emotional attachments (Agnew quoted in Creswell 2014, pp. 15–18).

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The Erasure of the Place of Enunciation The first explicit way Cuban contemporary literature engages in a process of “de-localising” is through a metafictional play with the place of enunciation. Ena Lucía Portela and Pedro de Jesús López Acosta seem to transform History into a simple anecdote in the reign of fiction. Both writers challenge the divide between the real world and a fictional one in which everything is possible. In The Bird: Brush and Chinese Ink (El pájaro: pincel y tinta china, 1998), by Ena Lucía Portela, the narrator breaks the frame between the world he narrates and the world of the other narrated characters. In a self-conscious and metafictional style of baroque writing, three characters are in search of their author Emilio U., who seems to be the narrator of the novel we are reading, but who, at the same time, is described by someone else. In this way, Portela erases the place of enunciation. There is more than a doubling of the voice, which is a schizophrenic body popping up at different textual levels. While there are sudden jumps to extra-fictional reality, the opposite also occurs: the first-person narrator loses his ability to distinguish fiction from reality and inhabits other characters, appropriating their fictional life. The voice duplicates itself infinitely, so that the place from which it speaks cannot be identified. In the following fragment, the “I” reveals this deliberate game: [Camila] ignores that Lacan, the bore who surely also had someone to tell him “will you stop already,” had at a certain point produced a fine and complete theory on the breaking up of the subject, without which the place from which one speaks would be but a mystery. Sometimes, however, it remains a mystery, or at least, that is what is attempted. For example, if you can guess who I am, you win a prize. (1998, p. 139)4

Writing is presented as a game in which it is possible to be narrator and character at the same time, to simultaneously think, act and inhabit all possible places. The text creates a virtual space that is not limited to one body or one territory. In this space, the “I” lives everywhere and nowhere concurrently. In other texts, Portela aims to construct a “nowhere girl” who longs to exist elsewhere, and to be multiple selves at the same time. This is a first example of delocalisation in contemporary Cuban literature. The metafictional erasure of place is even more symbolic in the novel Sibyls in Mercaderes (Sibilas en Mercaderes, 1999) by Pedro de Jesús López Acosta because of its link with the name of the nation and the author’s

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very peculiar experimentation with the deformation of space. The story takes place in Havana, Paris, St. Petersburg, Kuala Lumpur and Bambula, if we take language literally. However, there seems to be no displacement of the scene at all, it is rather just a game of multiple name changes. Tim Creswell has suggested that, through naming, we turn an abstract absolute space into a place; that is how we construct it and bestow it with meaning. Renaming in the novel does the opposite: it turns place into space. The self detaches from the symbolic name of the Nation and tries to disconnect the place from meaning. This rupture of perspective deliberately plays with the gaze of the viewer. Any expectations readers might have about reconstructing a stable or coherent fictional space are frustrated. This disavowal of readerly expectation is executed through the ellipsis of a localised place—even more, the ellipsis of its name, as if all notions about nationality would colour Pedro de Jesús’s fiction inappropriately. The fictional space seems deformed, being multiple places at the same time. If we were to think about space and place within a representational logic, such as the modes previously presumed in area studies, the Caribbean would be here an anamorphic and transvested space. However, if one takes a closer look, it is even more eloquent. Space is anamorphic as described by Sarduy: it is deformed, but it acquires a very clear shape when you look at it from a specific angle. Like anamorphosis in terms of Sarduy and Lacan, the novel plays with forms of concealment of the discomfort of the subject. However, through codes and allegorical plays (e.g. the image of the artist Christo Vladimirov Javacheff, who in the story covers up the nation with Bambula in 1959—the year of the Cuban revolution—), the novel reveals its discomfort with the omnipresence of the name of the Cuban nation and invites a more sociopolitical reading. Cuba is the simulacrum and grand récit in which the subject is trapped. The erasure shows a longing in contemporary cultural production to go beyond the nation, but simultaneously it also reveals the trap of its omnipresence. With these mind games, Portela and López Acosta gesture at erasing or deforming the place where speaking and existing are materialised. Quite a radical attempt, one could say. They play their games from a spatial inside, although they try to break space through metafiction. Other novels about which I will comment in the following pages also deal with the problematic of a rupture between an inside and an outside of a fictional place. In these narratives, the ruptures occur through a complex fusion between the self and the landscape: a voice is searching for a place outside. In these

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kinds of writings, “the sense of place” is central, together with the subjective and emotional feeling of (non-)belonging.

Disintegrated Landscapes, Limits and Lost Selves Some novels, such as From the White Madhouses (Desde los blancos manicomios,  2008) by Margarita Mateo and Training Days (Días de entrenamiento,  2012) by Ahmel Echevarría, situate images of alienation, non-identification and de-humanisation at the centre of their narratives. Self and landscape are used there to reconsider and reimagine psychological disconnections from the community, as well as reconnections with it. These novels reflect on the effect and affect of the insular construct of the nation through the allegory of the island and through a parody of symbols. The self-defining process of delimitation, demarcation, exclusion and breakdown of barriers is central. In From the White Madhouses, we see how the image of the archipelago is superimposed with the image of a cemetery claimed by the sea. From that fragmented world, in which solitude and death reign, the delirious protagonist seeks life in reconnection to her fragmented identity. The archipelago as a landscape of disconnected parts stands at the basis of her mental voyage. If the self is a sea of disintegrated isles, there are no limits between the subject and the world that surrounds it. At the same time, the psychological voyage in the novel obliges the self to reconstruct space and relations to it: the self, the city, the island, the nation and the region. The idea that identity in itself is rather a process than a state, relational rather than essential, as proposed by Glissant in his Poetics of Relation (1997), is useful to read the way in which the different parts of the archipelago connect, in Mateo’s novel, in multiple and rhizomatic ways. Glissant does not only link the archipelago to a liberating energy, he also links it to death. Mateo’s novel effects a similar extreme form of deterritorialisation. In an allegorical image, the sea invades the cemetery: archipelago and cemetery fuse with white graves as islands. Contemporary Cuban literature is now known for its presentation of a post-apocalyptic landscape with cemeteries and ruins. Mateo’s novel and the others I am discussing here are not mainstream, they are actually much less known than the ones sold by international publishers. In them, though, the topics of loss and decay recur. In Mateo’s novel, a psychological voyage through death, loss and mourning in order to rethink the self as a unified entity is central. Some well-known allegories, such as the image of the island-self, have a long tradition and are used here to resignify national imagery, moving it

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towards a more transareal vision. In that way, Mateo explores a continuity with the Lezamian imagery, which according to Otmar Ette already offers a “transareal” and a “transarchipelagic” vision, where space does not constitute itself in stable territoriality, but appears as a world-­ wide migratory space, a quasi-infinite, dynamic playing-space in which relationality becomes the moves of a potentiality and a procreative force that will neither tire nor slacken, as long as the myths do not become fixed and territorialised. Only literature, as though in an experimentation-space, is capable of transhistorically providing us with this space and the poetic awareness that goes with it, and of holding them ready for endless new applications. That the Cuban Revolution, unlike Lezama’s dynamic and open model, long ago spatially and semantically defined the myths that it created once and for all, in order, as it were, to immortalise them and itself is here nothing more than a marginal comment that will sooner or later become historical. (Ette 2016, p. 271)

In what ways do contemporary poetics, like Margarita Mateo’s, relate to national allegory and in what ways are they trying to resignify them? The erasure of the signifier “Cuba” is what is at stake in contemporary texts, which show the tension between the direct experience and the symbolic weight of that signifier. The archipelago in From the White Madhouses questions limits and demarcation, and indicates a self as a relational space of multiple islands in de- and resubjectification. It is not about a returning to an original space with fixed roots, as in the foundational fictions about the nation. On the contrary: the notion of “island” explodes into a fragmented and relational whole. In this way, fiction can give voice to an identitary crisis that invites us to rethink the possibilities of a new sense of community, an archipelagic one, in which the protagonist searches for a threshold that limits landscape and self in order to speak, to create a place of enunciation. The search for a self in changing surroundings and in a landscape of death, mourning and loss, is also present in Ahmel Echevarría’s Training Days, a novel that, as the previous one, also creates an urban oneiric map connecting different times and places. The recurrent question, “The universe will change, but what will happen with me?” (Echevarría 2012, p. 235), structures the events in the book. Echevarría also takes up the image of an island composed of rafts, not putting it at the centre of his narrative but transforming it into a mere anecdote. This young writer uses a more ironic distance, parody and demystification of national imageries,

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as is recurrent in contemporary narrative. The irony is made visible through the fact that national imagery is mostly expressed through the image of Fidel Castro, a secondary character in the novel who moves around in a wheelchair giving advice to the main character. It is Castro who talks about a floating coffin, a floating nation and the possibility of using them to create literature. The image of the former president as symbol of the nation is desacralised, and the symbolic weight is transformed into humour and absurdity: an old Fidel Castro asking for a pen, stating “Within literature everything” and questioning whether he should reincarnate as a writer or a continent. The novel seeks autonomy for writing itself and allows itself permission to transform everything around into fiction. These fictional machines are also visible in the work of the most recent generation of writers who try to detach themselves from the weight of the national construct, not only through spatial imagery but also through a parodic play with official symbols and rhetoric.

Desacralisation of the Construct of the Nation: Heroes, Symbols and Archive As discussed before, Training Days (2012) by Ahmel Echevarría dares to touch upon the figure of Fidel Castro. In oneiric narrations, the old man repeatedly appears on the scene interrupting the path of the protagonist, to whom he gives literary advice. As Dorta correctly pointed out, the repetitions and the hallucinating character of all the encounters between the young and the old man express a sort of astonishment towards “the pedagogical and curatorial role of the Cuban State, incarnated by the figure of Fidel Castro”; moreover, it “interrogates the pedagogical and paternalist role of the State and institutions presented by the figure of the old man” (Dorta 2018). It is not only the figure of the ex-president that is questioned in contemporary literature. The mambises and national heroes of the nineteenth century are also demystified and ridiculed. The Illiterates (Las analfabetas, 2015) by Legna Rodríguez, for example, where a long list of heroes and saviours make their appearance, puts an end to the glorification of heroism as such. A female serial killer narrates the shooting of the eight  medical  students often cited in Cuban history, but she turns the story upside down. The novel recounts the killing and eating of one Professor Petrovich, and subsequently the flights of a chimney sweep, a

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writer and a serial killer. It tells how they escape in a Fusca carrying a bonsai and how they collide with a piano in the middle of a highway. All the protagonists, the heroes of national history and the eight students, end up on the piano. This final image of outlandish catastrophe condenses Rodríguez´ poetic proposal: a sonic recreation of a piano playing a divertimento on the ruins of the national archive and historical memory. National History as a monument is desecrated through staging the same version of history repeating itself again and again in official discourse, with present and past merging outside the constraints of time. Rodríguez turns the fathers of the Fatherland into women and into illiterates. In so doing, she desacralises official History and replaces the archive with a doubtful, sonorous and playful polyphony. Take a look, for example, at how the figure of the national hero in the struggle for independence of the nineteenth century is reconstructed: You look like Antonio Maceo, the writer tells me. Tall Slender Beautiful Brave Black Penetrating eyes Porcelain smile Dead nipples Scar Big mouth, hands and feet Enormous vagina Sleep still in your eyes when you wake up Soft ears Curly hair Antonio Maceo in person. (2015, p. 128)5

The text is actually a poem that claims to be a novel, a poetic de-literacy campaign challenging the foundational Revolutionary Literacy Campaign of the sixties. The Illiterates is a radical, fragmented text, which, at the same time, could be a theatre piece. Its form challenges the limits of the archive—of writing as such—and the bearers of national collective memory. This kind of parodic form is a recurring theme in contemporary narratives: fragmentation represents a break with the immanent model of oeuvre and the tradition of the national novel as such. The narrator in

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Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo’s Boring Home (2009), for example, says that he prefers not to write a novel. Orlando/Bartleby tries not to fall into prescriptive power dynamics while these are precisely the reasons why he writes in the first place. Boring Home therefore plays with duplicity of signification in language and, through slippery errors and coincidences, creates a liberating ambiguity. Jorge Enrique Lage’s novels go very far in this kind of textual defragmentation: it is actually the basic principle of his narrations. Pieces of dialogue between historical figures and superheroes, and between freaks and robots, alternate with quotations or references to High Literature and the Hollywood film industry. This generic adventure aims to leave behind the form of the novel as such, in order to become a sort of dis-texture in which spatial imagery becomes interesting to analyse. Both Jorge Enrique Lage and Carlos A. Aguilera use material forms and places to question utopian national constructions, as I will show in the following pages through the image of a tower and a highway/bridge.

Parody and Deconstruction of Material Territorialising Forms Cuban literature started to desacralise the symbol of the nation in the nineties. In the texts by the writers of the group and journal Diáspora(s), for example, a conceptual China was constructed for that reason: to serve as a symbolic other space. This displacement continues in recent novels. The Oblómov Empire (El Imperio Oblómov, 2014), by Carlos A. Aguilera, and The Highway: The Movie (La autopista: the movie, 2015), by Jorge Enrique Lage, dynamite the idea of a Literary Nation through dystopia and metafictional play. In The Empire Oblómov, Aguilera exposes the kitsch and burlesque character of identitarian fictions. Through parody, the foundational gestures of the modern nation-state are turned into cartoons of themselves. Aguilera creates a sort of anti-novel staging its performance through delirious monologues by One-eyed Oblómov, Mamushka Oblómov, an opera singer, and God himself. Writing seems to be a delirium and a process of becoming one-eyed, becoming God, becoming monstrous-­mother. The novel shows the necessity of cartoonish comedies with one-eyed kings, anti-enlightened empires, crippled gods and hysterical Mamushkas who, through the delirium of nomad writing, deform the

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founding utopias of the modern state into a repeating foundational cartoon about authoritarian fathers and hateful mothers. In Aguilera’s use of space, the map of Great Slavia is a non-place: all territories merge into one in which macro-powers of destruction take over. The narration starts with hatred towards the East. The East is here a map of a space of negativity: an absolute, inverted, and abstract space, as if it were a map of a black hole. At the same time, the story deals with the construction of a material place: a tower, a counter-utopian place, “where imperfection and even death were in themselves a form of life” (Aguilera 2014, p. 128).6 Oblómov builds an empire in which he confines the territory for a new kind of humanity, a humanity to be saved. Only those with flaws, illnesses and deformities have the right to belong to this new society. Utopia is intertwined here with the projection of a territory: the dream of building a tower, as in Kafka’s story about the tower of Babel. Oblómov’s Empire illustrates the never-ending construction of the counter-utopian dream and becomes a critical reflection on biopolitical powers and national narratives. Something similar occurs with the construction of the highway in The Highway: The Movie, by Jorge Enrique Lage, which is made possible by the indefiniteness of space. The only spatial element we have in the novel is the highway, and no other dimension and orientation are given. In this new post-apocalyptic imagery, the city has become only a highway: “What Havana was. What it never was. Whatever it was. The highway has erased it from the map. In its place, the unabated asphalt that fills our nightmares” (Lage 2015, p. 114).7 There are no borders to distinguish an inside from an outside, nor is there a demarcation of territory. No one knows where they stand—it does not even matter. The main character has no idea whether he is going north or south at the end of the book. In contrast with sedentary spaces demarcated by walls and borders, space here is nomadic and is marked by erased and irregular traces. All spatial axes and relative places are deleted; the sense of direction is useless without endings or beginnings. The only presence is a flow of traffic, which Rachel Price (2015) relates convincingly to the petrol and economic flows of transnational capitalism. The highway seems to connect everything, but below it and at the margins of its construction you see all kinds of split off and isolated fragments. There you find the desert, graves and ruins where only and weeds grow. Action takes place at the margins: at a fast food outlet, a sex shop, a scrapyard, a motel, a garage, all non-places just like the industrial and military park behind the

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motel, a construction zone. As reflected throughout the plot, the characters and the fictional landscape seem to emerge from a machine that transforms waste and rubbish. An inconclusive and never-ending construction and destruction, just like the highway (and its movie): the impossible temporal construction of a narrative. A story that builds and collapses at the same time, again and again; a construction that includes its own failure, like the perverse functioning of utopias. More than an idea, the construction of the highway in the middle of an apocalyptic landscape is a destructive machine designed by a political power. Through an intertextual play with Kafka’s story about the Chinese wall, the novel deals critically and playfully with an opposition between nomads, who are located in the margins of the highway, and the State, the unknown office of the authority. In this way the novel uses burlesque to reflect on the functioning of power and the law. As we have seen, both novels by Lage and Aguilera use material forms of places and landscapes to erase the referentiality to Cuba in order to rethink such themes as power, dystopia and exclusion.

Conclusion I have shown how contemporary Cuban narrative deals with the problematic of the nation turning places into spaces. By delocalising, deforming and detaching national symbols, erasure is a strategy to open up the archive, the canon and the notion of identity. These are also ways to cope with the Cuban obsession with the nation, national identity, and the fixity of state rhetoric, an obsession very much related to the logics of representation of place in the international market, and in academic disciplines such as area studies. The contemporary deterritorialisation in lesser-known Cuban literature also creates an opportunity to reimagine the place of the self in a rapidly transforming world. These contemporary fugues and textual hybrids are not writing the nation as much as overwriting it with fragments of diverse traditions. I have also sought to construct a counter-canon of contemporary Caribbean literature, Cuban in this case, which is not interested in the testimonial function of literature, politics of identity or, with that sort of nation-branding that parallels the stereotypes of the tourist market, elements of Cuban literature which have already been discussed extensively and which fall into categories drawn by the  academy, the state or the market, looking for representational logics and references to particular places. If we want to put into practice the rich theoretical insights that

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Caribbean studies have produced on super-syncretism and detours, on archipelagic effects that liberate, reconnect and deviate, the challenge is to try to open up that logic. More than simply a question of defining places and identities, then, it is a matter of Caribbeanising academic knowledge. Putting this goal into practice would require considering, not only the selected texts we discuss but also our ways of writing about them. To illustrate this kind of approach, another quotation from the same article of the late 1980s by Antonio Benítez Rojo moves in the opposite direction than the first one I quoted at the beginning of this text: it shows a scholar leaving essentialism behind. I believe that by stressing the importance of affect and opening up the notion of identity in an apparently paradoxical or self-­contradictory way, his ideas trace a path for possible future cultural criticism: It suffices to say that the text is born when it is read by the “other”: the reader. From that moment onwards, the text establishes itself as an infinite act of double seduction. In each reading, the reader seduces the text, transforms it, appropriates it; in each reading the text seduces the reader, transforms him, appropriates him. If this double seduction reaches the intensity of the point “in a certain way,” both text and reader will transcend their respective centres without transcending them. (1986, p. 128)8

My proposal, therefore, is that academic knowledge should follow trends and modes of fictional writing that break the relation of servitude with the logic of representation of place and identity. In this research on Cuban cultural production, my ambition is not so much to denominate place, territory, or the way of being of the Caribbean. Rather, I find my inspiration in Glissant’s notion of detour (1996, p. 31), the archipelagic affects and effects which resound in Quintero Herencia (2016), and that “certain way” of mutual gravitation between text and reader of which Benítez Rojo speaks. It has more to do with the intercultural practice of negotiating identities without fixing them. These thoughts were born while I was consuming a Chinese soup in a Surinamese restaurant in Rotterdam. At the same time, I was listening to a political debate on Dutch television where xenophobic ideas were being expressed about national and foreign identities—both unknown to me and not connected to my sense of belonging. I like to think of our scholarly work within the field of Caribbean studies as a form of resistance to those nationalist discourses: as an invitation to be part of our intercultural

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heritages and to think critically about power dynamics in the construction of archives, communities and identities. A few years ago, in a Cuban journal, I playfully expressed my confession of sinning, of committing sacrilege. Instead of respecting the patrimony of Cuban literature, I steal it, appropriate it to insert it within other realities. The sacrilege is of such a magnitude that I even try to defend myself claiming that those Cuban texts are “ours” as well, without knowing what sort of collective I am vindicating with that cry. The good news is that, as a consequence of that sacrilege, I see other mental countries being born, countries resisting confinement by “that cursed circumstance of water everywhere”—either in the case of being an island or by lowlands with a set of dams protecting them. I like to think of Caribbean studies, therefore, as a mode of intercultural reading comprised of a mutual gravitation between text and reader. In a movement of displacement and mirages, a different mapamundi comes into being: a map with erased places with infinite names that question the possibility of knowing, naming and fixing identities. Post-critic models such as those offered by Margarita Mateo, Julio Ramos and Juan Carlos Quintero Herencia move between fiction and academic essay and might add to a productive and creative way of rethinking place: an antidote to essentialism might just be nourished by this all-consuming Caribbean approach to culture.

Notes 1. I want to thank Kristin Dykstra for her very helpful reading and commenting of the text. 2. “Un lector no caribeño puede disfrutar el texto de Cien años de soledad, pero no puede ser transformado ‘de cierta manera’ por este. Intento decir que esta novela puede ser vista con buenos ojos por la sociedad postindustrial; para el caribeño, sin embargo, su lectura será una experiencia trascendental: una experiencia del Ser” (Benítez Rojo 1986, p. 128). 3. “Se trata de olvidar Cuba. De ir borrando los significados, cualesquiera que éstos sean, asociados a ese significante de cuerpo presente, o fantasmático, o dictador. Se trata de que la literatura escrita por cubanos se descentre. Se trata de una desposesión” (Dorta 2012). 4. “Ella [Camila] ignora, de más está decirlo, que ya Lacan, el pesado, el que seguro también tenía a alguien que le dijera ‘No seas así,’ se apareció un buen día con una linda y acabada teoría sobre la escisión del sujeto, sin la cual el lugar desde donde se habla sería apenas un misterio. A veces sigue

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siendo un misterio o, al menos, lo pretende. Por ejemplo, si adivinas quién soy yo, te doy un premio” (1998, p. 139). 5. “Tú te pareces a Antonio Maceo, me dice la escritora. Alta Esbelta Hermosa Valiente Negra Ojos penetrantes Sonrisa de porcelana Pezones muertos Cicatriz Boca, manos y pies grandes Vagina enorme Legañas al despertar Orejas suaves Cabello crespo Antonio Maceo en persona”. (2015, p. 128) 6. “donde el defecto e incluso lo muerto fuesen en sí una construcción de vida” (2014, p. 128). 7. “Lo que fue La Habana. Lo que nunca fue. Lo que sea que haya sido. La autopista lo ha borrado del mapa. En su lugar, el inabarcable asfalto que llena nuestras pesadillas” (Lage 2015, p. 114). 8. “Me basta con decir que el texto nace cuando es leído por el ‘otro’: el lector. A partir de ese momento el texto se auto-establece como un acto infinito de doble seducción. En cada lectura el lector seduce al texto, lo transforma, lo hace suyo; en cada lectura el texto seduce al lector, lo transforma, lo hace suyo. Si esta doble seducción llega a alcanzar la intensidad del punto ‘de cierta manera’, tanto el texto como el lector trascenderán sus respectivos centros sin trascenderlos” (Benítez Rojo 1986, p. 128).

Bibliography Aguilera, Carlos A. El imperio Oblómov. Sevilla: Ediciones Espuela de Plata, 2014. ———. “El Gran Mentiroso vs. El Gran Paranoico.” Istor 15, 63 (2015): 137–146. Benítez Rojo, Antonio. “La isla que se repite: para una reinterpretación de la cultura caribeña.” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 429 (March 1986): 115–130. Creswell, Tim. Place. An Introduction. Wiley: Blackwell, 2014. Dorta, Walfrido. “Olvidar a Cuba: contra el ‘lugar común’.” Diario de Cuba, December 21, 2012. Accessed October 20, 2016. http://www.diariodecuba. com/de-leer/1356084148_85.html.

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———. “Fidel Castro como tabú: disrupciones de una prohibición”. Hypermedia Magazine, November 26, 2018. Accessed August 28, 2019. https://www. hypermediamagazine.com/sociedad/fidel-castro-como-tabudisrupciones-de-una-prohibicion/. Echevarría, Ahmel. Días de entrenamiento. Praga: Editions Fra, 2012. Ette, Ottmar. TransArea: A Literary History of Globalization. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2016. Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Lage, Jorge Enrique. La autopista: the movie. Barcelona: Esto no es Berlín Ediciones, 2015. López, Magdalena. “Challenging a South Red Atlantic: A Post-Liberationist Critique of the Hispanic Caribbean.” In New Perspectives on Hispanic Caribbean Studies, edited by Magdalena López and María Teresa Vera-Rojas, 47–66. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. López Acosta, Pedro de Jesús. Sibilas en Mercaderes, La Habana: Letras Cubanas, 1999. Mateo Palmer, Margarita. Desde los blancos manicomios. La Habana: Letras Cubanas, 2008. Nancy, Jean Luc. La comunidad inoperante. Santiago de Chile: LOM Ediciones/ Universidad ARCIS, 2000. Pardo Lazo, Orlando Luis. Boring Home. Praga: Bibliotecas Independientes de Cuba, 2009. Portela, Ena Lucía. El pájaro: pincel y tinta china. La Habana: Ediciones Unión, 1998. Price, Rachel. Planet Cuba. Art, Culture and the Future of the Island. London: Verso, 2015. Quintero Herencia, Juan Carlos. La hoja de mar (:) Efecto archipiélago I. Leiden: Almenara, 2016. Rancière, Jacques. Sobre políticas estéticas. Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona and Servei de Publicacions de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2005. Rodríguez Iglesias, Legna. Las analfabetas. Leiden: Bokeh, 2015. Rojas, Rafael. “Hacia la ficción global.” Libros del Crepúsculo, April 13, 2014. Accessed August 28, 2019. h ­ ttp://www.librosdelcrepusculo.net/2014/04/ hacia-la-ficcion-global.html.

CHAPTER 6

Sea/See Fluids, Reimagined Landscapes: Looking into Lesbian Desire in Sand Dollars and Liz in September María Teresa Vera-Rojas



Introduction

Women’s sexuality in the Caribbean carries with it the burden of exoticisation. That is, the power relations that shape their subjectivity and seek to regulate their identity through the intelligibility of erotic desire are inseparable from the discourses and colonial and neocolonial practices that have built and  romanticised—or  dehumanised—the racial ethnic other, to consequently legitimate its oppression and exploitation. This is what Kamala Kempadoo (2000) affirms when she explains that this exoticisation has not only imposed an inferior status on the cultural differences and remote peoples with respect to what Europeans considered to be the “civilised” standards, but it has also built a narrative of the exotic as an unknown and strange world, fascinating and terrifying at the same time, seductive given its virginal status, paradise-like, but also bestial, conceived

M. T. Vera-Rojas (*) Departament de Filologia Clàssica, Francesa i Hispànica Universitat de Lleida, Lleida, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. López, M. T. Vera-Rojas (eds.), New Perspectives on Hispanic Caribbean Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51498-3_6

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as such due to its “barbaric cannibalistic moments.” This perception has also defined the  sexualisation of women, and hence the fact that their subjectivity has been conceived by such narratives from a metaphysics of sex, as an irresistible ontological being, defined by its “natural” primitivism and her belonging to the lower order of the other.1 Similarly, this  exoticisation has been marked by the conception of women—particularly, black women—in the Caribbean as nature, in a colonial literary and artistic imaginary that has represented them as sugar, water, flowers; in other words, as an essential part of the plantations’ landscape and economy. However, centuries of normalization of this representation have made it difficult to understand that, as Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley (2010) affirms, both the woman’s body and her femininity as well as the Caribbean landscape have been an invention and the product of colonial records: Sugar islands, islands planted with tamarind, mangoes, star apples, bougainvillea, breadfruit, and palm trees, full of aluminum mines, oil fields, resorts, communal yards, and hounforts: if anything in the archipelago has been as constantly, systematically transformed, exploited, contested, and subverted as the colonial invention called Caribbean womanhood, it is the colonial invention called Caribbean landscape.

Registers of Caribbean nature produced by the European imagination have been simultaneous to its invention. The need to regulate, fix and modify this nature was bound together with the imagination of a landscape that was obsessively represented in the descriptions of travellers and colonizers, landscape paintings, natural history encyclopaedias, and so forth: “In these texts, colonialist logic—the logic that drives enterprises from the plantation to the free-trade zone or the all-inclusive hotel— imagines the landscape in which enslaved, indentured, or underpaid laborers work as a natural given, a passive, preexisting totality that the plantation owner charts and ‘develops’” (Tinsley). As a part of what this “passive” and “preexistent” nature meant for colonial exploitation, women’s sexuality has been conceived as a body from which the colonial imaginary and gaze have fulfilled their desires and legitimized not only their rational epistemology, but also their position as empirical beings.2 This representation was later appropriated by the national discourses in Spanish  America, which in their celebration of local nature as “symbolic embodiment of the idea of a peripheral State” seemingly reverse the negative images of popular sectors to resignify them as “source of national energy.” In this context,

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a different meaning to the figure of the “mulatta”  was given, and her voluptuousness and cadence were transformed into one of the main topics around which hegemonic fictions of national identity were built (Nouzeilles 2002, pp. 29–30; all translations are the author’s own). Many of the tropes of colonial discourse about the Caribbean landscape, race and sexuality remain today, among them, the representations that sexualise the Caribbean nature and idealise its utopian contours (DeLoughrey et al. 2005, p. 11). These images are in a constant process of resignification and actualisation, in part, because, as Mark Padilla (2007) points out, in the context of the informal economies that ensure the continuity of transnational sex tourism in the Caribbean, they are reproduced through the experiences, retellings, and idealised descriptions propagated by European tourists.3 Along with these images, there is also the influence exerted by the film and media industry, which has created an imaginary that has not only engaged with such colonial tropes but moreover multiplied them, by means of what E. Ann Kaplan (1997) has called the “imperial gaze.” Quoting Said and in relation to Hollywood cinema, Kaplan explains that “imperial gaze” is “a gaze structure which fails to understand that […] non-American peoples have integral cultures and lives that work according to their own, albeit different, logic.” That is, the imperial look “reflects the assumption that the white western subject is central, much as the male gaze assumes the centrality of the male subject.” In this parallelism between the colonial and the male gaze,4 Kaplan aims at showing not only the normalisation of a heterosexual gaze—which is not exclusive of European or North American cinema—but also at the denial of other forms of subjectivity in the representation of alterity, because by refusing to acknowledge its own power and privileges, the colonial gaze “unconsciously represses knowledge of power hierarchies and its need to dominate, to control. Like the male gaze, it’s an objectifying gaze, one that refuses mutual gazing, mutual subject-to-subject recognition.” In line with Kaplan, the imperial gaze, in addition to contributing to the “normalisation” of the bond between sexuality and nature, has also brought about the continuity of practices that promote a sexualised and racialised image of Caribbean peoples. They legitimise the patriarchal heterosexism as a structuring principle in Caribbean societies “that privileges heterosexual, promiscuous masculinity and subordinates feminine sexuality, normalizing relations of power that are intolerant of and oppressive toward sexual desires and practices that are outside of or oppose the dominant sexual and gender regimes” (Kempadoo 2004, p. 9).

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Despite the problematisation of this gaze in contemporary cinema produced in the Hispanic Caribbean,5 the heterosexist position from which the filmic gaze is projected, privileges experiences and conceptions of sexuality produced by a male gaze according to which “not only are appreciations of female (hetero)sexuality obscured, but homoeroticism and same-gender sexual relations are denied legitimacy” (Kempadoo 2004, p. 9). At the same time, the body has traditionally been the place of visual representation of desire, and cinema has been the means per excellence to materialize its changing and volatile nature, always in movement. As Marta Segarra affirms, from its origins, cinema has played with “the power of suggestion of the body using the erotic charge of feminine nudity […]. However, it was only after the ‘classic cinema’ codes were established when desire became in turn coded in a series of images that configure, as in literature, certain feminine stereotypes” (2012, p.  134). In relation to the configuration of these stereotypes, Segarra points out that in classic cinema “desire traditionally follows a single direction: it goes from man to woman, which is thus transformed into an object of desire and is never the subject of desire, although sometimes it seems so, as in the case of the femme fatale” (2012, p. 134). Since the 1970s, feminism and female filmmakers have sought ways to film desire from their own view, and this has taken a particular drift when referring to the lesbian body. As Teresa de Lauretis explains in her reading of Monique Wittig’s The Lesbian Body, the struggle with language to rewrite the body beyond its precoded, conventional representations is not and cannot be a reapropriation of the female body as it is, domesticated, maternal, oedipally or preodipally engendered, but is a struggle to transcend both gender and “sex” and recreate the body otherwise: to see it perhaps as monstrous, or grotesque, or mortal, or violent, and certainly also sexual, but with a material and sensual specificity that will resist phallic idealization and render it accessible to women in another sociosexual economy. (2007, p. 62)

In this scenario, it becomes imperative to reflect on how to access an imaginary that dismantles the rational logics of self-representation of the male and colonial gaze. That is, how can women be represented as subjects of desire beyond the limits of their material body? And to what extent have

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nature and femininity been rearticulated by the female gaze in contemporary cinema produced in the Hispanic Caribbean? Two recent films that draw their attention to forms of representation of lesbian desire in the context of the Hispanic Caribbean society allow us to conceive other ways of looking at, and representing the desire that not only problematise, but also resignify the tropes that have normalised the sexualisation of the feminine body and its relationship with nature and neocolonial economic exploitation in the Caribbean. I particularly refer to the Venezuelan production, Liz in September [Liz en septiembre] (2013), directed by Fina Torres, and to the Dominican-Argentinean-Mexican co-­ production, Sand Dollars [Dólares de arena] (2014), directed by Israel Cárdenas and Laura Amelia Guzmán. In both films, the prominence of the sea and natural landscapes lead us to an imaginary that explores other forms of representation of the lesbian desire of their female leading characters through a language of fluidity. I argue that this language gives shape to an imaginary that not only gives a different meaning to the relationship of women with the sea and its constitutive nature, but also challenges both the economic conception and the meaning of women as alterity  in the context of the Hispanic Caribbean culture. In Liz in September as in Sand Dollars, the female body is critically represented as part of the Utopian Caribbean landscape.  Moreover, both films are adaptations. The Venezuelan film is an adaptation of the classic milestone from the 1980s, Last Summer at Bluefish Cove (1980), by Jane Chambers, the first commercial play to represent lesbian characters in a complex and unapologetic way. In this play, the traditional summer vacation of a group of lesbian friends at the Bluefish Cove resort is transformed by the arrival of a heterosexual neighbour and by the terminal cancer of Lil, the main character. As for Sand Dollars, it is a free adaptation of the homonymous novel written by the French author Jean-Noël Pancrazi— originally published in French as Les Dollars des sables in 2006—in which a transactional sex relationship between an elderly European male tourist and a young Dominican boy—also name Noelí—takes place, and where the latter ends up in a desperate wreck fleeing to Puerto Rico from his poverty in the Dominican Republic. In both films, a “translation” of a cultural context is produced in which the relationships of their protagonists are mediated by the natural landscape and the power relations embodied in such landscape. This same translation is what generates the tensions in these films, because both cases involve not only a problematisation of colonial knowledge regimes but also a projection from the other’s

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view of the representation of homoerotic desire. As we will see, these films constitute an opening for the exploration of new languages that can articulate a new Caribbean gaze around lesbian desire and body, a language that dismantles not only the materialisation of desire in the woman’s body but also the representation of the female body as an element of the natural landscape; hence, the presence of the sea in both films is not an arbitrary resource. In this sense, and in line with Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, I am interested in exploring to what extent the tropes that have normalised the female body and sexuality as an extension of a nature that should be controlled and regulated by colonial gaze and power, acquire a new meaning by means of an aquatic imaginary that “redeploy these same tropes to imagine a landscape belonging to Caribbean women and Caribbean women belonging to each other” (Tinsley). The landscape is not only a technique for the production of imperial power, it is also a means for the production of counter-colonial strategies, as well as a terrain from which colonial empiricism is confronted; therefore, to think from the place of the “water politics” as “a poetic for identity dis-subjection as the beginning of the colonial end” (Quintero Herencia 2016, p. 225) is articulated with the recognition of fluids as the language of feminine materiality. As Hélène Cixous pointed out in her already classic essay, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” “we are ourselves sea, sand, coral, sea-weed, beaches, tides, swimmers, children, waves… More or less wavily sea, earth, sky-­ what matter would rebuff us? We know how to speak them all. […] For her joyous benefit she is erogenous; she is the erotogeneity of the heterogeneous: airborne swimmer, in flight, she does not cling to herself; she is dispersible, prodigious, stunning, desirous and capable of others, of the other woman that she will be, of the other woman she isn’t, of him, of you” (1976, pp. 889–890); that is, in the acknowledgement of the sea and in the indeterminacy of its forms, it is possible to find other ways for representing female desire, in which the erotic acquires value as a form of recognition of lesbian subjectivity and whose logic resists the objectification of the female body by the male gaze.

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“I Very Much Like Your Body, Did You Know? How Much Is It?”: Sex Trade, Sea Fluids and (Un)Natural Landscapes in Sand Dollars Sand Dollars is a film produced and filmed in the Dominican Republic, specifically in the touristic province of Samaná. In this film, the story revolves around the love and economic relationship between Anne (Geraldine Chaplin), a white, rich, European and elderly woman who is madly in love with Noelí (Yanet Mojica), and Noelí, a poor and young Afro-Dominican woman, who, in addition to getting sexually involved with tourists in the area, maintains a heterosexual relationship with Jeremy (Ricardo Ariel Toribio). Noelí mainly lives on the money with which Anne tries to buy her love and a hope for a better life by her side in Paris—a trip that also allows Noelí to fantasise about a possible life with Jeremy in Europe. This complex and unequal relationship is the core of the actions of Sand Dollars, a story of sexual encounters and disagreements between Noelí and Anne, which is framed in a landscape shaped by the sea, mountains and palm trees, but which occurs mainly in the midst of the existing contrast between the idyllic hotels and the luxurious mansions of tourists and foreigners, and the rural and deprive towns of the local inhabitants, who are mostly black and who are absent from the paradisiacal scenarios of such Caribbean beaches—a representation that seems to exist only in and for the European tourist and colonial imaginary. Thus, from the moment the film is introduced with the bachata “My little brunette” (“Morenita mía”), played by popular bachata singer Ramón Cordero,6 we anticipate the heartbreaking story that runs throughout the film and that—in contrast to the sunshine and the wave foam that frame the first scene in which Noelí accompanies an elderly male tourist while strolling on the sand beach—represents a more human and less idyllic picture than those manipulated to attract Anglo and European tourists. In this film, the pre-eminence of nature—a green vegetation, abundant and bright, with green mountains, tall palm trees and a sea always in motion—and music reinforces the exotic look on the Caribbean and its attractiveness as a paradise for fun and sex tourism. These events introduce a fragmented and dichotomous present that is defined by a dynamic of economic and affective exploitation of which Noelí and Anne are participants, and whose shortcomings—economic, the former, affective and existential, the latter—make difficult to reduce their characters to conventional stereotypes around sex tourism, as well as

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the elaboration of a trial that condemns one or another character. Likewise, the dichotomous space in which Noelí moves perpetuates the image of Dominican black women as an object of commercial exchange and neocolonial domination; but, on the other hand, her sexuality is a tool that allows her to articulate her subjectivity beyond the categorisations imposed by the Dominican heteropatriarchal society. Sand Dollars’ approach lies at the crossroads between these two opposing and unequal realities: while denouncing the sexual economy that prevails on the island, this film is able to divert the imperial gaze and the representation of the Caribbean as a refuge for a primitive and wildly free beauty—an alterity whose attractiveness resides in its sexualisation, animalisation, infantilisation and immorality (Kaplan)—to look at how the lesbian desire among these characters transforms the disposition of an orderly, productive and rational landscape. That is, despite the neocolonial imprint from which Anne can articulate her desire with a certain amount of freedom in a heterosexist society such as the Dominican, the homoerotic relationship with Noelí reconfigures a landscape whose control is rather elusive. If, as Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley explains, the landscape is not the trees, the river or the flowers, but “an imaginary way of organizing these into a ‘whole’,” and this landscape seems to be not a pre-existing entity but a continuous practice: “one that, like the invention of womanhood, proves subject to constant disruption and rerouting,” in this film, the natural landscape gains a new visual dimension in the company of Noelí, both to problematise the definitions that the colonial imaginary draws on the Caribbean and to resignify it through scenes in which the erotic resists rationalisation and order and allows the recognition of a lesbian subjectivity whose desire is irresistibly driven by flow and movement. From the first scene, we see a strategic Noelí participating in the sex trade that takes place in the Dominican Republic. Anne, on the other hand, finds shelter in the island to flee from a problematic family relationship with her son. In addition to enjoying a life of comfort and pleasure, for over three years, she has been in a relationship of sexual, emotional and economic exchange with Noelí. Although their relationship allows for speculation about the possibility of romance between people of different backgrounds, races and ages, in this film such contrasts also emphasize the dynamics of oppression and colonialism that shape the Dominican landscape. That is, the fluctuations between silences and music, the sound of the sea and the noise of the motorcycle on which Noelí moves from one place to another, the homoerotic relationship between the protagonists,

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and the heterosexual relationship of Noelí with her boyfriend are aimed at attracting attention towards the new forms of economic and colonial exploitation that take place as a result of sex tourism in the Caribbean. But, in turn, the natural landscape demonstrates its artificiality by being represented as a space inhabited, consumed and reproduced by tourists, at the same time that it’s displayed as the scenario of a conflictive way of representing the female body and sexuality. From a geographical, cultural and class distance, which is symbolized by the motorcycle ride that isolates the clean-cut resort on the beach of Las Terrenas—a seaside resort in the Dominican Republic where Anne resides—from the rural town where Noelí lives, this homoerotic relationship is not only the story of another side of sexual tourism between people of the same sex. Moreover, it is also the correlation of the forms of sexual exploitation to which Dominican young women are subjected both from the Dominican heteropatriarchal culture and from transnational sexual exchanges, which, in addition to sustaining the Dominican economy, reinforce neocolonial models of racialisation in the Caribbean. These ideas are addressed by Mark Padilla, who lucidly explains how the convergence of the colonialist historical context with the transformations in the neocolonial political economy have shaped the organisation of sex work that has been developing in the Caribbean: Just as the sexual labor of Caribbean slaves was key to the functioning of colonial economies in Europe, sex work in the contemporary Caribbean cannot be understood without reference to the transnational travel and tourism industries—and the governments that nurture and profit from them—which link “consumers” of sexual services in the industrialized world with “procedures” of these services in the developing world. Just as the juncture of sexuality, prostitution, and production in colonialism tended to foster racialized, exoticized representations of Caribbean sexuality […], the contemporary marketing of tropical destinations—as well as the motives behind sex tourists’ travel to these places—underlines the historical persistence of a particular racialized model of Caribbean sexuality in the modern world system.7 (2007, p. 3)

The representation of Noelí’s racialised body as a commodity and means of sexual exchange is constructed from a sequence of economic transactions of which she acts as the driving force: in the first scene, she bids farewell to a tourist and apparently a regular client who returns to Europe, and she asks him to give her money and a material gift that allows her to

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remember him. In the next scene, we see her with her boyfriend going to sell the chain that the tourist gave her as a present, followed by the scene where she and Jeremy are dancing together.  The next day, she goes to Anne’s house on the motorcycle, puts on her bikini and they go to the beach together. After a suggestive and long scene in which both swim under the sea—and to which I will return later—we see Noelí in the room with Anne, dancing and playing with her in bed (Figs. 6.1 and 6.2). That is when Anne speaks and says: —I very much like your body, did you know? How much is it? —1625 [Dominican pesos]—Noelí replies. —I’ll buy it from you. I like you too much. Did you know that?

Along with this one, other scenes represent the limits of an erotic body that strips Noelí out of her subjectivity—that is, when Noelí dances, her body is framed in a way that leaves her head out of the shot, thus representing a fragmented body lacking in subjectivity—and construct it as an object of commercial exchange. In the context of a heterosexist society and economy, there is no possibility for dispersion or lack of control for Noelí, whose identity is not projected from the question about her sexuality, but from the self-preservation strategies that are imposed on Dominican women by the practices of neocolonial and heteropatriarchal exploitation. At least two arguments can be outlined from this fact: on the one hand, the institutionalised forms of neocolonial exploitation carried out by the sex industry in the Dominican Republic, and the continuity of the modes

Fig. 6.1  Sand Dollars (2014). Dir. Laura Amelia Guzmán and Israel Cárdenas

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Fig. 6.2  Sand Dollars (2014). Dir. Laura Amelia Guzmán and Israel Cárdenas

of erotification of female  black bodies in the Caribbean; on the other hand, and related to the previous idea: the forms of affectivity and socialisation that emerge from the sex trade industry as part of the daily life of the subjects that participate in the sexual economy in the Dominican Republic. Both arguments reinforce the idea of the Caribbean as a Utopian landscape in the minds of tourists, who not only perpetuate the commercial trade based on the sex industry, but also transform “the production of intimacy, pleasure, and emotional comfort” into a site of “capitalist production and consumption [...], which can result in inequalities, discomfort, and sometimes even violence,” as well as in the legitimation of racial hierarchies, particularly when these exchanges take place between people of different races and nationalities (Brennan 2004, p. 99). However, in Sand Dollars the limits between romance and the sexual economy are represented as a rather ambiguous territory. Indeed, what for Noelí is work, which is not exempt from some signs of affection and complicity, for Anne is progressively becoming an unrequited love relationship: the doña is madly in love with Noelí, who appears and disappears throughout the film, which intensifies Anne’s desire as well as the circulation of money and gifts, and speeds up the legal procedures that would allow Noelí to move with her to France—a common practice not only in the area but also in Noelí’s life, whose mother emigrated to Barcelona under the same conditions. These moments and the promises of comfort that Noelí enjoys with Anne are far from her life with her boyfriend: a “mestizo” young man who occasionally plays drums in a bachata group,

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who sometimes also acts as a sanky panky, and who takes advantage of Noelí’s money without asking too much about its origin. In fact, he only shows his love when he fears losing Noelí, who becomes pregnant with his child, and it is only then when she finally decides to leave Anne at the time of their almost imminent departure for France. In this film, despite his sexism and unfaithfulness, the young couple’s relationship prevails over neocolonial economic policies and represents a wink of resistance to the power relations that promote sex tourism as part of the global economy. However, this film not only critically emphasises what has become the normalisation of sexual exchanges as a workforce in the Dominican Republic, but also demonstrates the heteropatriarchal identity of Dominican society, which leads to an uncertain ending for Noelí. Despite its resolution, this film does not have a moralistic gaze on lesbian relationships. Its great political achievement is having focused on the sex industry, without morally confronting—nor denying—the homoerotic desire as part of the criticism of the sex trade. In this sense, it is not fortuitous the importance given to silence in this film: the fact that heterosexual exchanges do not imply an alteration of gender and sexuality norms, unlike what does happen with sex trade between people of the same sex, has contributed to the cover-up of these practices by Dominican society.8 In fact, it is precisely the overlooking and stigmatization around same-sex sex tourism which has not only reinforced the normative paradigms of traditional genders, but also contributed to the underestimation of the extent to which such sex trades are performed in the Dominican Republic (Padilla 2007, p. 7). Along with these remarks, it’s important to highlight that the materiality of Noelí’s body as a commodity and object of economic power is represented as such when it is on solid earth as opposed as to when is moving in the water. As Gilles Deleuze (1986) points out when referring to Jean Epstein’s documentary cinema and the prominence of water in the creation of the moving image: “water is the most perfect environment in which movement can be extracted from the thing moved, or mobility from movement itself. […]. The liquid abstract is also the concrete environment of a type of men, of a race of men who do not live in quite the same way as those of the earth, do not perceive and feel like them” (pp. 77–78), that is, water is the liminal space that makes the difference between “the madness of the earth and the superior justice of the water” (p. 78).

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Fig. 6.3  Sand Dollars (2014). Dir. Laura Amelia Guzmán and Israel Cárdenas

Fig. 6.4  Sand Dollars (2014). Dir. Laura Amelia Guzmán and Israel Cárdenas

In the first scene in which Noelí and Anne show up together, Anne embraces Noelí from behind and they enter the sea and swim together (Figs.  6.3 and 6.4). Under water and away from the external noise, a female homoerotic desire is represented through images that move away from the sex trade industry and the male gaze. In addition, these images project a movement in which class, age and race differences are on hold in the midst of the agitated confusion caused by the sand that moves from the bottom of the sea.

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One of the most recurrent metaphors to account for female body language and sexuality is the water and the unstable economy of its fluids; thus, with reference to female writing, Luce Irigaray proposed the particularity of female language through the idea of fluid, which “like that other, inside/outside of philosophical discourse—is, by nature, unstable. Unless it is subordinated to geometrism, or (?) idealized” (1985a, p.  112). Irigaray opposes this mechanics of fluids to the solid mechanics and to the rationality of the subject: “Woman never speaks the same way. What she emits is flowing, fluctuating. Blurring. And she is not listened to, unless proper meaning (meaning of proper) is lost. Whence the resistance to that voice that overflows the ‘subject’. Which the ‘subject’ then congeals, freezes, in its categories until it paralyzes the voice in its flow” (1985a, p. 112). Following this mechanics of fluids, in this scene bodies fluctuate, thus emphasising the instability of desire and the resistance to the materiality from which consumption and the imperial/male gaze fragment the female sexualised body. Moreover, the fluidity convened by the feminine language to which Irigaray referred to is enhanced in this scene through the play, the confusion of bodies, the movement of the sand and the exchange of positions in which Anne passes under the legs of Noelí, not only to represent the elusive and unstable nature of fluids—and of the female sexual pleasure—but also, to locate the erotisation at the borders and confines of the materiality of the female body. These ideas relate to what Adrienne Rich called “lesbian existence” and that comprise the erotic “as that which is unconfined to any single part of the body or solely to the body itself” (1986, p. 53). The water is the place where not only the possibility of representing lesbian desire beyond the material limits of the body takes place but also the building of a gaze that distances itself from colonial regulations and male pleasure. Other scenes of their sex/love encounters take part in the context of a marine landscape. In one of these, long palm trees, mountains and the sea in the background frame the image of them at the lawn of Anne’s house. As the camera gets closer, we find Noelí laying down in a blanket and Anne leaning back on Noelí’s body, while we hear Noelí’s voice asking Anne about her family and her past (Fig. 6.5). The image of both women recovers an idyllic stamp of overflowing heterosexual and colonial references; however, contrary to the expected servitude, the presence of Noelí bursts onto the stage to dismantle the empirical order from which the Caribbean landscape has been invented and controlled.

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Fig. 6.5  Sand Dollars (2014). Dir. Laura Amelia Guzmán and Israel Cárdenas

In a moment of intimacy and confession, Anne answers some of Noelí’s questions regarding her conflictive relationship with her son and the reasons for their distancing, thus developing a seemingly intimate bond between them. From the moment they walk hand in hand, to the scene where they lie on the grass, there is an interruption of the logic that conceives of the landscape as an imaginary way of organising  their natural elements into a whole (Tinsley). This interruption is produced both by the visibility of a lesbian relationship that, in their race and age differences, is far from the ideal representation of lesbian bodies imagined by the male gaze and by the inscription of Noelí—and her poverty, her loving fluctuation and her race—on a scene whose representation and enjoyment is intended for the European imagination. The discomfort produced by her questions as well as her bodily comfort and the naturalness of her movements make Noelí appropriate this natural and marine landscape on her own terms and conditions. In a similar way, Anne’s conflict is expressed in a turbulent and motioning sea to which she enters to go deep into it, to then get out exhausted and return to Noelí. Pain and desire are thus the components of a relationship that makes the sea its language and its materiality, and that strip the landscape—and the female racialised body as an extension of it—of the order, control and sexualisation inscribed on it for centuries by the colonial gaze.

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 “I Like Making Love to Women. Don’t You?” The Lesbian Body, Disease and the Marine Imaginary in Liz in September Liz in September (dir. Fina Torres 2013) is a film produced and filmed in Venezuela, with the Morrocoy National Park as the stage and protagonist. The plot revolves around the relationship between Liz (Patricia Velázquez), who from the first scene, floating at sea, refers to herself as a lesbian woman, and Eva (Eloísa Marturén), a heterosexual woman who grieves the death of her son, suspects her husband’s infidelity and who accidentally ends up in a heavenly inn at the seashore, “The Blue Rabbit,” run by Margot (Eva Escobar). At this paradisiac place,  Liz and her five lesbian friends (a group made up of lovers, friends and former partners), meet annually to celebrate Liz’s birthday, but also to live their sexuality without secrecy or censorship. In Liz in September, the story heads in two directions of which Liz is the starting point: the reflection about the meaning of disease, on the one hand, and the regenerative capacity of friendship and love between women, on the other. Liz suffers from terminal cancer and this borderline situation coupled with her seductive personality, the security of her sexuality and Eva’s attractiveness, leads her to bet on her friends that she can make Eva fall in love with her in three days. However, what at the beginning was only a game became, in a few days, a love relationship that problematises the link between the female body and the Edenic nature, and whose turn lies on the promise of a new generation and political and emotional legacy that will last in Eva’s daughter. Both the conception of motherhood as a “profoundly female experience” and this form of community among women (Rich 1986, pp. 52–53) were understood as constitutive elements of the “lesbian existence” by lesbian feminists of the 1970s and 1980s—and outlined, to a large extent, the studies on lesbian language, body and desire. Although these revolutionary vindications may seem problematic to some feminists today, their representation in the context of contemporary Hispanic Caribbean cinema is, without a doubt, an innovative approach. Among other reasons, because not only Liz’s relationship with the sea—to which I will refer later—implies a recognition of the subjectivity that moves away from empirical rationality about women and the landscape, but also because the relationship of these friends with the natural landscape allows for the appropriation of a desire and the resignification of a materiality that, since

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the imperial imaginary of the conquest, has been reserved for the pleasure of the male gaze. Packed with symbolisms from the same names of the leading characters—let’s recall that the meaning of Eve in Hebrew is “source of life,” and that of Liz is “the promise of God”—this film is positioned from a political place that gives visibility to the lesbian subject and desire in the Caribbean context—particularly the Venezuelan Caribbean—but that also subverts the heterosexual ties of family and romance. Therefore, even if her director has insisted on the universality of the experiences represented in this film,9 the very fact of being an adaptation of Jane Chambers’ Last Summer at Bluefish Cove permeates Liz in September with a political orientation that seeks to question the moralising and negative stereotypes of lesbianism, in order to inscribe lesbian identity and subjectivity in the Caribbean imaginary from a friendly, positive and unthreatening place.10 As we are shown at the beginning of the film, Liz fully enjoys her sexuality and reaffirms herself on it and on the power of her beauty, especially after her parents kicked her out of the house when they discovered that she was a lesbian, and she began her career as fashion model. In addition to being beautiful, the seduction game makes Liz grow, which is why— unlike the motorcycle that Noelí rides in Sand Dollars—Liz’s motorcycle more than a means of transport is an expression of empowerment and freedom. In this film we do not witness their characters’ doubts about their sexuality—neither from Liz nor from her friends, among whom there are divorced women and mothers who maintain a harmonious relationship with their male ex-partners—not even Eva shows resistance when Liz undertakes her love “conquest.” No one leads a traumatic coming out— only Dolores (Mimí Lazo), a well-known doctor and writer, refuses to recognise herself as a lesbian outside her circle of friends and lovers for fear of society rumours and homophobia—nor there is a negotiation attempt with heteropatriarchal society. In this sense, we only find scarce scenes and dialogues that remind us of the difficulty of lesbian women to fully live their sexuality in public: for example, a scene of Liz repairing Eva’s car at the town garage reminds us that homophobic insults and threats are a common behaviour, particularly coming from men. There is also a comment by Dolores in which she affirms, while eating with her friends and fearing that Eva would discover her sexuality, that “being gay in this country is shit;” or maybe Eva’s naïve reaction when she meets them all and they not only reveal that they are lesbians but also that some of them are couples (Fig. 6.6). Rather, representing a sort of Caribbean lesbian arcade,

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Fig. 6.6  Liz in September (2013). Dir. Fina Torres

Liz and her friends gather in this paradisiacal environment to live their sexuality in an unapologetic way and to shape a relationship of sisterhood—or lesbian continuum, in Adrianne Rich terms—that reinforces mutual support and love between women. Thus the context of their love and sexuality dismantles the forms of regulation both colonial and national that sexualise the natural landscape and represent the female body as an extension of nature. Although many reviews, especially  those published by entertainment magazines in the United States,11 have criticised the sweetened character of Liz in September, and have pointed out the incandescence produced by the soap opera beauty of the light skinned actresses and the paradisiacal background scenario, this is a pretty risky film, particularly considering that it is framed within the Venezuela sexist and homophobic context. Undoubtedly, it is difficult to project a look at sexuality that problematises sexual categories when there are few representations that challenge lesbophobia with positive images about female homoerotism in the Caribbean, that is, when the approach and representation of openly lesbian characters and plots in the cinema and contemporary narrative of the Caribbean are of recent data.12 This is unquestionably the political merit of this film, as well as one of the reasons to understand an approach that an Anglo-­ European viewer can consider dated and even conservative. Nevertheless, it is still more interesting to look at how that this representation of lesbian love is produced by means of a gaze that problematises the imaginary that understands the sexuality of the Caribbean woman as part of nature and landscape. The purpose of creating a positive image that

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vindicates lesbian identity goes further in Liz in September by subverting the representation of the female body, not only through the inscription of the sick body, but also by way of the exploration of a lesbian imaginary that highlights the mother’s bond and the female genealogy through an echogenerative process of death and regeneration, which materialises in Eva’s daughter, also called Liz, and who we see in the final scene of the movie, swimming in the sea. This representation defies the Utopian order and the imaginary of consumption that promotes heterosexual romance, but also allows the circularity of a narrative in which the sea fluids defy the normativity in temporal linearity, as well as the “location” of eroticism in the body and the exaltation of feminine beauty as part of a rational and explorable natural landscape. Liz character is perhaps the one that embodies best the dissidence with the heterosexist model of Caribbean femininity, and the one that supposes the vanishing point that opens up the possibilities for reflection on the subject and the lesbian body proposed by Monique Wittig. Liz’s subjectivity is constructed from her lesbian sexuality in the first scene (Fig. 6.7): — I was born gay, no doubt about it, and later, when I started to have experiences with girls, I turned even more gay. I liked it. I like women a lot. A lot. I like making love to women. Don’t you? When you think of me, Dolores,13 when I’m no longer around, you’ll remember me like this… floating … floating … floating…

Fig. 6.7  Liz in September (2013). Dir. Fina Torres

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Fig. 6.8  Liz in September (2013). Dir. Fina Torres

The fact that the film begins with this statement to the audience and that this happens while she floats in the sea dismantles humanist thinking from which the empirical subject defines her subjectivity. While talking, Liz leans back and floats (Fig. 6.8). The image that follows focuses on her from the depth of the sea, and the light that outlines her body upside down, suspended in the sea, creates an amphibious silhouette that confuses the limits of the human body and the animal body, and thus displaces the kingdom of the intelligible in the configuration of the subject. In turn, it represents a body whose materiality transcends the conventional representation of the female body and gender, to, as Wittig demanded, project a body that, from its sexuality, is recognized as a hybrid, inaccurate to classify and resistant to the male—and colonial—gaze. The next day after Eva’s arrival, Liz convinces her to accompany her to dive. Eva accepts and they go together in a boat piloted by Liz. It is Liz, too, who takes Eva’s hand while they dive together and their amphibious image doubles as they swim and explore the corals next to the school of fish. In this scene, the water and the sound of the bubbles merge with Eva and Liz’s swim to suggest the flow of desire, but also the recognition in a space whose rhythm and movement resist the precision of the terrestrial landscape: “Like Janus—Irene Depetris Chauvin affirms—the sea has a double face: as alma mater, the nourishing mother who provides food to the inhabitants of the coast is, at the same time, an impulsive force of a changing nature with which the human cannot entirely deal with” (2019, p.  129). The flow of this scene is suddenly interrupted by Liz’s severe

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headache that forces them to refuge in the shore where a storm foretells Liz’s tragic destiny. In the midst of the different scenes of celebration, meals and enjoyment with which Liz’s friends enjoy their stay at the inn, Liz is having painful episodes due to her terminal cancer, which she alternates with shelters at sea and moments of seduction to Eva. These contrasts between life and death represent not only the dichotomy between marine and terrestrial life, but also an alteration of the balance evoked by the marine landscape that Liz and her friends inhabit. As Gabriela Nouzeille explains, the landscape is not just “the iconographic genre with which the imperial gaze shaped the perception of nature,” specifically, the landscape “refers to a western way of perceiving space and imagining a relationship with nature in terms of a scene located at a certain distance from the observer, as if it were a painting.” According to this perspective, “the landscape hides the subjectivity that is inherent to it and that gives it meaning and value,” in its representation as a pre-­ existing reality, the landscape interpellates the public and appeals to the transparency of the vision, with what it becomes naturalised as “an instrument of power that reinforces a way of seeing the world” (2002, pp. 20–21). As part of this imperial gaze that orders and regulates space, “women appear as territory and space, source of erotic-epistemological enjoyment and provocation for the male conqueror” (2002, p. 20). In Liz in September, the possibility of subverting the orderly rationality in which the female body is projected as materialisation of the male/imperial desire is produced by the inclusion of Liz as part of the landscape. In one scene, in particular, Liz walks towards the inn’s jetty by a gangway that crosses a mangrove that is barely illuminated by the green of its canopies and a few faint sunrays. As she walks, she reflects on her death, the passage of time and the absence of God. Upon reaching the end of the jetty, she meets a serene and infinite sea horizon, she takes off her clothes without us seeing her, and she then throws herself into the sea to swim. Instead of exhibiting a sexualised body that merges with the beauty of the landscape, the body that is thrown into the water is a diseased body with cancer, that is, a de-sexualised body, unappetizing, lacking vitality and desire (Sontag 1978, p. 13), whose subjectivity can only be recognised in the water and in its regenerative and ancestral power. In the Caribbean cultures, Yemayá is the maritime goddess par excellence. Water, fluids and, particularly, the sea are the places that define the reign of Yemayá, who, according to Lydia Cabrera: “is a Universal Queen

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because she is the Water, the salty and the sweet one, the Sea, the Mother of everything created it. She feeds everyone, being the World earth and sea, the earth and everything that lives on earth, thanks to Her she is sustained. Without water, animals, men and plants would die” (1996, pp. 20–21). This creative and regenerating power that symbolizes Yemayá leads us towards a logic that escapes Western epistemological rationality, and towards a conception of femininity that is not recognised in the landscape but in an original language that emphasises sexuality and its maternal function. Like Yemayá, Liz finds in the water her place of desire and healing. After Eva’s husband went looking for her to continue the journey that would take them together to their original trip, Eva asks him to stop the car, makes love with him, for the last time, and returns to the inn looking for Liz. Not finding her, she explores her room and, in the bathroom, she finds the medication for her cancer. Liz disappears for hours to later be found in a rural town, which, like in Sand Dollars, is inhabited by Afro-descendants, who dance and play dominoes, and have no other role in the rest of the film than the representation of racial stereotypes, of alterity and disorder, as well as the connection to Yoruba religion. Liz is found drunk by her friends and is taken to the inn where Eva decides to lie beside her. Dawn finds them together and, while they kiss, Liz asks Eva: “Why did you come back?” to what Eva replies, “Because Changó drove me crazy.” The reference to Changó that connects us, symbolically, with Yemayá as mother and queen of creation is not random, because as a result of her last sex encounter with her husband, Eva will become pregnant, and her pregnancy will coincide precisely with the fullness of love with Liz and her progressive death. After an almost terminal relapse, Liz decides to leave the hospital and spend her last days at the inn, next to Eva, who will take care of her and help her die. Before she dies, Liz asks Eva to teach her daughter to dive, to hold her breath underwater, to open her eyes in the water. Liz’s death returns her to the gangway, to a partially illuminated mangrove until she reaches a sea that opens up as her voice disappears. In the final scene of the movie, we return to the inn a few years later, where her friends play together and share their time with their children. This time Eva also accompanies them and, while she reads, a girl named Liz, Eva’s daughter, comes running through the sand, climbs the gangway and throws herself into the sea to swim (Figs. 6.9 and 6.10). Eva accompanies

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Fig. 6.9  Liz in September (2013). Dir. Fina Torres

Fig. 6.10  Liz in September (2013). Dir. Fina Torres

her and the last image represents them both as amphibians swimming together and losing themselves between the sea and the sand. With this circular ending, the gaze extends on Eva and her daughter the fluidity of bodies that resists their normalisation and rescues the original foundation of the “body to body with the mother” (1985b, p. 11), put forward by Luce Irigaray. That is, we find a new representation of desire in which the erotic does not materialise in the female body or is reproduced by the male gaze, but is projected in the acknowledgement of a female genealogy that, in the recognition of the mother, it aims at, in Irigaray’s words, “discovering our sexual identity, that is, the uniqueness of our self-eroticims, of our narcissism, the uniqueness of our

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homosexuality” (1985b, p. 15), a homosexuality that is given by maternal love and that determines that, for women, “The first relationship of desire and love is directed to the body of a woman” (1985b, p. 16). It is, then, towards maternal enjoyment, towards the recognition of the subject through the language and images of the fluids, it is towards the representation of the sea as origin and regeneration, and as a space that challenges the imperial and male gaze and the materialisation of desire in the female body where Liz in September leads us.

Notes 1. According to Kempadoo (2000), in the case of black women’s femininity in the Caribbean, two main stereotypes have been identified that were particular to this region during slavery: “The first drew from the general perceptions of Africans by Europeans as ‘slaves by nature’ and defined slave women as passive, downtrodden, subservient, resigned workers.” The second focused on black female sexuality and the sexual functions from which the notions of slaves spread as “sexually promiscuous, ‘cruel and negligent as a mother, fickle as a wife’ and immoral.” Consequently, sexual imaginary relied on associations between black femininity and natural instincts, on the one hand, and promiscuity and immorality and pathology, on the other, to awaken disgust and repugnance in order to maintain slavery by the Creole plantocracy or, alternatively, to illustrate the abolitionist cause emphasizing how slavery degraded the lives of Africans. 2. Gabriela Nouzeilles also suggests that “the feminization of nature would not simply be the result of a projection of (male) desire of control of nature, but also the perverse expression of a certain nostalgia for what was lost in the same act of possession” (2002, p. 20). 3. According to Padilla: “Given the dramatic growth of vacationers who regularly travel to tourism-dependent nations, in conjunction with the particular racialised constructions of Caribbean sexuality that have circulated globally since the colonial era, it is perhaps not surprising that the Caribbean is often constructed by tourists as a utopian space in which to escape restrictive moral-sexual codes at home, as well as to enjoy the greater sexual ‘freedom’ presumably permitted in ‘primitive’ Caribbean societies” (Padilla 2007, p. 4). 4. The reference to the “male gaze” points to Laura Mulvey’s already classic text, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), in which the British scholar explores the scopophilia, that is, the erotic pleasure involved in looking at women’s body performed by the “male (heterosexual) gaze” in classic narrative cinema, which splits into an active/male and other pas-

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sive/female positions: “The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness” (Mulvey 1989, p. 19). 5. Although the still scarce production of films in the Hispanic Caribbean focusing on gay and transsexual relationships outnumbers those on lesbian desire and love, in the last years there has been a growing production of short films, documentaries and feature films that focus on lesbian relationships, such as the Puerto Rican-Venezuela full-length film Extra Terrestrial (2017, dir. Carla Cavina), or the documentaries Being a Family (Puerto Rico—2017, dir. Teresa Previdi) and Mamis: A Family Portrait (Cuba—2013, dir. Virginia Fuentes). As the titles of these documentaries suggest, there is an increasing interest—at least in the field of documentary films—in the representation of lesbian families and maternity in the Hispanic Caribbean context, particularly regarding the legal and social obstacles they have to overcome to become mothers. That is, as Mabel Cuesta and Consuelo Martínez-Reyes (2019) explain in their study of lesbian documentaries produced in Cuba and Puerto Rico during the first decade of the twenty-first century, these documentaries show how lesbian sexuality is not the mainly or solely concern of lesbian films in the Hispanic Caribbean, but that this goes beyond it to focus on their everyday life and their aims to problematise heteronormative maternity and traditional family roles. 6. The stanzas of unrequired love that Cordero sings at the beginning and at the end of the film give this a circular structure that dismantles the fantasies of the Caribbean as a place for fun, sex and relax sold by the sex tourist industry. Thus, this heartbreaking feeling resonates in the stanzas sang by Cordero: “I live in grief / because I don’t see you here / and because you’re away / from my humble heart. // You fill me with excitement, / I would give anything to see you, / but because of my bad luck / I can’t enjoy your delights / and if you don’t love me / it will be the cause of my death. // There is no woman / that I love more than you / and I sign to you from here / because you are my delight. // I would like to have you / forever by my side, / but because of my bad luck / I can’t enjoy your delights / and if you don’t love me / it will be the cause of my death. // Love of my heart, / It will be the cause of my death.” [“Vivo en la desolación / porque no te veo presente / que porque te hayas ausente / de mi humilde corazón. // Tú me llenas de ilusión, / cuánto yo diera por verte, / pero por mi mala suerte / no gozo de tus placeres / y si tú a mí no me quieres / va a ser causa de mi muerte. // Yo no hallaré otra mujer / que la quiera más que a ti / y hoy te canto desde aquí / porque tú eres mi

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placer. // Y te quisiera tener / a mi lado para siempre, / pero por mi mala suerte / no gozo de tus placeres / y si tú a mí no me quieres / va a ser causa de mi muerte. // Negra del alma, / va a ser causa de mi muerte.”] 7. This racialisation of sex tourism is also organised by means of the representation of queer subjects of colour only as objects and not subjects of consumption. As Jasbir Kaur Puar explains in the context of gay and lesbian sex tourism: “queers of color are often not represented in the industry literature but, rather, are invoked through the specter of the native, the other, the ‘Third World’; in other words, they are the bodies most displaced by these emerging forms of queer global capital and consumption, as well as the ones most available for consumption as the fetishised queer other. A culturally defined and driven homophobia does not, after all, deflect the lure of an exotic (queer) paradise; instead, it encourages a continuity of colonial constructions of tourism as a travel adventure into uncharted territory laden with the possibility of taboo sexual encounters, illicit seductions, and dangerous liaisons—a version of what Renato Rosaldo terms ‘imperial nostalgia’. Thus the desire to be free of homophobia comes up against the primitive vision of the tourist imaginary of an unspoiled, undiscovered paradise, while fantasies of sexual fluidity of preidentity, precapitalist, premodern times conjoin nicely with the tourist agenda, leaving intact a queer modern-­ versus-­ primitive native binary” (2002, p. 113). 8. It is at least striking in this sense that the Dominican feature film Hermafrodita (2009), directed by Albert Xavier, only suggests tangentially the subject of sexuality and gender identity of the protagonist. That is, although the violence exerted by her boyfriend, Molasses, on the body of María, the main character, and the secret attraction that Wanda has for her girlfriend, the narrative plot of this film is rather oriented towards the construction of a social account about the social and economic difficulties for hermaphrodite subjects of the Barahona community in the Dominican Republic. See, among others, the analysis of this film by Consuelo Martínez Reyes in “La fluidez del género como estrategia en el cine y la literatura lésbicos del Caribe hispano” (2016). 9. Almost constantly, in each of the interviews and premiere events of the film in Venezuela, Fina Torres insisted on disassociating her film from the idea that her film or its proposal was to be considered as gay cinema. For instance, even before its release, a review published in the Caracas based newspaper El Nacional promoted the film with the headline: “Fina Torres: ‘Liz in September is not a gay movie’” (Moreno González 2014). A few days before, in another interview published in the Zulian-based newspaper Panorama, entitled “Director Fina Torres to PANORAMA: ‘I did not

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make a gay movie’” (“Directora Fina Torres a PANORAMA: ‘No hice una película gay’”, 2014), Fina Torres insisted on this same argument: “It is not a gay movie. I would never say that it is a gay film. It is a drama with homosexual characters whose problems are absolutely universal, which can happen to anyone regardless of his/her sexual preference. That is where the key to the movie is. It will not center on the fact that someone comes or does not come out of the closet, but rather it will represent a group of women that are destined to solve problems like any other person, or for example, how to face death and illness, how to see friendship, and love as a deep and inexplicable connection.” 10. In this sense, the idea of “paradigm” from which Alberto Mira approaches the conceptual framework around which the lesbian subject is constructed and the homoerotic desire in the audiovisual media is represented is more than suitable to understand the political dimension of this film: “Far from existing in a vacuum,” Mira points out, “lesbian images always appear in context, from a perspective, and this perspective is organised in terms of frameworks of understanding called paradigms. These frameworks can propose a coincidence or a genealogy and are often related to moral systems, with which the effect of the discursive labeling operation was discrimination of certain individuals […]. If the ideas contain prejudices, they will perpetuate among the poorly prepared viewers or who are not aware of how the fiction materials have been generated” (2012, pp. 41–42). The importance of considering the paradigm in the organisation and meaning of the cinematographic plot is not meaningless, not only because the stories that are reproduced in the cinema, television, songs and so forth “participate in a whole series of mythologies on how desire and emotions work,” but also because “they work by opposition […] and reach their ultimate meaning in a closure that often acquires moral value and has to do with the attainment or frustration of desire” (2012, p. 42). Hence, “In the case of something as elusive and with as little stability reference as homosexuality […], the paradigm is really what makes certain practices be understood in one way or another in a social context” (p. 42). 11. See, among other, the review written by Dennis Harvey (2016) for Variety, and the one by Elizabeth Kerr (2015) for Hollywood Reporter. 12. In the context of Venezuelan cinema, the originality of Liz in September rests on the incorporation of  lesbian relationships and characters as the main subject of the film’s plot, as in the case of other recent Venezuelan films such as Blue and Not So Pink (Azul y no tan rosa, dir. Miguel Ferrari, 2012) or From Afar (Desde allá, dir. Lorenzo Vigas, 2015), where the narratives represent different conflicts regarding homosexual desire and gay identity of their protagonists. In addition, and although the approach was oriented towards the crisis of the heterosexual conjugal models and the

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emotional quests of their characters, lesbian characters and romances were already part of the Venezuelan cinematography through some paradigmatic films such as Male and Female (Macho y hembra, 1985), directed by Mauricio Walerstein. For a panoramic approach regarding LGTBI representations in Venezuelan cinema, see Peña Zerpa and Peña Zerpa (2013). Moreover, for an analysis of Cheila, a House for Mom (Cheila, una casa pa’ maíta, dir. Eduardo Barberena, 2010), the first Venezuelan movie including a female transsexual protagonist, see Hernández (2015). 13. Dolores is important to Liz because, in addition to being a doctor and her former partner, she is the only character who at the beginning of the film knows that Liz is ill with cancer. In fact, given Liz’s refusal to receive chemotherapy, it is Dolores who gives her morphine to help her overcome her pain episodes.

Bibliography Brennan, Denise. What’s Love Got to Do with It?: Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004. Cabrera, Lydia. Yemayá y Ochún. Kariocha, Iyalorichas y Olorichas. Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1996. Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs 1, 4 (Summer, 1976): 875–893. Cuesta, Mabel and Consuelo Martínez-Reyes. “Representaciones de la maternidad lésbica en el cine de Cuba y Puerto Rico.” Cuadernos de Literatura XXIII, 45 (enero-junio, 2019): 22–46. Accessed September 2, 2019. https://revistas. javeriana.edu.co/index.php/cualit/article/view/27709. De Lauretis, Teresa. “Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation.” [1988] In Figures of Resistance. Essays in Feminist Theory, edited by Patricia White, 48–71. University of Illinois Press, 2007. Deleuze, Giles. Cinema 1. The Movement-Image. [1983] Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M., Renée K.  Gosson, and George B.  Handley, eds. Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2005. Depetris Chauvin, Irene. “Ecologías líquidas, geografías acuáticas en las artes audiovisuales de Brasil, Argentina y Chile.” 452°F. Revista de Teoría de la Literatura y Literatura Comparada 21 (2019): 125–150. Accessed September 2, 2019. http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/452f/article/view/27739/29542.

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“Directora Fina Torres a PANORAMA: ‘No hice una película gay’.” Panorama, September 17, 2014. Accessed May 17, 2016. https://www.panorama.com. ve/contenidos/2014/09/17/noticia_0100.html. Guzmán, Laura Amelia and Israel Cárdenas, dir. Dólares de arena. Aurora Dominicana, Canana Films and Rei Cine, 2014. Harvey, Dennis. “Film Review ‘Liz in September’.” Variety, January 20, 2016. Accessed March 4, 2019. https://variety.com/2016/film/reviews/ liz-in-september-review-1201679719/. Hernández, Wilfredo. “De La quinta Dayana a Cheila, una casa pa’ maíta: representaciones de la transexualidad femenina.” Revista Cuadernos de Literatura del Caribe e Hispanoamérica 22 (2015): 69–90. Accessed March 4, 2019. http://investigaciones.uniatlantico.edu.co/revistas/index.php/cuadernos_ literatura/article/view/1594/html_15. Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which is Not One. [1977] Translated by Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1985a. ———. “El cuerpo a cuerpo con la madre.” In El cuerpo a cuerpo con la madre. El otro género de la naturaleza. Otro modo de sentir. Barcelona: Lasal, 1985b. Kaplan, E.  Ann. Looking for the Other. Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze. New York and London: Routledge, 1997. E-book. Kempadoo, Kamala. Sexing the Caribbean. Gender, Race, and Sexual Labor. New York and London: Routlegde, 2004. ———. “Gender, Race and Sex: Exoticism in the Caribbean.” Paper delivered at the International Symposium “Challenge of the Difference,” Workshop 5. Universidade Federal da Bahia, Salvador, Bahia: Brasil. 9–12, 2000. Accessed May 17, 2016. http://www.desafio.ufba.br/gt5_lista.html. Kerr, Elizabeth. “‘Liz in September:’ Filmart Review.” Hollywood Reporter, March 30, 2015. Accessed March 4, 2019. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ review/liz-september-filmart-review-785238. Martínez Reyes, Consuelo. “La fluidez del género como estrategia en el cine y la literatura lésbicos del Caribe hispano.” In Nuestro Caribe. Poder, raza y postnacionalismo desde los límites del mapa LGBTQ, edited by Mabel Cuesta, 136–150. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Editorial Isla Negra, 2016. Mira, Alberto. “¿Gay, queer, gender…? Paradigmas críticos. El ejemplo de representación lésbica en las nuevas series”. In Nuevas subjetividades/Sexualidades literarias, edited by María Teresa Vera-Rojas, 41–52. Madrid: Egales, 2012. Moreno González, Sergio. “Fina Torres: ‘Liz en septiembre no es una película gay’.” El Nacional, September 21, 2014.  Accessed May 17, 2016. http:// w w w. e l - n a c i o n a l . c o m / e s c e n a s / F i n a - To r r e s - i L i z - s e p t i e m b r e i pelicula_0_486551370.html. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Visual and Other Pleasures, 14–26. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.

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Nouzeilles, Gabriela. “Introducción.” In La naturaleza en disputa. Retóricas del cuerpo y el paisaje en América latina, compiled by Gabriela Nouzeilles, 11–38. Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2002. Padilla, Mark. Caribbean Pleasure Industry: Tourism, Sexuality, and Aids in the Dominican Republic. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007. Peña Zerpa, José Alirio and Claritza Arlenet Peña Zerpa. Arcoíris tricolor. Producciones audiovisuales sexodiversas venezolanas (1982–2012). Germany: Editorial Académica Española, 2013. Puar, Jasbir Kaur. “Circuits of Queer Mobility. Tourism, Travel, and Globalization.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 8, 1–2 (Winter 2002): 101–137. Quintero Herencia, Juan Carlos. La hoja de mar (:) Efecto archipiélago I. Leiden: Almenara, 2016. Rich, Adrianne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence (1980).” In Blood, Bread, and Poetry. Selected Prose 1979–1985. 23–75. New  York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1986. Segarra, Marta. “Cuerpos y deseo en el cine de mujeres.” Estudios. Revista del Centro de Estudios Avanzados 27 (enero–junio 2012): 133–142.  Accessed March 4, 2019. https://revistas.unc.edu.ar/index.php/restudios/article/ view/3155. Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978. Tinsley, Omise’eke Natasha. Thiefing Sugar. Eroticism between Women in Caribbean Literature. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010. E-book. Torres, Fina, dir. Liz en septiembre. Ararare Films, CNAC and Fundación Villa del Cine, 2013. Wittig, Monique. The Lesbian Body. Translated by D.  Le Vay. London: Peter Owen, 1975.

CHAPTER 7

Social Engagement and/against Creativity: Art Making, Collective Agency and the Politics of Urgency in the Hispanic Caribbean Carlos Garrido Castellano

Introduction Between August and October 2017, Maria and Irma struck Puerto Rico. The impact of both hurricanes was considered to be the worst environmental disaster in the history of the island. Not only Puerto Rican infrastructures and private household were severely damaged; the hurricanes also provoked a crisis that affected Puerto Ricans at all levels. The crisis revealed the extent to which crucial issues of resilience and liveability in the island were still affected by its colonial status. This became clear in March 2019, when the Trump administration denied further disaster aid after downplaying the magnitude of the catastrophe. By saying that both

C. Garrido Castellano (*) Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. López, M. T. Vera-Rojas (eds.), New Perspectives on Hispanic Caribbean Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51498-3_7

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hurricanes did not reach the magnitude of Katrina in New Orleans and by outspokenly criticising Puerto Rican politicians for being incapable of managing the crisis, US President Donald J. Trump publicly staged a negative image of Puerto Rico that stressed the island’s externality in relation to the United States. The unfortunate management of the situation reveals more than a lack of knowledge about the situation in the island by side of the Republican administration; it also evidenced the marginal role that Puerto Rico occupies within US geopolitics. On a more general level, the denial of help reiterated and restaged a common trope of the Caribbean as a precarious place naturally subjected to environmental hazards and consequently in need of external aid and tutorship. By depicting the Caribbean as an unmanageable territory in constant need of economic help and supervision, Trump’s discourse also revived traditional colonial images of the Caribbean as an exotic space where (environmental) disasters are “natural” (both in the sense of inherent to the land and outside of human control, outside history). Even more than this, by denying any possible comparison with similar catastrophes taking place in “American soil,” the speech restaged the division of the Americas, detaching the Caribbean from North America and deeming the region a territory of secondary importance. A few months later, in November 2017, the San Juan-based art space BetaLocal opened a call to react against the consequences of both hurricanes. El Serrucho (The Hand Saw), a programme of economic support through micro-scholarship for artistic creators, was converted into an emergency fund that allowed many Puerto Rican artists to cope with a wide variety of structural needs. As many of those creators worked side by side with local communities, the fund particularly targeted those groups as well, therefore having a greater impact in wider artistic communities. Rather than supporting individual artists working alongside the restricted area of Old San Juan or “old” acquaintances of BetaLocal, El Serrucho was mobilised as an expansive and transferable tool. This process also implied decentralising the organisational capacity of BetaLocal and making its role more flexible: in this case, all the emphasis was put in supporting the petitions of the Puerto Rican artistic community (Figs. 7.1 and 7.2). The use of El Serrucho as an emergency fund to attenuate the consequences of hurricanes Maria and Irma and to support attitudes of cultural and material resilience continues a decades-long tradition of solidarity and comradeship within the Puerto Rican artistic medium (see Figs.  7.1 and 7.2). Since the urgency of the situation demanded “real” actions, the local artistic community put the emphasis on solving specific, tangible

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Fig. 7.1  Untitled. 2017. (Photograph by Abraham Cruzvillegas. Image courtesy of Sofía Gallisá)

needs affecting artists as much as the community at large. In this case, the creative potential of visual artists was mobilised and put to task for a wider economy of mutual caring and restoration, continuing a tradition of cooperation that is intrinsic to the logic of artistic production in Puerto Rico (see Segarra 2012; Velázquez Collazo 2014; López 2019). Dealing with the politics of culture in post-Fordist times, Hito Steyerl (2011, p. 31) suggests that a good way of keeping track of the social relevance (or lack thereof) of contemporary art is to “look at what [art]

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Fig. 7.2  Untitled. 2017. (Photograph by Sofía Gallisá. Image courtesy of Sofía Gallisá)

does—not what it shows.” In this regard, Steyerl also asks, “what is the function of art within disaster capitalism?” Considering the Hispanic Caribbean as a more than suitable space to find answers to those questions, in this chapter I argue that the recent transformations that many collaborative art projects and experimental art platforms are undergoing in the Hispanic Caribbean are eloquent of broader decisive shifts in cultural production. In this sense, the flexibilisation of the role of visual creators (and that of labour on a more generic level) mirrors the division of labour and the precariousness affecting many Caribbean cultural producers. Those cultural transformations, in any case, are far from straightforward: flexibilisation may imply that visual artists are closer to sociocultural concerns, but also that they can be part of the processes of generating precariousness and gentrification concomitant to creativity. Rejecting to simply celebrate or demonise artistic creativity, I argue that contemporary art poses important questions beyond the contemporary art medium in the

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Hispanic Caribbean. The work of Caribbean artists involved in “alternative” art spaces is not limited to representing the region. Rather, they increasingly invest in non-representational activities including networking, exhibition curating or community organising. Again, this multifaceted role is not restricted to the Caribbean. On the contrary, it is symptomatic of broader processes in late twentieth-century transformations in contemporary artistic production. At the same time, however, in the case of the Caribbean, it fulfils a crucial role in fuelling alternatives for social transformation despite the lack of public support. In this chapter, I explore the ambivalent role of “alternative” art institutions as symptomatic of the ways in which cultural creators attempt to redefine their role in the context of urban gentrification and marginalisation, and the proliferation of market-oriented creative industries. The second hypothesis posited in this chapter has to do with considering “alternative” art institutions in the Hispanic Caribbean as platforms that enable alternative modes of intraregional maritime creative articulations. Even more, the activity of these platforms anticipates broader debates in art aesthetics and social transformation. In this sense, the artistic dynamics linked to those platforms which take place in the Hispanic Caribbean acquire a wider repercussion and prepare for larger transnational shifts.

The Contradictions of Artistic Creativity in the Hispanic Caribbean Cultural creativity has become an omnipresent label, colonising every facet of life. The fact that disaster capitalism comes side by side with the booming of art markets and the increasing financialisation of every aspect of life should make us aware of the deep transformations undergoing at the heart of creativity. As Oli Mould (2018, p. 10) argues, creativity has become a master narrative behind social and personal aspirations: “contemporary society is formulated, operated and maintained with creativity as the core source of progress.” Deprived of any transformative potential, creativity has been mobilised to maintain the status quo and to encourage ongoing processes of privatisation and marginalisation. Contemporary art has been often supportive of these processes, becoming a tool used in the hands of neoliberal capitalism to deregulate and erode any form of collective solidarity. Artists (including art activists) have often found themselves trapped in this situation, becoming their own worst enemy (Sholette

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2017). But this is hardly the whole story. Creativity cannot be reduced to the process by which cultural initiatives pledge to capitalist logics. Indeed, there are many examples of creativity being repurposed as a potentially transformative practice. In the Hispanic Caribbean, where an art institutional texture exists at least from the 1960s on, museums and art biennials have been associated to an ambivalent image: on the one hand, they have always mobilised large segments of the population within and across the islands. On the other hand, art institutions have remained exclusive spaces at the reach of only a few. The emergence of artist-managed spaces around the 2000s presented an alternative to the biennial and gallery system. In the Caribbean, as elsewhere, the adoption by the artists of a more extradisciplinary and organisational role is part of a broader transformation in cultural creativity, one that privileges flexibility over specialisation while maintaining many of the privileges associated to artists as individual creators (see Holmes 2007). One can say that the flexibilisation of contemporary art practice has released artists from the burden of representing reality or of standing for a particular identity. At the same time, however, the increase in tuition fees for artistic educations has made many Caribbean artists dependent on the risks of economic logics, as art practice has growingly demanded great investments, unassumable for many. Finally, although these transformations have contributed to the pliability of artistic production, it has simultaneously inserted Caribbean visual creators into time-consuming managerial dynamics. The consequences of these transformations are still to be fully measured. Of course, nothing of this is new. The creation of artistic collectives has been a hallmark of Caribbean visual creativity for many decades. In the Hispanic Caribbean, artists have always joined efforts together and gathered to protest against the lack of institutional support. In the case of the Dominican Republic, for example, artistic creativity has been linked to the creation of art collectives. If we take the performance art scene as a model, we can see how many creative initiatives involve inviting fellow artists to interact and co-produce part of the work. Artworks by Silvano Lora and Geo Ripley, to name two pioneers in artistic multidisciplinary creativity, are indissolubly attached to collective artistic experimentation (see Garrido Castellano 2019). Silvano Lora’s Marginal Biennial, a counter-exhibition emerging in 1992 in response to the first Caribbean Biennial, anticipated many other community-based projects emerging across the Caribbean. In this case, the Marginal Biennial aimed to exhibit artworks rejected by the

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Caribbean Biennial in 1992, including experimental artistic manifestations not subsumable into the ethos of national identity. The Marginal Biennial retreated from the space of official institutions and moved to peripheral locations in Santo Domingo, denouncing the cultural spectacularisation and segregation behind the official commemorative programme set out by President Joaquín Balaguer in the context of the commemoration of Columbus’s “arrival” in the Americas. The event included the production of murals designed and made by local communities and the organisation of workshops open to all kinds of audiences. Removed from the focus of attention of Santo Domingo’s Ciudad Colonial, the event forced renowned artists, such as Lora, to reinvent themselves. In this case, artistic expertise was repurposed and put to the task of responding to broader, collective expectations. The dynamics promoted by the Marginal Biennial was crucial in challenging and complementing a biennial system, favouring individual creativity through the establishment of a competitive logic based on economic prizes. The final result was a shared process of apprenticeship that moved artists and audiences outside of their comfort zone. Once that position was assumed, all the stages of artistic production were redefined and negotiated from scratch. Accordingly, we could consider art initiatives such as El Serrucho as part of a broader process of cultural transformation in Puerto Rico that particularly affects the spaces where art is produced, displayed and discussed. BetaLocal, the platform where the initiative is organised, has survived as a self-managed structure counting only with scarce economic support from 2013 onwards. Like El Serrucho, many of the actions conducted by BetaLocal are oriented towards social transformation and cooperation. For example, the Iván Illich programme provides a forum for alternative, peer-to-peer education. The emphasis on the educational and collaborative nature of such initiatives acknowledges and reveals the difficulties of operating under economic precariousness. At the same time, it makes evident the importance of sustainability and cultural resilience, two of the main pillars of the Puerto Rican art ecosystem. The recent history of Puerto Rican art can be best summarised by alluding to the organisational role that many artists living inside and outside the island have adopted. This expansion of the traditional representational role attributed to visual creators constitutes a common trend that reaches back, complements and enlivens similar projects in the past.1 Puerto Rican “official institutions” have therefore found in this model a useful way of redefining their social role. Many have not hesitated in using (or

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appropriating) the potential of alternative platforms to transform their action. Concepts traditionally considered antithetic, such as improvisation and organisation, institutional power and informality, are nowadays part of the same equation. However, the flexibilisation of creativity in Puerto Rico (as elsewhere) is not without contradictions. A good way of conceptualising this paradigm in Puerto Rican artistic and cultural creativity is by approaching the quintessentially Boricua idea of brega. For Arcadio Díaz Quiñones, bregar means resisting the pressure imposed by external needs and demands, yet doing so from an oblique position, based on ongoing and sustained resistance rather than on theatrical revolutionary gestures (Díaz Quiñones 2000). Echoing Quiñones’s approach to cultural production, visual artists-­turned-flexible creators have accepted that they are part of a broader economic system they cannot overturn. This posture has, however, brought the whole Caribbean visual and cultural criticism face to face with a troubling doubt: are the artists, in fact, siding with the celebration of precariousness and economic dependence by romanticising an image of subalternity? In the case of Puerto Rico, the essays of Marta Traba and Nelson Rivera in the visual art field, and Juan Duchesne, Carlos Pabón or Juan Flores in a broader cultural discussion, have delved into this question in detail. We only need to walk the streets of Santurce, one of the most “artistry” neighbourhoods in San Juan, to figure out to what extent visual creativity can contribute to urban gentrification and ongoing marginalisation. Many of the “alternative” platforms that have emerged in the city are gathered around this area. The evolution of these spaces, and more particularly the pressing instability that conditions their functioning, is best understood when they are put side by side with the displacement of working-class families from the Santurce area. This process appears even more striking if we think that many of these art spaces championed a mode of community engagement and social cohabitation that relied on local solidarities. Consequently, the same initiatives seeking to create platforms for alternative exchanges in order to challenge social isolation are paradoxically contributing to the process of urban transformation that provokes that isolation in the first place. Inevitably, this situation is hardly unique. On the contrary, it represents a common trend affecting any global city and, as far as creative activity is concerned, the conditions in which collaborative projects are carried out: firstly, the adoption of an organisational role represents an “extra”

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workload difficult to carry since it is often achieved at the expense of family and leisure quality time. Secondly, despite the increasing attention that collaborative creativity is receiving, when artists embark on these initiatives they still have to bargain with a system that still values individual creativity and originality as synonyms of success. Although interpersonal caring and social reproductive work play an increasingly crucial role in the art field, they are seldom measured under the same terms when it comes to determining who is going to participate in an artistic biennial or who gets hired to teach at academic level. Finally, we must not forget that many “informal” art platforms in the island are not eligible for cultural funding. The flexible structure of El Serrucho has allowed many art institutions akin to BetaLocal to familiarise themselves with the strategies needed to deal with the bureaucratic obstacles affecting cultural creativity. El Serrucho relies on international, mostly US funding, involving institutions such as the Ford, the Andy Warhol or the Robert Rauschenberg foundations. As dependence on external support is a common handicap in small- and mid-­ scale art institutions in the Global South, one is tempted to dismiss the label “alternative” often applied to these spaces. In this sense, it is clear that initiatives such as El Serrucho are far from exempt from the contradictions of operating on a transnational cultural landscape. Although they prompt collaborative processes and networking, they perpetuate a relation of dependence which, in one way or another, replicates old colonial patterns, with artistic or cultural institutions in the North funding creative practices in the South. Bearing in mind these contradictions, initiatives such as El Serrucho raises the possibility that this dependence may be subverted, or at least oriented, towards pressing ends a bit less vulnerable to monetisation. Its reorientation to the local economy of relief after hurricanes Maria and Irma reveals that creativity can also be mobilised in alternative ways. On the one hand, it is clear that collaborative processes, and more specifically those involving artists in organisational tasks, arise from, or are caught in, the contradictions of flexible capitalism. On the other hand, it has also become evident that they are not reduced to these contradictions. For instance, El Serrucho challenges the idea of crisis as an insurmountable, omnipresent reality, which cannot be questioned or addressed. Instead of recreating a specific representation of Puerto Rico based on crisis for external eyes, El Serrucho articulates and tests practical, collaborative responses to that situation.

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Linking the Caribbean The sense of urgency triggered by environmental or economic causes, which has led many Caribbean artists to join efforts and adopt a more flexible role as creators, has many consequences, one of the most interesting being the establishment of relational, submarine (and subversive) alliances. In the most recent survey of Caribbean visual creation, curators and scholars Tatiana Flores and Michelle Stephens propose “relational undercurrents” as a way of looking at the entanglements and cultural relations established by Caribbean visual artists. They argue “archipelagos may appear to be natural geographic formations, but in a Caribbean divided geopolitically and linguistically with different imperial pasts and constitutional forms, forging archipelagic connections is an intentional act” (2017, p.  26). What is interesting in this archipelagic conceptualisation of Caribbean creativity is the emphasis put into the active role of visual practitioners. Challenging the essentialisation of islands as places of isolation, and conceiving archipelagos as something else than the straightforward correlation between their cultural and geographical coordinates, Flores and Stephens’ perspective highlights the fact that cultural connections across the Caribbean are intentional, that is, they are circumstantial and therefore historically mutable. Behind this logic, a strategic purpose for creativity becomes possible. However, the emphasis on the tactical articulation of cultural links does not mean silencing the relations of dependence that still condition cultural production in the Caribbean. On the contrary, it implies being aware of the multiple ways in which Caribbean creators attempt to challenge these obstacles (Fig. 7.3). The omission of the artistic production from the Caribbean, and particularly from the Hispanic Caribbean (with the notable exception of Cuba), in broader Latin American debates can be linked to the insularity Flores and Stephens allude to. Despite the acute reaction of many Caribbean artists to pressing issues (such as environmental resilience, civic agency or transnational identity and identification) that very much shape cultural production and visual creativity in the Americas, Caribbean creators have been more often than not curated out of the major surveys produced within and outside the Latin American territory. This absence can be explained by referring to Nelson Maldonado-Torres’s idea that continental reason plays a central role in the perpetuation of coloniality. For Maldonado-Torres (2011), the division of the world into continents and self-enclosed regions is an inheritance from colonial governmentality.

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Fig. 7.3  Untitled. 2017. (Photograph by Juanky Álvarez. Image courtesy of Sofía Gallisá)

If colonialism categorised the globe as a collection of territories susceptible of being conceptualised, isolated and conquered, continental reason represents the ideological uncovering of this unnatural process under the apparently neutral image of a world map divided into neatly separated units. This artificial act of isolating the Caribbean from the rest of the Americas is also justified under the idea that Latin America, North America and the Caribbean had different historical evolutions. What is missing in this theorisation, however, are the multiple bonds that connect the Caribbean and the rest of the Americas, in the past as in the present. Visual creativity and, more specifically, collaborative, socially oriented initiatives, such as the ones we analyse in this chapter, are a possible way to uncover the heterogeneous links that connect this wider geography.2 Traditionally, mega-exhibitions and art biennials organised within the Hispanic Caribbean were understood as the privileged platforms to forge creative connections. Although the two work in quite different ways, biennials and mega-exhibitions privilege exchanges with local audiences and

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the delving into the contemporary situation of each Caribbean territory. And yet, in both cases, a short-term logic has prevailed over sustained engagement. Moreover, as already mentioned, both biennials and mega-­ exhibitions privilege the display of artistic objects produced by individual creators to the detriment of other creative processes, such as educational programmes or artistic research. The role of these exhibitionary platforms has been positive in many different ways. They have provided many creators with transnational forums to test their ideas. They have also funded many “high risk, high gain” art projects that otherwise would have hardly been materialised. Perhaps more importantly, they have contested the critical insularity of national art scenes, expanding the scope of artistic creativity and encouraging discussion with larger audiences. On a broader picture, we can say that the articulation of collaborative platforms within the last two decades has reinforced the maritime links among Caribbean territories beyond political or linguistic boundaries. For many artists, the experience of doing a residency within a space that is not limited to the traditional role of the art gallery or the museum, where the exhibition of artistic results predominates over any other task, has implied a positive opportunity to test and materialise riskier creative projects. It has also served to establish durable bonds with partner platforms, which in many cases inspire the introduction of different creative or organisational strategies within the “home” context. These strategies have been crucial to challenge the limited official support that conditions several Caribbean art ecosystems. At the same time, the links established through these processes of mobility have been crucial in creating partnerships that go beyond the more marketable forms of artistic exchange. In a medium where artistic objects are granted mobility more easily than the producers of these objects, the creation of a network of platforms in which ongoing conversations and shared experimentation are more important than the final results of any residency has served as an escape valve to attenuate the socioeconomic limitations of national art contexts. Caribbean visual creativity, thus, provides crucial reasons for dismantling the idea of the region as separated from the rest of the Americas. Indeed, a quick look at the platforms and collaborative artistic initiatives emerging from the Hispanic Caribbean reveals how the effect of these initiatives reaches a global level. In Cuba, artistic platforms such as Tania Bruguera’s Cátedra de Arte de Conducta (Behavior Art School) was essential in expanding the debates and the influences of Cuban art beyond the pressures of the market. The focus on behavioural interactions and the

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immersion of artists and critics into the everyday life of Havana functioned in this case as a positive alternative, enriching the experience of foreign and “local” participants alike. In the Dominican Republic, regular performance events, such as Performar or Chocopop, have retaken the organisational labour of Silvano Lora and other pioneer artists and have often stressed the establishment of connections with Latin American performers. These links have been crucial to break the isolation of Dominican performers and connect them with a broader continental sphere. By developing stable links based on shared interests and mutual participation and exchange with countries such as Venezuela, Mexico or Guatemala, these initiatives have been crucial in, at least, three different senses. Firstly, they have redefined the geopolitics of cultural production in the Dominican Republic, inserting the work of Dominican performance artists within a broader Latin American scenario. Secondly, framing Dominican creativity within a broader continental map, they have challenged the centrality of the United States as the main platform of exhibition and discussion of Caribbean visual practice. Finally, the focus of these events on civic engagement and sustained participation has expanded and diversified the experience of attending to an artistic event.

From Laboratory to Creative Hub The Caribbean has always been subjected to two kinds of external examination. A common image of the region revolves around the idea of the tropical, which identifies the Caribbean with an exotic and feral territory, particularly suitable for an external gaze to project upon it its fantasies and anxieties. As Krista Thompson well explains (2007), the identification of the Caribbean as a place of leisure and tourism is a centuries-old construction. Far less common, although present in the academic writing of authors such as James Clifford (1988), and even in the theorisation of thinkers such as Antonio Benítez Rojo (1996) and Édouard Glissant (1997), is the image of the Caribbean as a laboratory that anticipates global processes. In this sense, for example, creolisation in the Caribbean has been taken as a model for broader processes of social miscegenation around the globe. This logic of “first in the Caribbean, then elsewhere” is interesting for several reasons. It counters the idea of the Caribbean as an empty space available for the projection of the Western gaze and expertise, a portion of land susceptible to be commoditised and rendered accessible (in epistemological, economic or physical terms) for the visitor. Moreover, it highlights

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the active capacity of Caribbean societies to innovate, to produce something new. This capacity is crucial to expand the conceptualisation of Caribbean cultural production and to connect it with what Michaeline Crichlow and Patricia Northover (2009) called the “post-creole”: a space-­ time determined by, but by no means reducible to, colonial inheritances. As regards contemporary art, both images (the Caribbean as tropical, the Caribbean as a laboratory) have been influential in configuring specific interpretations of Caribbean visual creativity. For instance, the capacity of Caribbean artists to return and challenge the Western (touristic, exoticising) gaze has been the object of several exhibitions and critical approaches. Under this logic, Caribbean creators appropriate and contest the stereotypical imagination of the region produced from outside. In many artworks, vernacular culture is opposed to historical or archival visual iterations. The process of returning the gaze has been essential in deconstructing restrictive notions of Caribbean citizenship: visual creators have expanded the vocabulary used in the construction of Caribbean identity, granting “local” images a subversive condition. Linked to this idea, visual art has also approached the trope of the Caribbean as a laboratory. The clearest example of this process comes in the form of a celebration of local creativity as seen in exhibitions such as Kréyol Factory. In this landmark mega-exhibition organised in 2009  in Paris, Caribbean creativity was praised as a fertile ground for untiring innovation and originality. Creoleness was identified in this context as a quintessentially Caribbean expansive and contagious cultural value that was becoming more and more present throughout the globe. Although there is nothing bad per se in celebrating creativity, one may wonder if the idea of the Caribbean as a factory of talent, implicit in the conceptualisation of the exhibition, is not a direct continuation of the extractive logic (the Caribbean as a place where different “products” and raw materials are exported for Western consumerism) permeating the relationship between the Caribbean and Europe. Indeed, the processes of returning the gaze and the celebration of Caribbean creative innovation often ignore the broader economic and cultural politics determining how art is produced, mobilised and displayed. In the case of the Kréyol Factory exhibition, the fact that many “subversive” artistic discourses were mobilised in Europe to make a statement on what the Caribbean “Is,” by a European curator and in front of a European audience, poses important questions about ownership and cultural agency. These questions, it is important to mention, are not limited to this exhibition. Rather, they are

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intrinsically inherent to the logic that has determined the transnational circulation of Caribbean visual creativity. For many decades, Caribbean art has been the sum of large-scale (often externally organised and externally displayed) art exhibitions and specific artworks individually produced. Artistic success has been often measured by the participation on international biennials. To be sure, biennials provide crucial forums for artistic exchange and collective sharing. Moreover, they are far from being homogeneous. However, when conceived as the main tool for leveraging art ecosystems, they fall short in giving account of more durable and long-­ lasting bonds and infrastructural platforms such as those represented in the example that opened this chapter. The paradox is that collaborative initiatives have been fundamental in providing the soil in which many individual careers have flourished. Without that soil, it would have been far more difficult for artists to sustain artistic pathways. The point is not, to say it again, to criticise biennials or art exhibitions nor to consider them less suitable creative manifestations. Rather, what is needed is a broader conceptualisation capable of revealing the connection between individual artworks and artists to the subtler solidarities nurturing any art ecosystem. More than a laboratory, the art ecosystem of the Hispanic Caribbean bears the possibilities and contradictions of a creative hub actively rejecting the privatisation of culture and its mobilisation for financial uses (therefore, rejecting “creativity” itself when reduced to this programme). It is the amalgam of local and external funding, durable and temporary institutions, individual and collective creativity always in transit, conditioned by, but in no way reducible to, national cultural scenarios. Under this view, the formal and the informal feed each other back, as we see in the example of the San Juan Triennial. By paying attention to the multiple ways in which Caribbean creators embark in organisational and socially transformative tasks, we can see how the strategic articulation of maritime alliances, identified by Flores and Stephens, also applies on a broader, non-­ discursive level. The main objective of visual creativity here is not merely to connect symbolically with fellow colleagues in other islands, nor to produce subversive artworks to be exhibited and circulated inside or outside the region. At the same time, Caribbean artists are redefining the rules of the game and turning the economy of attention that privileged exhibition-based practices over collaborative art making. Visiting Puerto Rico in 2018, the activist and art critic Gregory Sholette registered his impressions of doing research fieldwork on resilience, social transformation and austerity in the island. He was taking part of a trip with

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members of the Social Practice Queens project in CUNY on the occasion of a shared artistic and research project with different Puerto Rican academic and activists. Sholette, a relentless practitioner and a leading voice in the conceptualisation of socially engaged and activist art since the late 1970s, highlights the ability of Puerto Rican artists to counter urban speculation and the arrival of cryptocapital to the island via sustained community engagement. He also acknowledges the ways in which broader segments of the San Juan society are investing in the creation of civic centres (instead of cultural centres), attempting to repurpose creativity in order to face structural needs. Attempting to reject the logic of US activists using Puerto Rico as a space for research, this view employs sustained conversation to create a tailored response to the specificities of post-Maria Puerto Rico. Beyond the specificities of the project and the dialogues held, Sholette’s impressions of the activist scene in the island are interesting because it identifies the structural interests lying behind the management of the hurricane crisis while acknowledging his own biased position: It became clear that one immaterial but no less significant outcome of both the island’s ongoing economic crisis (especially after the 2008 real estate and financial meltdown), followed by the two 2017 hurricanes (Maria and a lesser degree Irma) is a collective paradigm shift in which many Puerto Ricans who once imagined themselves to be middle class Americans now view their status visa-vie the United States as second-class citizens living in a colony. This was a sentiment in fact echoed by other island residents throughout the time of our visit. (Sholette 2018)

Rejecting the idea of Puerto Rico as a laboratory where experiments happen in sanitised conditions, this analysis of the activist scene reveals how creativity in Puerto Rico is being repurposed to face its pernicious effects when aligned with global capital and the financialisation of everything in times of crisis (see Martin 2002). At the same time, Sholette’s examination reveals how the stories of resilience and subversion of boricuas inside and outside the island are deeply entangled with similar episodes in the United States and elsewhere, which have received far more attention. These entanglements provide a suitable standing point to challenge how Caribbean art histories have been produced.

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Conclusion: Maritime Synergies and Alternative Archipelagic (Art) Histories If politics is thought of as the Other, happening somewhere else, always belonging to disenfranchised communities in whose name no one can speak, we end up missing what makes art intrinsically political nowadays: its function as a place for labor, conflict and…fun—a site of condensation of the contradictions of capital and of extremely entertaining and sometimes devastating misunderstandings between the global and the local. (Steyerl 2011, p. 36)

Which are the consequences of envisioning alternative histories of artistic creativity?3 What would happen if we start considering art making in the Caribbean as a far more complex process than producing objects to be displayed and consumed in art spaces (mainly outside of the Caribbean)? Reframing the art histories of the Hispanic Caribbean can have multiple consequences. An attentive eye to the synergies articulated by “visual-­ creators-­ turned-cultural-organisers” can expand the scope where Caribbean art is displayed and discussed, revealing subversive links with other territories. Visual arts emerge then as a fertile field where alternative theoretical and creative mappings are possible. To conclude, we will retake the example that opened this chapter in order to explore one of such possibilities. Out of all the territories of the Spanish State, the Canary Islands were particularly linked to the Caribbean. This is due to the central role that the Canarian Archipelago played in the expansion of Spanish colonialism, but also to the ways in which Canarian cultural creators have conceptualised their own identity and positionality vis-à-vis Europe, Africa and the Americas. The idea of Tricontinentalidad epitomises the singularities of Canarian identity and the complex role that the archipelago played in the history of the European expansion as one of the first territories occupied by the Spanish colonisers. Canarian identity is thus shaped by the fact of simultaneously being one of the first colonised territories and a laboratory for the colonisation of the Americas. Analysing and deconstructing this history from a critical perspective has been an ongoing concern of Canarian creators throughout the twentieth century. As part of this process, Canarian literature and visual arts have looked at the Caribbean as a way of defamiliarising and decolonising the history of both archipelagos. During the 1990s, art exhibitions such as Otro País: Escalas Africanas

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(Another Country: African stopovers) (1994–1995), Islas (Islands) (1997) or Trasatlántico: Diseminación, cruce y desterritorialización (Trasatlantic: Dissemination, Crossings and Deterritorialisation) (1998), all organised in the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, pioneered in challenging the European-centred perspective around which modern-day Spanish state attempted to redefine its own identity in the context of the European Union (see Garrido Castellano 2018). These exhibitions were crucial to reveal the coloniality hidden beyond the surface of modern and cosmopolitan Spain. They initiated a process of decolonisation of the imagination of the Canary Islands and the Spanish State. Significantly, in this process contemporary visual creativity from the Hispanic Caribbean and the participation of Caribbean intellectuals and visual practitioners resulted indispensable. Almost two decades later, the maritime synergies with the Caribbean were retaken by a younger generation of Canarian creators. In 2014, a collaborative project took place that seeks to deconstruct the space of the Fine Arts Museum of Tenerife in the Canary Islands. Two years later, the synergies between Tenerife and Puerto Rico intensified. Michy Marxuach, one of the founding members of BetaLocal, learned that the first survey of Puerto Rican flora counted with the decisive participation of Ana Roqué de Duprey and the Tenerife-born botanist Domingo Bello y Espinosa. Bello was a close friend of Carl Wilhelm Leopold Krug, the botanist officially recognised as the father of Puerto Rican botany. He was also a lawyer that dedicated his free time to the observation and cataloguing of plants in Puerto Rico. Roqué and Bello occupied a secondary position within the official records of Puerto Rican science for different reasons: for Roqué, because she was a woman, and for Bello, because he worked on a precarious basis, developing a scientific career far from the main sites of knowledge production in Spain. When Marxuach, by chance, knew about the copy of Bello’s Puerto Rican botanic album lying in the Tenerife Fine Arts Museum, her view of both islands changes. If Bello’s scientific eye is the result of the colonial interest by the West in cataloguing and seizing the rest of the world, the story of Bello’s notebook emerges also as a clear example of how islands (including Tenerife) have been traditionally looked at from a continentalocentric perspective. Bello’s notebook evidences that the tropicalisation of the Canarian territory was an intentional process linked to the independence of Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Philippines from the Spanish empire in 1898. Under this perspective, not only his notebook unsettles the colonial history of Puerto Rican sciences and the “unnatural”

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history of botany in the Caribbean island; it also decanters and defamiliarises Tenerife’s cultural and natural history. Exploring the entanglement between Puerto Rico and the Canary Islands revealed by Bello’s personal journey, in August 2016 Marxuach and the Mexican curator Pablo León de la Barra participated in Species Plantarum, a collective exhibition hosted by TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, the main public contemporary art centre in Tenerife.4 The collaborative synergies of Species Plantarum resulted from a deeper relationship that goes far beyond one-time-only curatorial designs. Marxuach and León de la Barra were invited to be part of the exhibition by La Oficina para la Acción Urbana (hereafter La Oficina), artists and architects-managed project dedicated to urban and artistic research in Tenerife. The collaboration between BetaLocal and La Oficina started in 2014, when Gilberto González invited the Puerto Rican creative platform to Tenerife as part of a cultural festival organised by Solar, another research and practice-based space in the island. The dialogue between the members of both platforms revealed a common concern with using art for social transformation. The conversations continued in Tenerife and Puerto Rico and, two years later, in 2017, Solar produced Islario, a research-based exchange that brought together four Puerto Rican artists (Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Pablo Guardiola, Nibia Pastrana and Joel Rodríguez) and four Canarian Creators (Dailo Barco, Carlota Mantecón, Francisco León and Panki Rodríguez). On this occasion, the focus was placed on creative research and thought, rather than on artistic production. Key topics affecting the Caribbean and the Canarian archipelagos, such as environmental hazards, the commoditisation of the archipelagic territory or the impact of tourism in the degradation of the insular landscape, were discussed through a sustained dialogue. As it happened in the Puerto Rican case, the synergies established by artist-led platforms ended up “contaminating” more official institutions. In 2017 a group of colleagues from the Tenerife cultural scene organised an initiative called Contra viento y María (a pun playing with the Spanish saying “contra viento y marea,” which means to progress against any obstacle). Around the same time, a one-month exchange was organised in which Canarian artists stayed in Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans in the Canary Islands for one month. Also in 2017, when Gilberto González was chosen as chief curator of Fotonoviembre, a decades-old landmark biennial exhibition, the participation of Puerto Rican visual researchers resulted in the production of innovative curatorial models. One of the main

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achievements of this collaboration was Épicas Enanas (Dwarf Epics), an exhibition that used the Fine Arts Museum of Tenerife as research object to question the political and epistemological structures lying behind the consolidation of a colonial imaginary in the Canarian archipelago. Épicas Enanas included participants invited by Gilberto González and made use of previous research on these topics by the Puerto Rican (Beatriz Santiago, Tony Cruz and Sofía Gallisá) and Cuban (Zilia Sánchez) artists who were present at the exhibition. If the attentive eye of those and other artists made explicit the importance of museums and fine art academies in the ideological establishment and uncovering of coloniality in the Canary Islands, it also revealed the existence of alternative possibilities. Those were further developed in 2018 by Michy Marxuach and Carolina Caycedo in Zig-Zag Mnemónico: Re-ordenando el almacén (Mnemonic Zigzag: Reordering the Warehouse), a series of dialogues and research initiatives seeking to uncover the legacy of decolonial Canarian feminism by hand of a new batch of researchers and creators such as Larisa Pérez, Mayte Henríquez or Ebbaba Hameida Hafed. Two elements of the ongoing exchange here summarised are worth of attention: firstly, the expertise in practice-based research and organisational action by Puerto Rican visual creators has substantially redefined the Canarian artistic landscape, encouraging non-representational creative modes and challenging the logic of insularity and peripherality in the archipelago. Secondly, the collaboration across visual organisations from the Canary Islands and the Hispanic Caribbean has been crucial in the articulation of creative artistic practices and shared interests across both archipelagos. The recent initiatives succinctly described in this chapter, and particularly the exchanges analysed in this final section, demand a re-examination of the premises of art criticism and art history in the Caribbean. More specifically, they pose the question of what kind of art history would be more useful in framing the most recent transformations in cultural production within the Hispanic Caribbean. For many decades, Caribbean art histories have been written from the point of view of individual artists and national traditions. In many cases, however, non-representational practices have remained untouched and overlooked. Under this logic, not only are artists considered as representatives of national traditions, but also, these histories are produced through individual artistic objects and the process of displaying them in national museums or international exhibitions. The fact that this act of display has been the result of active

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collaboration by many individuals has been rarely commented upon. Perhaps more problematically, the hegemonic focus on individual artists and artworks in Caribbean art history risks silencing the uneven economies of exchange and display that affect Caribbean artistic objects, as well as ignoring the context of precariousness in which many of those artworks were produced and distributed. By understanding contemporary art as a field where central aspects of socio-political reproduction and labour are negotiated, another art history of the Hispanic Caribbean is possible, one attentive to organisational and infrastructural processes. This disciplinary expansion would acknowledge the importance of Caribbean artistic discourses seeking to counter the Western gaze. At the same time, however, it would be attentive to what happens when those discourses are appropriated, mobilised and displayed. More decisively, it would ground artistic production within the specific coordinates determined by artistic apprenticeship and the contested here and now of creative labour, refusing uncritical celebrations of resistance and paying attention to the ways in which artistic agency can become a civic agency.

Notes 1. Casa de los Contrafuertes, a project conducted by Ana Rosa Rivera and Charles Juhász-Alvarado, is a good example of this. Created in 2012 as part of the Poli/Graphic Triennale of San Juan, Contrafuertes has re-enacted collective projects from previous decades. It has also survived as a public and civic centre within the increasingly gentrified landscape of Old San Juan. 2. On a broader, regional level, platforms and projects such as Caribbean Linked, Arc, Tilted Axis or SX Salon are crucially strengthening the links among Caribbean creators. 3. This section benefited from sustained skype and email exchange with Néstor Delgado and Larisa Pérez, two Canarian artists and researchers actively involved in the creative collaboration with Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. 4. The other main venue in the archipelago is the Las Palmas-based Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (CAAM).

Bibliography Benítez Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1988.

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Crichlow, Michaeline and Patricia Northover. Globalization and the Post-Creole Imagination: Notes on Fleeing the Plantation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. Díaz Quiñones, Arcadio. El arte de bregar: ensayos. San Juan: Callejón, 2000. Flores, Tatiana and Michelle Stephens. “Relational Undercurrents: Toward and Archipelagic Model of Insular Caribbean Art.” In Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago, edited by Tatiana Flores and Michelle Stephens, 14–29. Long Beach: Museum of Latin American Art, 2017. Garrido Castellano, Carlos. Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art. Space, Politics, and the Public Sphere. New Brunswick, NJ.: Rutgers University Press, 2019. ———. “Curating and Cultural Difference in the Iberian Context: From Difference to Self-Reflexivity (and Back Again).” Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research 24, 2 (2018): 103–122. Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997. Holmes, Brian. “Extradisciplinary Investigations. Towards a New Critique of Institutions.” Transversal. EIPCP Multilingual Webjournal (January 2007). Accessed September 2, 2019. http://eipcp.net/transversal/0106/holmes/ en/print.html López, Teresa. “El arte contemporáneo en Puerto Rico a la luz del giro global (2000–2009).” PhD dissertation, Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Puerto Rico y el Caribe, 2019. Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. “Thinking through the Decolonial Turn: Post-­ continental Interventions in Theory, Philosophy, and Critique—An Introduction.” Transmodernity 1, 2 (2011). Accessed September 2, 2019. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/59w8j02x#main Martin, Randy. Financialization of Daily Life. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002. Mould, Oli. Against Creativity. London: Verso, 2018. Segarra, Abdiel. “Un panorama de alternativas en diálogo desde Puerto Rico.” Papeles de Cultura Contemporánea 16 (2012): 46–68. Sholette, Gregory. Delirium and Resistance after the Social Turn. London: Pluto Press, 2017. ———. (2018). “Art Against Austerity/Memories of Disinvestment: A Journal.” Greg Sholette. Welcome to Our Bare Art World. Accessed September 2, 2019. https://gregsholette.tumblr.com/post/174702791800/art-againstausteritymemories-of Steyerl, Hito. “Politics of Art: Contemporary Art and the Transition to Postdemocracy.” In Are You Working Too Much? Post-Fordism, Precarity, and the Labor of Art, edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood and Anton Vidokle, 30–40. Berlin: Stenberg Press, 2011.

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Thompson, Krista. An Eye for the Tropics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Velázquez Collazo, Edwin. (2014). “The Best Alternative Art Space/Espacios Alternativos in Puerto Rico.” Puerto Rican Art News/Blog—Revista de Arte. Accessed September 2, 2019. https://www.puertoricoartnews.com/2014/03/ the-best-alternative-art-space-espacios.html

CHAPTER 8

The Queer Hispanic Caribbean: Contemporary Revisions of Its Genealogies Lina Martínez Hernández

Introduction Changes to face the unknown, to surrender control, to let go; they all generate anxiety. It is in their dreams that Jose A. and Pachi, the main characters in Luis Negrón’s short story “Mundo Cruel” (2010), first sense the manifestation of that anxiety: something is about to change. In this story, the last one in a collection by the same title, José A. and Pachi face the co-optation of their world, their queer world. Their dreams take them back in time, to the Bocaccio, a gay club in Hato Rey, San Juan, stuck in the 1980s, when queer parties were frequented by less than fashionable folks: owners of small beauty salons, male nurses, city clerks, and, “horror de los horrores,” butches. These dreams also predict the tragedy of disconnection and isolation: to have a phone incapable of receiving calls. Both of their dreams, although playing with past and present, already foresee the change to come. As the story progresses, we learn that both José A. and

L. Martínez Hernández (*) Spanish Department, Haverford College, Haverford, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. López, M. T. Vera-Rojas (eds.), New Perspectives on Hispanic Caribbean Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51498-3_8

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Pachi spend large amounts of their time at the gym; they are careful with their nutrition, having only Gatorade and power bars for breakfast; they try on several outfits before facing the streets and gay bars at night. This is their world, a world in which, one day, they start noticing the cracks of change, when they spot one of the most glamorous gays eating fried eggs for breakfast. From then on, the story moves on into what seems a downward spiral of doom. Pachi arrives to his office only to find that his boss has requested everyone—todos y todas—to attend a meeting: The boss himself started the meeting saying, hear me well, that this was a special day, because in keeping with the new times and in order to benefit the firm and its collaborators, both men and women, they had invited these young leaders of who knows what, that are here to talk about homophobia in the workplace. (Negrón 2010, p. 98; all translations are the author’s own)1

These “young leaders,” wearing their flip flops and burnt skin from attending so many gay marches, end up opening up a space for more than 16 of the firm’s people to come out. Suddenly, everyone is queer. Pachi cannot stand this display of collective coming out and leaves the office, only to find a world in which everyone, including the evangelicals, promulgate the end of homophobia. The story ends with Pachi and José A. arriving at the gay nightclub only to find lesbian couples and “regular” people wearing “regular” clothes, now taking the streets during the officially declared Thursday Gay Nights in Santurce. They pass over a group of angered activists shouting to be recognised for their struggle to end homophobia—“They should make a sign, thanking us” (Negrón 2010, p. 101)2— and, in an unexpected turn of events, Pachi finds Papote parading with the crowd: he was the straight man he used to love in high school. Pachi ditches José A. for the newly outed Papote, and José A. promises to leave town and fly to Miami, because he could never live without decorum. “Mundo cruel” contains many of the elements I want to bring into conversation in this text, mainly the notion of change within and around queer aesthetics and movements in the Hispanic Caribbean. Are we at the point where we can speak of the mainstreaming of queerness in the Hispanic Caribbean region? How do contemporary queer artists and communities relate to the genealogies of what we now call queer identities? These questions are another way of naming some of the elements that interest me and that are present in “Mundo cruel,” including: the anxiety of change when change means the co-optation of the opaque force of resistance within

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queer art and activism; a revision of the past, particularly of the moment in which being queer started to oscillate between a minority identity and a set of actions/decisions/ways of being in the world; the existence of a “(in) visible frontier” between queer subjects concerned with critical aesthetic production and queer subjects at the forefront of political and social movements; and, lastly, if the struggle for recognition, representation, and inclusion is paving the way towards becoming part of mainstream politics and economy, what will happen to the critical force of queerness in the region and elsewhere? Can queerness continue to be transformative and bring liberation? My approach to these themes will be comparative. Starting with the revision of a past, or what I will call here the genealogy of recent queer art and activism in the Hispanic Caribbean, I want to begin this reflection on the present state of queer literary productions and movements in the region by connecting it, and facilitating a conversation with, the impact left by Caribbean schools of thought and activist movements during the 1970s. Is it possible to affirm that the current state of queer lives, queer studies, queer politics, and queer art in the Caribbean owes its place in the public sphere to the struggles for civil rights and to identities marginalised in the 1970s? If so, what is the relationship between today’s activists, artists, and communities in this region and that political heritage? What can queerness offer as a space to revise the recent regional political genealogy? Queer lives in the Caribbean face a double-imposition of sexualised gazes from the outside: double in the sense that it is a common trope to approach Caribbean subjects from a colonialist perspective that continues to think of Caribbean experiences closely attached to (sexed) bodies;3 and also in the sense of the anxiety and violence that queer subjects and practices continue to awaken in many areas of the Caribbean within its own populations.4 This double-imposition, then, which operates in the present, continues to be an unavoidable lens through which we must revisit political ideologies, their large-scale contributions, and their pertaining to minority identities. Particularly, on what they have been able to achieve so as to reduce the harm imposed on queer bodies. As happens in the anxious dreams of Pachi and José A., in this text I am interested in understanding a particular way of looking back: is recognition and visibility the change that procures the liberation of queer people? Or is it silence (a sort of “elective closet”) a nostalgic site of resistance and strategic ambiguity?5 The impact of global phenomena since the second half of the twentieth century, particularly the Civil Rights Movement in the United States; the

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problematic emergence of second-wave feminism; the gay liberation movements catapulted by the Stonewall riots and lead by Caribbean subjects; the political framework of the Cold War, particularly post-Cuban Revolution; and the rise of student and workers’ protests can be traced into the present state of queer activism and organisation globally. As Jane Ward states in Respectably Queer (2008), before the expansion and mainstreaming of New Left politics in the 1970s, the landscape with regard to the oppression against LGBT and other minorities was much more violent (Ward 2008, p. 146). So, how has the rise and consolidation of identity politics deriving from these global phenomena changed queer lives and the “inclusion” of queer communities? How has the emphasis on representation and assimilation affected the ways queers name themselves and are named? And, more importantly in my reflection, how is this impact materially and symbolically experienced and critically observed from the Hispanic Caribbean as a singular region? In this chapter, I explore this looking back from three sites of queer intervention: a series of interviews conducted by Frances Negrón-­ Muntaner of activists involved in the creation of the first feminist and/or lesbian collectives in Puerto Rico in the 1970s and 1980s; a distant comparative reading of the work of Hispanic Caribbean queer writers Rita Indiana Hernández, Ena Lucía Portela, and Raquel Salas Rivera; and, finally, a closing remark based on the work by diasporic Caribbean queer collectives, mainly in Puerto Rico and New York, operating in the fields of social justice and community-based initiatives. By floating through these diverse forms of expression and practice, I seek to understand the ways in which the aesthetic and political come together as a form of historic revisionism and contemporary political/economic critique around queer experiences in the Hispanic Caribbean. Even if the mediums are different, I want to explore how each of these interventions brings together a reflection on the always-imposing presence of history in the Caribbean, the emphasis given to the corporeal, particularly sexed-bodies when speaking of queer subjectivities, and a transition between an ideological dream of sovereignty and autonomy in the 1970s and 1980s, following the Marxist model of the Cuban Revolution, and the current neoliberal commodification of subjects, lands, practices, and sexualities coming from the Caribbean.

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Looking Back: The Legacy of the 1970s The critical response to theories of dependency and plantation economy in the Caribbean during the 1970s can be seen as a continuation of the discussion of whether or not the Caribbean can be part of modernity. Perhaps getting close to historical irony, the fact that most of the political discussions of the 1960s and 1970s in the Caribbean were directly influenced by the triumph and contradictions of the Cuban Revolution and the independence struggles of African nations—and their Marxist approaches to sovereignty and anti-imperialist politics—clashes with the way the Caribbean was perceived by the very founders of Marxist thought. It is worth remembering, for the interest of the discussion I want to initiate, that, as Mimi Sheller reinstates in the introduction to her book Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies (2003), the Caribbean, along with Africa, was one of the places conceived as atemporal or ahistorical stagnant primitive economies that provided the counter-image of the progress of the West: Since its origins in the nineteenth century, social theory has continually used non-western places as counterfoils for Western modernity, “backwards” places against which processes of modern urbanisation, industrialisation, democratisation, rationalisation, individualisation, and so on could be gauged. Max Weber’s comparative sociology, for example, rested on a fundamental contrast between the “dynamic” rational West and the “absences” of conditions for modernisation in the “stationary” irrational Orient; Marx and Engel’s notion of the “Asiatic mode of production” contrasted “the socio-economic stagnation of the Orient with the revolutionary character of capitalist society.” (Sheller 2003, p. 2)

In that sense, the long-lasting impact of this Westernised figuration of the Caribbean as a place devoid of historicity and the required elements to participate fully in Western modernity can be expanded, even more so, when considering how queer subjects have been forced to occupy the place of the other within the Other. Additionally, this double-othering not only serves the purpose of delegitimising queer Caribbean subjects in terms of their agency, autonomy, and capacity to be “modern.” It also allows domesticating their material existence with the purpose to be offered for consumption, along with everything else in the natural and human Caribbean landscape. Although it is not a novelty to approach the relationship between the West and the Caribbean in terms of commodification, it is interesting to

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think about this topic from the question of a predictable failure of political ideologies and movements nurtured by socialist and Marxist readings of Caribbean difference in the 1970s and 1980s, and Caribbean appropriations of Marxist thought. Commodification is a trope in the Caribbean that, as Lyndon K. Gill explains in the introduction to Erotic Islands: Art and Activism in the Queer Caribbean (2018), is based precisely on that conceptualisation and materiality of an “Other”: “The exotic fetishisation of the Caribbean calls attention to the use of to which Caribbean ‘difference’ is put; here the familiar Other—as body and as location—is in essence consumed as an attractive commodity” (2018, p. xxvi). Obviously, contemporary service and tourism industries (not to mention a sexual economy) make this very clear, but how does this commodification occur when, in the centre of it, we find queer bodies and practices? How have queer bodies, then, been thought of in terms of non-productive, non-­ modern, but yet still commodifiable beings in the global market? And which are the strategies used by queer people within the Caribbean region to evade the imposition of commodification (or to use it to their advantage) and create alternative ways to exist as subjects and communities? I propose to go back to the 1970s, not only because this is the decade revised by the primary sources I will be commenting below, but also because of the changes with regard to the relationship between the West (or the First World) and the Caribbean. In her article, “Caribbean Dependency Theory of the 1970s. A Historical-Materialist- Feminist revision” (2001), Cecilia Green reminds us that “difference” began to be a preoccupation in the First World once people from the Caribbean were present and visible in their spaces. For the United States6 that meant an increase, during the post-War era, particularly during the 1960s, of an English-speaking workforce coming from the West Indies and Spanish-­ speaking communities coming and going from Puerto Rico, or political asylum seekers coming from Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. This presence meant an increase in intellectual production regarding the Caribbean, a school of thought made up by theorists from the United States and Europe looking at the region, as well as of thought produced from and about the Caribbean. In both cases, however, I am interested in understanding the relationship between these alternative ways to think about the Caribbean and their intersection with queerness as a presence and as the Other-within-the-other. Aside from emphasising a particular Caribbean-North (US) chronology emerging when “difference” became a political-economic-theoretical

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concern, Green also acknowledges how one of the elements lacking in the production of knowledge growing from that concern is how non-­ institutional forms of production tied to “difference” in terms of gender and sexuality also participated in modes of production and colonial oppression in the history of the Caribbean. Approaches from political-­economists of the 1970s, particularly figures like George Beckford and Sidney Mintz, rightly emphasised the dependency of the Caribbean on metropolitan needs, which amounted to the region becoming incapable of developing an independent capitalist mode of production. The nature of the plantation economy, aside from hijacking autonomy and sovereignty from the region, also makes class struggle much more complicated when race and nationality become singular markers of this region. But what happens with other modes of production that co-existed with the institutionalised economy of the plantation? The domestic economy is therefore a mere technical concept, not a phenomenon that embraces a bounded community of re/producers and the activities by which they reproduce themselves, whether or not these activities fall within the ambit of the codified national economy. (Green 2001, p. 57)

Green’s main argument to challenge dependency theory is the fact that it erases the class-mobility from labour to middle class in the Caribbean, an oversight that she later traces into the transition towards the current corporate economic model: how can theorists identify alternatives and exceptions when they are focused mainly on institutional production, and on local communities mainly as labourers and consumers? For Green the answer is the development of a decolonial complex framework to understand Caribbean production, one in which dependency is acknowledged together with racial, gender, class, and sexual variables that can inform large-scale analysis with the methods of resistance and alternative production exercised by local actors. Green’s critique ties well with another reconsideration of Marxist thought in the 1970s. Despite the fact that Green is looking back at the work of dependency theory thinkers studying the Caribbean region in a large-scale, she devotes a small space to discuss the specificity of the Hispanic Caribbean. Due to its colonial, linguistic, migratory, and political development, the Hispanic Caribbean of the 1970s stood at the crossroads between the impact of the Cuban Revolution upon Caribbean and Latin American leftists movements, and the different

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African-American, feminist, anti-Vietnam war, gay, and Chicano movements emerging in the context of the Cold War in the United States.7 Simultaneous to an understanding of Caribbean economies and nations through the frame of anti-colonial and dependency approaches sustained by a Caribbean reading of Marxist thought, other forms of Marxist revisionism affected the way in which minority communities were building their movements and aesthetics. Such is the revision offered by Kevin Floyd in The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism (2009). Floyd’s main argument in his book, and the one I want to bring into conversation here, is how Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1955), as well as Marcuse’s academic work in California during the 1960s, created a shift within Marxist thought towards the empowerment of the notions of “reification” and desire. Floyd’s understanding of Marcuse’s influence on the relationship between Marxism and desire, as an alternative path to a looking back to the 1970s that avoids the emphasis on masculinity, the messianic glorification of male political figures (like Che Guevara), and a patriarchal call to action, allows me to set a different theoretical genealogical counterpart for the comparative reading I offer of my primary sources. According to Floyd, Marcuse’s notion of reification pointed towards an unexpected form of liberation centred on the materiality of the body. To move beyond consciousness and into the praxis of the material body allows blurring the boundaries between work and leisure, production and consumption. For Marcuse, according to Floyd, only an extreme sexual reification of the body can negate the effects of reification. Transposed to the Caribbean, and particularly to the extreme objectification of queerness as the other within the other, this can provide with a tool to observe how minority communities, particularly what we now call queer communities, flipped the discourse around their colonial-marginal-othering status: through the force of desire. “Only by passing through objectification, Marcuse suggests, does the body again become a free, non-­instrumentalised subject—only in suffering the most extreme reification does it triumph over reification” (Floyd 2009, p.  125). Is it possible, then, to reframe minority and queer movements in the Caribbean during the 1970s within an effort to reclaim otherness as a site of sociopolitical challenge and enticement? This perspective agrees with much of contemporary work in the field of Queer Caribbean Studies, albeit following a different discursive path. Although some contemporary theorists do not go back to Marcuse as a genealogical source, they do find a similar approach in other influential

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writers from the 1970s, as Audre Lordeand her “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” (1978).8 Going back to Shell and Gill, they are part of a current of queer theorists that centre desire and the erotic as energising forces and hermeneutics in the Caribbean. Together with Floyd’s reading of Marcuse, I want to formulate a productive interpretative convergence: how does eroticism flip the Westernised exoticising gaze imposed on queer Caribbean subjects to equip them with tools and strategies to defy large-­ scale interpretation of regional sovereignty and economic autonomy, but also to perform a critical approach to identitarian struggles without falling prey to any form of essentialist classification. Additionally, I put forward an approach that privileges the erotic and desire as forces of agency, not only within the individual realm but within that sets the attention on practices for community-building rather than in abstract or distant phenomena, precisely what Green criticises about the modes in which dependency theory of the 1970s operated. Going back to Gill: “At the heart of eros as a renovated concept is the confidence that political, social, and cultural exclusions can (and must) be confronted through community building, through touch, and through faith” (Gill 2018, p. 11). However, is that the case for all of the Caribbean? Can we point out fundamental differences when dealing with the linguistic, historical, and political distance between the Anglophone Caribbean and the Hispanic Caribbean? In my view, the Hispanic Caribbean stands at the crossroads of the Caribbean as a plural linguistic region, the impact of Latin American genealogies around literary and political history, and the more recent and rapid changes brought by diasporic communities in Europe and the United States. How then can this approach to the “erotic” and, with it, a revision of forms of resistance and alternative practices of consumption contribute to a better understanding of contemporary critique emerging from Hispanic Caribbean artists, activists, and communities? One way to approach this question is through that particular looking back that also returns to the 1970s, the decade that saw the emergence of Lorde’s notion of the erotic, a decade that inherited the energy, but also the disappointments and frustrations, from the liberation movements of the 1960s, a decade that allowed for a different understanding of the relationship between desire and politics. The interviews conducted by Frances Negrón-­ Muntaner to Puerto Rican activists are a first approach to the question of intolerance to feminist and lesbian movements within the masculinist paradigm of 1970s revolution. The literary works of the Cuban Ena Lucía Portela, the Dominican Rita Indiana Hernández, and the Puerto Rican

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Raquel Salas Rivera are parodic gestures that gloat with a critical erotic force allowed in the aesthetic realm; and finally, a look at queer movements in the present brings together the questions set by the first two sets of primary sources: how can these movements thrive? And how can they avoid neoliberal co-optation?

The Historical Context: The 1970s Reviewed from the Present Recently, Yolanda Martinez-San Miguel and Larry La Fountain-Stokes co-­ edited Centro Journal’s volume on Queer Studies in the Caribbean. Among the critical articles, they included first-account testimonials from Hispanic Caribbean activists involved in the development of queer movements in the region. I focus here on the interviews conducted by Frances Negrón-Muntaner to three women that were central in the consolidation of feminist and lesbian movements in Puerto Rico during the 1970s and the 1980s. In 1990 Negrón-Muntaner interviewed Ana Irma Rivera Lassén, a lawyer and founder of Mujer Intégrate Ahora (MIA), a second-­ wave feminist organisation in Puerto Rico, and Comunidad Orgullo Gay (1974–1977), the first major LGBT organisation in Puerto Rico; Madeline Román López, previous member of MIA and later founder of Alianza Feminista por la Liberación Humana (AFLH), which aimed at organising working-class women from a leftist and nationalist approach;9 and Mildred Braulio Martínez, a member of Colectivo de Concientización Gay (CCG, 1983–1988) and Colectivo de Lesbianas Feministas (CLF, 1989–1991), which focused on the intersection of feminism and lesbianism and the creation of a gay liberation movement. The interviews published, then, are also a revision of a revision: a looking back to the accounts of these activists’ work in the 1970s and 1980s. As defined by Negrón-Muntaner in the introduction to these interviews, the relevance of oral-history within queer studies emphasises the blurry borders between activism and academic research. Performing what she calls a pressing urgency to be undertaken by “scholaractivists” like herself, the interviews sought to shed light on the ways in which lesbian politics and queer activism faced the failure of the traditional left to transform the economic and sociopolitical crisis in Puerto Rico in the 1980s, mainly due to the collapse of the industrialisation process that began in the 1940s, the emphasis of modes of kinship that continued to focus on family

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centred structures and marginalised the role of women and other minorities, and the lack of efficient responses in federal and local levels to face the impact of AIDS in the island and US mainland. This last failure takes us back to the narrowness, criticised by Green, of economic analytical models too focused on institutionalised dependency and unable to seek local alternatives. Negrón-Muntaner’s approach would also agree with other forms of critique within a queer Marxist approach which, as it is mentioned in these interviews, perceive a contradiction in leftist (socialist) struggles that continue to think of “family values,” gender roles, and domesticity as part of a private sphere located outside the realm of capitalist production: “The struggle for socialism would ultimately abolish the bourgeois nuclear family as a normative ideal, since the ideology of domesticity justifies the privatization of social responsibility and legitimates women’s oppression in a sphere of privatized reproduction” (Cloud 2001, p. 72). One of the points of encounter among the three interviewees was, precisely, the difficulty of being accepted by a leftist movement unwilling to engage with women and queer-led struggles. The urgency of Negrón-Muntaner’s initial interviews was aimed at filling the void within a historical narrative and explains the origins and development of Puerto Rican lesbian and queer activism and, more importantly, to understand why did many of these movements disintegrate and how did they deal with (white) US-centric accounts of “a” queer movement beginning with the Stonewall riot. But quite more interestingly, the revision of this activism, 30 years later, uncovered the continuation of similar worries in today’s Hispanic Caribbean queer movements and research: as some of the fundamental matters that consumed earlier activists such as the importance of autonomous organising vis à vis the state, political parties, and the Left; the desire for constituting non-hierarchical political communities, and activist exhaustion and intra conflicts have come to the fore in post-­ Hurricane Maria time, the memories of past transformative politics becomes relevant. (Negrón-Muntaner 2018, p. 355)

Her revision of these earlier interviews revealed to Negrón-Muntaner a previously ignored interest to think of her own position as a Puerto Rican diasporic queer subject (living in Philadelphia and later NYC since the 1980s) and as an “inheritor” and perpetuator of lesbian praxis. How did these movements struggle for autonomy? Autonomy is central in

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understanding the distance needed to identify and dismantle strategies of biocontrol executed over sexed national/regional bodies, particularly those of queer subjects. It is also a requirement when thinking of how these movements progressively identified and postulated their claims and struggles through an intersectional approach, one that identified the convergence of racial and sexual discrimination, class struggle, and colonialism. This is key to understand what later would take the form of a distancing from a type of political struggle that was directly influenced by a non-intersectional Marxist approach and which did not think of sexual orientation or queer politics as relevant in a struggle for class liberation (Negrón-Muntaner 2018, p. 358). The interview with Rivera Lassén is emphatic in trying to figure out whereas, during the 1970s and 1980s, there was an insurmountable contradiction between feminism and the Left in Puerto Rico, a Left that, according to Román López, was heavily influenced by Marxism-Leninism. Within the island’s context, the Left meant taking a stance in favour of independence, but “not necessarily having more open views on issues like sexuality or women’s rights” (Negrón-Muntaner 2018, p. 361). In fact, according to Rivera Lassén’s experience, the Left associated feminism with a gringo import that would continue colonialist practices, at the same time as they only considered women’s liberation possible through the triumph of socialism. For Rivera Lassén, the accusation of an americanised feminism adopted in Puerto Rico does not stand. She sees Puerto Rican feminism as part of a Latin American and Caribbean movement, a root that later became invisibilised due to the media stereotypes of US feminism in popular imagination. The real challenge for Rivera Lassén was the continued struggle for specific aims—like abortion—claiming the liberation of all women in the island, despite the accusations by leftist independentistas of following US trends. Aside from the contradictions faced when negotiating autonomy and grassroots versus legalistic struggle with the Left at the time, the interviews pause on the distance between some of the feminist organisations and lesbian politics. If feminism was already seen as a threat to Marxist-­ influenced class struggle, then lesbianism was definitely seen as a sub-cause that would divide, instead of unite, forces. This phenomenon of a triple-­ militancy had to leave room for the most urgent struggle at a time heavily influenced by Marxism, according to Román López: “It was understood that there was a greater struggle we had to engage in and, therefore, all sectors felt compelled not to abandon that bigger effort. All of this mixed

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in with the question of colonialism” (Negrón-Muntaner 2018, p. 367). Román López can see in retrospect how the officiality of Marxist discourse drove people away—particularly those interested in a struggle rooted in identity politics—due to its insistence on making nationalism the epicentre of political dissidence on the island. For Román López the impact of the guidelines of the official Left in the forms of organisation in the 1970s and 1980s can still be perceived in the present: it obstructs autonomy and prevents from thinking of organising in a more localised manner. For her, grassroots politics should be concerned with particular struggles, and no longer with US-Puerto Rican debates regarding political status: once more, we are back to the critique of an expanded-institutional approach versus a localised struggle focused on strategies serving different communities and needs. As part of Colectivo de Concientización Gay (CCG), Braulio Martínez remembers how in the 1980s, during what she calls the “heyday of feminist organisations,” there was space for the creation of one of the first gay organisations in Puerto Rico seeking to create community and to raise awareness about the existence and the struggles of gay and lesbian individuals. Even though they received the support of some of the already-­ standing feminist organisations, they had to face homophobia coming from the government and its intent in invisibilising the existence of lesbians. Nevertheless, as it was the case with feminist organisations, Gay and Lesbian organisations also had to deal with what they perceived as the stagnation brought by the predominance of Leftist language and political practices. Even though the Left seemed to create a space of convergence through the identification of different sets of oppressions, it was never representative of what we today call a queer political struggle for visibility and agency. According to Braulio Martínez, this is one of the main reasons that explain why these 1980s movements ended up dissolving: “Aside from the rigidity of the concepts, you had to follow the discipline of the party. I believe in dissent. To express opinions and to discover, and not necessarily to have to follow what the boss says” (Negrón-Muntaner 2018, p. 372). Aside from this distance with the Left, the lack of growth in terms of membership and of communication with other communities in the diaspora also contributed to the end of the Colectivo and the beginning of Colectivo de Lesbianas Feministas in 1989, in time for the first Gay Pride Parade in Puerto Rico in 1991. Even though at the time of the interview (1990), Braulio Martínez had hoped on organising a lesbian feminist collective, she could also foresee difficulties due to the amount of fear in

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coming out, as well as the difficulty of communicating within organisations. These interviews then continue the conversation I pointed out earlier about the actual and material power of queer organising as well as the erotic as its mobilising force when located in larger national/regional frames. The frustration expressed by Braulio Martínez and Román López links together the limitations present with both alternatives in conversation: political organising around Marxist principles proved to be unwilling to seek out a way to integrate women and queerness to their class-based struggles. For its part, organising around sexual and gendered identitarian movements also seemed limited when contained by a discourse of performativity, textuality, and identity, since these markers continue to be critiqued as pertaining only to an individualistic and “private” frame of action. Highlighting the main critique contained in the interviews, we are left with a question about the real power of queerness as a liberationist political possibility: how to take it out of the frame of the textual, the performative, the individual, and bring it closer to other forms of class-based intersectional struggle open to understanding sexual and gender difference?

The Literary Revision: Who Inherits the Revolution? Aquellos niños, marcados por la pasión ideológica de sus padres, ¿quiénes eran ahora? Rita Indiana. Hecho en Saturno (2018, p. 31)

This segment offers a distant comparative reading. My goal is not to conduct an analysis of the two novels and the book of poetry I have selected as sources for an aesthetic queer intervention. Rather, I want to invite these three texts to the conversation I have been threading together. With that in mind, I have selected these texts because of their own way of looking back at the 1970s as a temporal frame that continues to impact the present of their story and writing. Ena Lucía Portela, Rita Indiana Hernández, and Raquel Salas Rivera not only share being self-identified queer authors, but also a point of view that privileges locating their diegetic voices with one foot in and the other out of queer communities they write about. Starting with Portela’s novel Cien botellas en la pared (2010), queerness is here associated with evil. The notion of evil does not anticipate a

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moral judgement; it introduces an aesthetic and critical alternative to think outside the limitations of social contracts and the status quo. In that sense, evil is an erotic pulsation. Cien botellas en la pared is a story written by Zeta, the protagonist, giving testimony of a murder. Playing with the strategies of the crime novel, Portela locates at the centre of the plot a woman that encapsulates failure: failure within the sex economy in the island (she likes sex so much she cannot charge for it); failure as an intellectual and ideological heir of the revolutionary legacy (her partner, Moises, reminds her over and over how stupid she is); failure as a fiction writer (it is Linda, her lesbian best friend and Portela’s alter-ego, the “successful” writer hunted by publishing houses thirsty to consume more of that dirty realism steaming out of Cuba). It is almost as if Zeta’s generous body becomes the site of negation of all of the things that grant legitimacy within this particular Caribbean context. She is fully body and also fully speech, but an unprofessional and ideologically deviant speech. Zeta resists any form of identitarian classification: is she straight? Is she Marxist? Is she Christian? She also performs a historical narrative of Cuba’s present with a lightness that parodies the centrality of the island in the social imaginary of the Caribbean region and Latin America. For Zeta, life is not about big historical events, but about the little scandals occurring in her neighbourhood. Because of the precariousness of her present, life can only fit the short temporality of survival. Life, however, is also about the fleeting memories that she leaves open for the readers to fill in with their own interpretations. Such is her view of the past and, more specifically, of the impact of the 1970s in her own biographical recount. Zeta’s life and the crime she narrates happened in her house, an old mansion originally owned by an oligarch and later by an astrologer who founded an esoteric club, now divided into smaller apartments: la esquina del martillo alegre (the corner of the happy hammer). Back in the 1970s, when the revolutionary government had already begun its media campaign to produce materials in support of the revolution, the mansion had become a residence for film students: “They believed they were living intensely. They believed. I imagine them rebellious, enthusiastic, dynamic, full of life, optimism and novel ideas. It must have been a moment of illusions. […] Those were the hard years, when they had nothing, just rice with fish, illusions and that’s about it” (Portela 2010, p. 32).10 Her father, a gay man that impregnated Zeta’s mom, a Parisian woman, lived in the apartment and was part of that artistic movement. During those days, Zeta was born. Zeta narrates her birth as the consequence of

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her father being raped by her mother, and later describes his ignorance of all things related to raising an infant with affection and tender compassion. The lack of those “family values” and the centrality of the nuclear family allowed for Zeta to be fully autonomous. Even more so when her father decided to leave the revolutionary promise and move to San Francisco to pursue his queer dreams. Zeta grows up without “the law of the father” in a context fully dominated by patriarchal figures and masculine messianism. By including herself in this genealogy, Zeta’s biographical account offers a completely different approach to the history of the island in the 1970s: instead of narrating the consolidation of the Marxist-Leninist discourse of the revolution, or of lamenting the censorship that began to be enacted in that decade against educators, dissidents and intellectuals, Zeta, through a parodic move, narrates her expected “female-driven” domestic and private story to reveal the cracks and exceptions within the official discourse. She is what she is in the present because of her queer beginnings, the absence of a motherly figure, and the negligence of a queer father that failed as the hombre nuevo, yet succeeded in finding queer community beyond the nation. Similarly, Rita Indiana Hernández’ latest novel, Hecho en Saturno (2018), is part of a new trilogy that begins with La mucama de Ominculé (2015). Unlike her first trilogy centred around a teenage female character coming to terms with her sexuality, the racial politics of the Dominican Republic, her family history, and her father’s absence, among other challenges she has to face, this trilogy focuses on Argenis, a failed Dominican artist struggling to overcome a heroin addiction. In Hecho en Saturno, Argenis also faces the impact of his own genealogy as the son of one of the ideologues and revolutionaries fighting against Joaquín Balaguer’s government in the 1960s and 1970s, José Alfredo Luna. What does it mean to be the son of a revolutionary? Argenis’ present situation contrasts with his father’s important role in national and regional history. We can interpret this contrast as a form of queering the revolutionary masculinity that occupied the main stage in official accounts of the 1970s. Unlike his father, Argenis is a sensitive artist looking to perfect his painting technique. His addiction, though, prevents him from fulfilling his desire. Trying to save face, his father sends him to a rehabilitation clinic in Havana. The situation creates the convergence of a parodic way of looking back: the Cuban doctor, Bengoa, in charge of Argenis’ recovery used to struggle for liberation with his Dominican father: they met during the Latin American Conference for Solidarity in

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1967. But now, both the doctor and the father have succumbed to the temptations of power and bourgeois comfort. The father is now part of a corrupt government, while the doctor embezzles the money sent to take care of Argenis. What does this say of the state of the revolution? Is it its total collapse? Is Argenis, an artist addicted to heroin, the heir and continuator of a revolutionary dream that now only exists in history books and nostalgic oral recreations? He marks the beginning of a new time in the Caribbean, of questions that still do not have a clear answer under the neoliberal economic regime: “He hadn’t been born in a sugar plantation like his father, and he hadn’t been tortured and deported like they had done with his parents’ friends during the seventies. What the hell was wrong with him?” (Hernández 2018, p.  37).11 Argenis’ approaches the glory of revolutionary history in moments when he is experiencing the high produced by the Temgesic, the synthetic morphine used to treat heroin addiction. While high, he makes a sound collage of all of the memories shared by Bengoa: The new chemical entered Argenis following the impetuous rhythm of Bengoa’s conversation; a stream of emblematic dates of the anti-imperialist struggle, recipes for prophylactic smoothies, pieces of songs by Silvio, Amaury Pérez and Los Guaraguaos, Chinese economy and baseball statistics. His mouth was dry and his pupils so expanded that everything around him looked like a high-contrast photograph. (Hernández 2018, p. 13)12

The narrator notices how the re-telling of revolutionary memories creates the same type of high for Bengoa. But now the reality is life in the streets where hustling to survive is everyone’s main occupation, the same way an addict hustles to get his fix. Everywhere around Argenis, there are images of two worlds coming together as they fall apart: pictures of Che Guevara and Maradona, the Che’s face in stickers, posters, and hats and the face of the quaker on Quaker Oats: “On the one hand, the socialist ideal turned into a commodity; on the other, the capitalist brand of contraband that barely sustained the biological operation of the Revolution” (Hernández 2018, p. 33).13 Is Argenis the only one lost in his thoughts and anxiety to get his fix? Or does anyone have any clarity about what is going on in the islands and whether there is a political north towards which institutionalised leadership is leading the way? Heroin stands out in this novel as the paradigm for individual gratification. Argenis had surrendered everything else—family, work, health, art—for a dose. He is stuck not by the drug,

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but by the fear that there is nothing else waiting for him outside the world he has built when high. Can he move forward if there is no place for him when looking backwards, to the broken legacy left by his father? There is a similar set of questions in Raquel Salas Rivera’s LoTerciario/ The Tertiary (2018). This bilingual poetry collection focuses on the impact of Puerto Rico’s debt in the present life of its citizens, but also in the way a collective gaze looks back to the path that drove the island to its present state of affairs. The lens chosen by the poetic voice is a revision of a Caribbean Marxism that was particular to a generation of ideologues in Puerto Rico’s 1970s. Salas Rivera’s revision of notions of labour, value, exchange, and commodity seeks to update the understanding and usefulness of these concepts with a double-intention: to review critically that which was attempted and achieved by prior generations, but also, to regenerate a vocabulary that asks present generations to come to action. I want to focus this distant reading on one particular poem, “no se cambia una chaqueta por una chaqueta,” as a counter-narrative to the dependency theory and plantation economy paradigms of the 1970s. The poem anchors Puerto Rico’s debt in the quotidian existence of its citizens. Saying “citizen” already problematises a notion of belonging to the island: is debt ours, as people who live and work in Puerto Rico, or yours, as the control executed by the United States, the island’s local government and the global financial system? As Zeta in Cien botellas en la pared and Argenis in Hecho en Saturno, here the question lies on who is the chosen heir of that generation that dreamt with the Revolution. If Zeta has chosen a form of agency through writing and Argenis through self-gratification, what can the people in this poem do? They set out to find ways to pay the debt: but paying a debt is no longer as straightforward: just as the debt and the fifty years of work have use-values that are qualitatively different, so are the forms of labour that produce them: that of the investor and that of the colonized. your life is not enough. you will have to pay with the labour of your children and your children’s children. (Salas Rivera 2018, p. 20)

If dependency theory and the plantation economy paradigm focused, on the one hand, on the materiality of colonial containment and on the other hand, on the subjection of labour and class to the mandates of an export-­ economy directed by the North, now it is the intangible, the immaterial which rules relationships of production and exchange. The collective does

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not understand how debt came to be, but knows that it will take years and generations to pay it back. And even if you do not have your own lineage, it will be inherited by your neighbours, your dog, your grandma, and even “Angelía that still awaits your book.” Migratory movements come into play in this new iteration of colonial economy: even if you travel north, in this case to Philadelphia, to work and bring back what was said to be the currency (coats) to pay the debt, it will never be enough: imagine that it is a long, longer, almost interminable line, a line that spans 50 years. (Salas Rivera 2018, p. 23)

The future, then, waits in line at a bank. As a space of collective encountering, lining at the bank is similar to hustling for food in the streets of Havana, or to being seen through the lens of narratives that sell this new “dirty realism” coming out of the Caribbean. Read together, Cien botellas en la pared, Hecho en Saturno, and LoTerciario/The Tertiary point towards a question around dissolution and disillusion: what will happen to the public, the communal, the ways of existing that have been historically excluded from official narratives of the region? What happens to them now that official narratives cannot avoid facing the shortcomings, contradictions, and failures of the revolutionary dreams of the 1970s? In these three aesthetic accounts, the questioning of genealogy and inheritance occurs parallel to an exercise of the corporeal and of sexuality that allows for a reification of the material towards its liberation: Zeta offers her body to the failures of non-productive sexual encounters within the black/sexual markets; Argenis struggles with desire and with erections as a way to cope with the distancing from his addiction; and in Salas Rivera’s poems, the looking back to the Marxist Caribbean commune focuses not on strategies or alliances, but on enticing pulsations that threatened to disrupt military obedience (i.e. “First stage: the capitalist appears as the buyer”).

The Call to Action: Contemporary Queer Hispanic Caribbean Movements I want to end this reflection with a final comment on contemporary queer movements in the Hispanic Caribbean. If the selection of literary writings I introduced above looks back at the legacy of the 1970s through the questions of inheritance and present responsibility, it also remains in a critical space, without a clear path to move forward. The communal is at stake

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and, due to the invisible forces handling the financial and sociopolitical destinies of the islands, it is not quite clear which are the material alternatives for the present. Contemporary queer movements start from similar questions but are particularly concerned with ways to dismantle forms of organisation and hierarchical structures, and in doing to, to freshen up collective work. Going back to “Mundo cruel,” the question now for queer movements in the Hispanic Caribbean seems to be if queerness, although visible and in some cases representative, is being co-opted by invisible forces that have finally opened the door to it, but only after its value was clearly commodifiable. Negrón-Muntaner’s interviewees point to a related phenomenon: how is it possible to make political the sphere that the capitalist structure deems to be private, individual, and domestic? Such sphere is, generally speaking, the sphere of marginalised communities, of women and queer subjects. Today, different movements try to combine all the pieces of the puzzle together, learning from the previous critique of queer activists while incorporating the critical, erotic force of artistic production. This is visible, for example, in current attempts to retrieve the land back into the hands of small farm workers in Puerto Rico. Agricultural projects lead in many cases by queer individuals and organisations seek to revitalise local economies. Tara Rodríguez Besosa, a queer activist from Santurce, is one of the leading figures pushing forth a model of food sovereignty in the island. After Hurricane Maria, she helped create the Fondo de Resiliencia,14 a sustainable agricultural movement that aims to impact on the plantation and colonised-industrialisation models at a grassroots level the cons. By weaving a network among projects located in the island as well as in the North-­ American diaspora, El Fondo promotes new forms of labour and organisation, and the visibilisation and opening up of spaces for people not involved in institutionalised economies, in addition to an autonomous food production. Moving from the fields to the streets, the Women’s Day commemorative celebration in San Juan also pushes for an intersectional and class-­ conscious approach to public demonstrations. Actualising many of the obstacles faced by Negrón-Muntaner’s interviewees, the feminist approach in action of this demonstration brings together claims against Puerto Rico’s colonial status and national debt, gender-fluid and trans movements in the island, and the diaspora and cuts on public education and health services, while clearing space for an expanded forum on queer artistic production.15 Intersectionality now demands moving beyond claims

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for identitarian representation, and to go back to the materiality of bodies struggling for survival. In this sense, the demonstrations work in parallel to El Fondo to enact, at the level of the people, a sovereignty that has become impossible at the State level. One more example from Puerto Rico I would like to bring forth is the biannual academic and activist encounter Coloquio ¿del otro la’o?, held in the University of Puerto Rico in Mayaguez. The organisers, Lissette Rolón Collazo and Beatriz Llenín Figueroa, conceive the colloquium as a space to establish a conversation between queer initiatives that take place in the fields, the streets, the classrooms, and in academic analysis. In spite the initial resistance of university administrators, the colloquium has achieved a central position in the Hispanic Caribbean since its inception in 2006. We can think of this space as another way to face the urgency felt by Negrón-Muntaner to enact the figure of “scholaractivist.” An important space, then, when the Hispanic Caribbean, and most places in the region, is experiencing a turn to political conservatism that threatens spaces that allow queer praxis and manifestation. These are some of the possibilities moving forward within a queer Hispanic Caribbean scene. They are not devoid of challenges, particularly those pointed out by Ward in Respectably Queer: how to organise avoiding corporate models, resisting neoliberal co-optation, and positioning people whose voice has always been looked down in leadership positions? For Ward, three of the main goals for queer organising should now include, firstly, to move towards anti-professionalisation and avoid the primacy of the “experts;” secondly, to avoid academic and activist discourses and their meaningless vocabulary; and finally, to resist commodification, maybe the most challenging goal, considering the power of the non-profit industrial complex to intervene in grassroots movements via grant financing. The new ways of organisation through queerness seem to be signalling, not to the mainstreaming of queerness, as it was feared by the characters in Luis Negrón’s “Mundo Cruel,” but to the queerification16 of political critique, regional hermeneutics, community-organising, and aesthetic production.

Notes 1. “El mismo jefe abrió la reunión diciendo, oigan bien, que ese era un día especial, pues a tono con los nuevos tiempos y para beneficio de la firma y sus colaboradores y colaboradoras, había invitado a unos jóvenes líderes de

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quién sabe qué, que venían a hablar de la homofobia en el trabajo” (Negrón 2010, p. 98). 2. “Deberían hacer un anuncio, dándonos las gracias” (Negrón 2010, p. 101). 3. Different emblematic accounts of (Hispanic) Caribbean identity and cultural studies insist on the primacy of sexed bodies as the focus of what makes the Caribbean different. Think of Antonio Benítez Rojo and Roberto Fernández Retamar, among others. The same claim is reflected upon by Faith Smith in the introduction to Sex and the Citizen. Interrogating the Caribbean. In the opening piece, “Sexing the Caribbean,” Smith recognises the intertwinedness of the taboo of miscegenation and the taboo of homosexuality as a convergence specifically intensified in the Caribbean: “Racial combinations become a way to assign or refute inferiority and to prop up racial and masculine honor. Sex—or at least heterosexual, reproductive sex—proves something about the success or failure of political rule, and written into the nationalist text are these refutations and affirmations” (Smith 2011, p. 4). 4. Forms of violence that, as Kofi Campbell describes in the introduction to The Queer Caribbean Speaks, exist within a contradictory pendulum in which queerness is severely punished or silently tolerated. “One can see, then, that the lives of queer Caribbeans are filled with contradictions and contradictory cultural receptions. How can a country that says homosexuality is a crime also be home to the Miss Gay Guyana Glory Pageant, an annual event well attended by people of all classes” (Campbell 2014, p. 4). 5. Here I am thinking of the introduction to José Quiroga’s Tropics of Desire. Interventions from Queer Latin America (2000). Quiroga lays out a different politics of “coming out” in Latin America. More than a public declaration of one’s desire or sexuality, ambiguity and non-disclosure exist in Latin America as another way of queer resistance: compared to the “transparency” of the coming out politics of the North, opacity offers an alternative to existence and creation. 6. According to a report on migrationpolicy.org, the United States is the first destination of Caribbean migration, followed by Canada, Spain, and the United Kingdom. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/ caribbean-immigrants-united-states. 7. 1968 is the catalyst for much of a global transformation in many different aspects of experience. In particular, it was the year that saw a shift around support for the Cuban Revolution. Before the Cuban Government’s support of the invasion of Prague by the Soviet Union, there was a generalized support of the global left for the Revolution. According to historian Rafael Hernández, “Until 1968, the left almost everywhere supported the Cuban Revolution. In Europe, the Revolution was originally perceived as a popu-

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list revolution ‘without ideology’ that had independently come to power in an unaligned manner through the efforts of guerrillas, offering an alternative to Stalinism and a world divided into two superpowers. In the Third World, above all in Africa, the Cuban Revolution was seen as the spearhead of the struggle against colonialism and neocolonialism, and Cuba as a political an even military ally, of considerable weight despite its small size” (Hernández 2009). 8. At this point, it is necessary to make a distinction regarding the actuality of Queer (Hispanic) Caribbean studies today. On the one hand, understanding queer practices as modes of agency that hold on to their genealogies as they respond to the demands of current neoliberal forms of oppression has contributed to a line of current work that focuses more on the contributions of black academic and activist production in the region and its diasporas. As Gill puts forth as the guiding principle for his book and the community of academic production in which he participates, there is a looking back to the contribution of black feminist thought, particularly that of the Trinidadian-­ American, Audre Lorde. For Gill and others, like Rinaldo Walcott and Omise’eke Tinsley, the engagement with black feminist scholarship production today arises as a concern to think of the ways in which Lorde’s texts, and others, had already begun, avant la lettre, to think of queerness, problematising the silencing of feminist thought and the wide space occupied by white gay masculinity in the field. Gill anticipates that it is a particular reading of Lorde’s notion of the erotic, taken from her stellar speech at the Fourth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women in 1978, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” that which can open up the space for the cohabitation of contradictory modes of experience like pleasure/pain or love/hatred. In his refashioning of the concept, the “erotic” “describes various formal and informal power hierarchies (the political), sexual as well as nonsexual intimacy (the sensual), and sacred metaphysics (the spiritual) simultaneously” (Gill 2018, p.  10). Bringing together political desire, sensual desire, and spiritual desire may in fact contribute to a reconciliation of modes of experience thought which are, to me, unassimilable, and, thus, may contribute to a revision of Queer Caribbean genealogies by emphasising the ways in which they perceive and include tensions within difference. 9. Even though Negrón-Muntaner clarifies that Román Lopez’s position has changed and currently her academic work deals more with what can be referred to queer epistemologies, distancing herself from her early leftist militancy, and focusing more on the role the law has on determining binary constructions of “good” and “evil,” “victim” and “victimizer,” etc. (Negrón-Muntaner 2018, p. 353).

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10. “Creían vivir intensamente. Creían. Los imagino rebeldes, entusiastas, dinámicos, plenos de vitalidad, optimismo e ideas novedosas. Debió ser un momento de ilusiones […] Eran los años duros, cuando no había nada de nada, arroz con merluza, ilusiones y va que chifla (Portela 2010, p. 32). 11. “No había nacido en un ingenio azucarero como su padre, ni lo habían torturado y deportado como habían hecho con los amigos de sus padres en los años setenta. ¿Qué coños le pasaba?” (Hernández 2018, p. 37). 12. “El nuevo químico entraba en Argenis al atropellado ritmo de la conversación de Bengoa; un torrente de fechas emblemáticas de la lucha antiimperialista, recetas para batidas profilácticas, trozos de canciones de Silvio, Amaury Pérez y Los Guaraguaos, economía china y estadísticas de béisbol. Tenía la boca seca y las pupilas tan dilatadas que todo a su alrededor lucía como una foto en alto contraste” (Hernández 2018, p. 13). 13. “Por un lado, el ideal socialista convertido en mercancía; por otro, la marca capitalista de contrabando que sostenía a duras penas el funcionamiento biológico de la Revolución” (Hernández 2018, p. 33). 14. https://fondoderesilienciapuertorico.tumblr.com/collaborators 15. https://remezcla.com/features/culture/puerto-rico-feminist-movementintersectional/ 16. https://slate.com/human-interest/2019/04/puerto-rico-queer-lifehurricane-maria-macha-colon.html

Bibliography Campbell, Kofi. The Queer Caribbean Speaks. Interviews with Writers, Artists, and Activists. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Cloud, L. Dana. “Queer Theory and ‘Family Values’: Capitalism’s Utopias of Self-­ Invention.” In Marxism, Queer Theory, Gender, edited by Mas’Ud Zavarzadeh, Teresa L.  Ebert and Donal Morton, 71–114. Syracuse, NY: The Red Factory, 2001. Floyd, Kevin. The Reification of Desire. Toward a Queer Marxism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Gill, Lyndon. Erotic Islands: Art and Activism in the Queer Caribbean. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. Green, Cecilia. “Caribbean Dependency Theory of the 1970s. A Historical-­ Materialist- Feminist revision.” In New Caribbean Thought: A Reader, edited by Brian Meeks and Fonde Lindahl, 40–72. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2001. Hernández, Rafael. “The Red Year. Politics, Society and Culture in 1968.” Harvard Review of Latin America VIII (Winter 2009): 21–24. Hernández, Rita Indiana. Hecho en Saturno. Madrid: Editorial Periférica, 2018.

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Negrón-Muntaner, Frances. “Can you imagine?: Puerto Rican Lesbian Activism, 1972–1991.” Centro Journal 30, 2 (Summer 2018): 348–377. Negrón, Luis. Mundo cruel. San Juan: Libros A.C., 2010. Portela, Ena Lucía. Cien botellas en una pared. Doral, FL.: Stockcero, 2010. Salas Rivera, Raquel. Lo Terciario/The Tertiary. Oakland, CA: Timeless Infinite Light, 2018. Sheller, Mimi. Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Smith, Faith. “Introduction: Sexing the Citizen.” In Sex and the Citizen. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011. Ward, Jane. Respectably Queer. Diversity Culture in LGBT Activist Organizations. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2008.

CHAPTER 9

“Holland” in the Caribbean: Voids Between the Spanish-Speaking World and the Lower Countries Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger

Introduction In the Americas, when referring to the Kingdom of the Netherlands, the term “Holland” is used again and again. A perfect example is the title of Annette Strott’s book, Holland-mania. The Unknown Dutch Period in American Art and Culture (1998), in which she describes the preferences for everything Dutch at the turn of the twentieth century. This use of “Holland” for the Netherlands derives from quite early times. The revolt of the northern provinces of the Spanish Lower Countries against the Hapsburgs from 1561 to 1648 unified them into the Republic of the Seven Dutch Provinces, and Amsterdam became an urban centre for global expansion to the East (East India Company, founded 1602) and the West (West India Company, founded 1621) Indies. Because of the

I. Phaf-Rheinberger (*) University of Giessen, Giessen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. López, M. T. Vera-Rojas (eds.), New Perspectives on Hispanic Caribbean Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51498-3_9

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location of the main cities (Amsterdam, The Hague and Rotterdam) in the provinces of North and South Holland, the Dutch Republic became, from that early date, repeatedly addressed simply as Holland. The Dutch territory regained its independence, lost after the 1795 French intervention, in 1813, when it sanctioned the official name of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The use of “Holland” in Iberian territories in Europe and the Americas becomes even more diverse. In times of the Inquisition, Dutch commercial traders migrated from the Protestant provinces to Spain, Portugal and the Spanish and Portuguese Americas pretending to be Flemish, that is Catholic, and from the Spanish Lower Countries, today Belgium. Therefore, in the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries in the Caribbean and Latin America, the term “Flemish” often became an equivalent of being from Holland. This shows in the title of the classical book on the occupation of northeast Brazil, O tempo dos flamengos (The time of the Flemish, 2001), by historian José Antônio Gonsalves de Mello, which describes the time between 1624 and 1654 when governors of the West India Company (WIC) had their headquarters in Recife and were involved in the transatlantic business across the “Western” hemisphere. Since the WIC took the islands of Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao from the Spanish in 1634, “Dutch” Recife was in close contact with the Caribbean, with the goal to break not only the Portuguese but also the Spanish monopoly in the Americas. Dutch ships had already visited Caribbean salt pants before but at this point, with the Company’s imperial support, they started invading the Spanish territories. The Dutch also acquired Suriname from the English in 1664  in exchange for New Netherlands, the island of Manhattan. Since then, the Netherlands Antilles and Suriname have had Dutch as their official language. However, language diversity has remained particularly pronounced in this “Holland” overseas. Would this be a reason for the “Dutch Caribbean” being a marginal field in Caribbean literary studies? In congresses pretending to cover the Caribbean area as a whole, authors working on the Dutch Caribbean are seldom mentioned, quite in contrast to their rich literary productivity. Books written in the Dutch language, if not translated, do not reach an international audience. Besides, scholars of Dutch Caribbean cultural studies do not participate actively in postcolonial discussions in the academia, and texts written in the creole languages of Suriname (Sranan) or Curaçao (Papiamentu)1 are only of interest to local readers. Moreover, many potential readers live in Europe,

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with scarce contacts with South America. In this chapter, I intend to explore these relationships. Because of the geographical position of “Holland” in the Caribbean, I will develop some aspects of its cultural history with an emphasis on the connections to the Spanish-speaking world, not only of the islands but also of the coastal mainland.

Dutch Maritime History Just like in the history of the Caribbean as a whole, the slave trade was one of the economic pillars for Suriname and Curaçao. This trade started to develop in the period when both countries were considered regions “beyond the line” which marked the difference between the northern and southern half of the oceans on the globe. Historian Michael Mann argues that the phrase “no peace beyond the line” appeared in the 1559 Cateau-­ Cambrésis Peace Treaty between France, England and Spain, and that “the line became a matter of bilateral and multilateral regulations in the course of the seventeenth century” (Mann and Phaf-Rheinberger 2014, pp. 7–8). The Dutch claimed free access to trade on all the oceans of the globe, and the maritime space of the Caribbean, so close to the treasuries of Spanish America, became a legendary destination for all types of adventurers seeking a fortune. This circumstance explains the international success of the first fiction book on pirates, De Americaensche Zee-roovers (The Buccaneers of America), by the French Alexandre Olivier Exquemelin (1646–1707), published in Amsterdam in 1678. The book was immediately translated into German, Spanish, English and French, and it was often rewritten since. Exquemelin’s publishing house, Jan Ten Hoorn, outlaid its selling strategies with care in a period in which travel books were popular in Europe (Korten 2011). Exquemelin had first hired himself as engagé to the Compagnie des Isles de l’Amérique in 1666. After living in slave-like circumstances on the island of Tortuga and later in Hispaniola, he became a surgeon in the service of the pirate Henry Morgan, who would become governor of Jamaica, and probably participated himself in the plundering of Maracaibo in 1669 and Panama in 1670. Exquemelin settled in Amsterdam in 1677 to obtain his official surgeon degree (in 1679) before taking service again on ships to the Caribbean. He wrote the manuscript of De Americaensche Zee-roovers during his stay in Amsterdam, presumably in French (the original manuscript has not been found), and published a Dutch translation. Exquemelin’s book is, in fact, about European rivalries

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in the Caribbean. The subtitle in the first edition reads, “a pertinent and veritable description of all the most important robberies, and inhuman cruelties, committed by the French and English pirates against the Spanish in the Americas,” with the addition, “Who himself, in need, assisted to these robberies” (Korten 2011, p.  26; all translations are the author’s own).2 The book contains descriptions of vegetation, animals and agricultural products of different parts of the region, and Exquemelin discusses the life and deeds of famous pirates such as François L’Ollonais, Rock Brasiliano, Bartolomé the Portuguese or Henry Morgan, who ransacked and devastated the Spanish coastal cities. The text includes little information about the Dutch territories, in contrast to the fact that Dutch buccaneers and corsairs were similarly active on these seas. The festivities in Holland were exuberant when Piet Hein conquered Salvador da Bahia in 1624, and even more when he captured part of the Spanish silver float in 1628 at the Cuban coast of Matanzas. Three years earlier, in September 1625, Boudewijn Hendricksz had besieged the city of San Juan Bautista in Puerto Rico with seventeen ships for two months. These Dutch admirals had been involved in attacks on the Portuguese hegemony on the coast of West Africa and Brazil. The aggressive expansion of the Dutch United Provinces culminated in the governorship of northeastern Brazil by count Johan Maurits van Nassau from 1637 to 1644. During Maurits’ tenure as a governor of the WIC, São Jorge de Mina and Luanda/Angola were occupied and the Dutch imperium in Brazil expanded continuously with the aim to reach towards the Spanish possessions in the Americas. As a consequence of the permanent attacks of the pirates, the Spanish destroyed and depopulated the villages at the northern coast of Hispaniola, causing the creole citizens and their slaves to put up resistance to the governor’s soldiers. In The Repeating Island (1996), Antonio Benítez Rojo relates that “an entire Dutch squadron that was marauding the coast offered the help of their men and their guns, on the condition that they declare themselves to be subjects of Maurice of Nassau” (p. 48). Benítez Rojo emphasises the saga of Caribbean piracy and marooning and mentions Exquemelin’s book, albeit without going into much detail.

Caribbean Enlightenment Privateering, piracy and buccaneering continued until the end of the eighteenth century, as described by Alejo Carpentier in El siglo de las luces (Explosion in a Cathedral, 1962). Carpentier, who lived in Caracas, started

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writing his novel after visiting Guadalupe and Barbados. Carpentier’s novel focuses on the revolutionary spirit of the times in which the Haitian and French Revolutions had a severe impact in the entire Caribbean region. His point of departure is three Cuban bourgeois living in Havana, where enlightened ideas, especially those concerning slavery, were forbidden. The first chapters of Carpentier’s book are set in Cuba, Haiti and France, but by the third chapter, overseas “Holland” starts to play a role. One of the Cuban characters arrives to Guadalupe from France in the years that Pointe-à-Pitre became one of the richest cities in the region, which was observed with jealousy from the Spanish parts of the “Sea of Islands” where forbidden enlightenment books are imported through the Dutch possessions (Carpentier 1965, pp.  179–184).3 Carpentier also writes that France authorised corsair ships to sell the slaves taken from the English, Spanish and other enemies of the French Republic in Dutch Caribbean harbours. This became an important source of income for the citizens of Pointe-à-Pitre, who had initially thought that, because of the 1795 Basel Treaty in which Spain and France established peace, there would be a possibility to reinstall commercial relations with the mainland, Puerto Rico and Havana, which proved far from the truth. Therefore, the slogan is “Let’s go to a Dutch island, where we will sell the cargo of blacks” (Carpentier 1965, p. 193).4 These golden years ended in 1798, when the USA declared war to France, at which point Carpentier’s character Esteban decides to abandon Guadalupe for Havana. Esteban travels via French Guiana, where he has to wait for a passport. He remembers the persistence of marooning in Venezuela, Mexico, Brazil, Haiti and Suriname, a country where “Holland had to gather a mercenary army to fight, in the bush of Suriname, the tremendous maroon armies of three popular leaders, Zan-Zan, Boston and Arabay, who threatened the colony with destruction” (Carpentier 1965, p.  238).5 Esteban then continues to Suriname because he has to travel through a Dutch harbour to Havana, since “Holland was, by now, the most loyal ally that France had in these territories” (Carpentier 1965, p.  243).6 When Esteban arrives in Paramaribo, he observes the festive image of a city that looks like a Flemish kermesse, obviously an allusion to Brueghel the Old. In this opulent, “ultramarine Holland” you can buy everything, and an astonishing religious tolerance reigns, with a Catholic church, Protestant and Lutheran temples, Portuguese and German synagogues, all of them with their different celebrations of Holy Days. Esteban

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does not have contact with the maroons, but when he visits the hospital for a health problem, he observes that the Dutch court sentences slaves to have their legs or arms amputated in punishment for their disobedience.7

Connections with Spanish America Carpentier’s description of Paramaribo, heavily borrowed from Voltaire’s Candide (1759), stands in contrast to other writings about Suriname of that period, such as the one by John Gabriel Stedman (1796), a Scottish soldier who fought the maroons under the Dutch in Suriname, or the “enlightened” essay about the “colony of Surinam” written in French by the Sephardic Jew David Nassy in 1788. Nassy’s family, originary from Dutch Brazil, were founders of the Jewish Savanah, a plantation area in Suriname where they built a synagogue—in addition to another in Paramaribo. In Nassy’s essay, he asserts that Jewish “privileges” in the colony were under attack, and dedicated his essay to Wilhelm Dohm, a Prussian official who had published a book on the civil situation of the Jewish people in Germany in 1781 (Phaf-Rheinberger 2019). Nassy did not write about the contacts of Surinamese Jews with other Jewish communities in the Caribbean, although an important Jewish migrant population from Europe and Brazil had settled in Curaçao since the midst of the seventeenth century.8 Unlike Suriname, Curaçao’s soil was less appropriate for agriculture, so that the Sephardic community there, which spoke Spanish fluently, concentrated on business with the Americas. Some of its members participated in the liberation struggles in Spanish America: the Curaçaoan Jewish family Mordechay hosted Simón Bolívar and his sisters before he left for Jamaica and, later, Haiti. In the course of the nineteenth century, many Colombian and Venezuelan families started to send their children to private schools on the island of Curaçao because of the lack of safety in times of war and rebellion in their own countries. There, Spanish was more frequently spoken than Dutch and a Spanish-speaking literature developed towards the end of the century. Although this tradition has been almost completely forgotten, we are fortunate to have the analytical readings and the anthology by Liesbeth Echteld (1999). Echteld mentions the existence of Notas y Letras. Semanario de Literatura y Bellas Artes (1886–1888) and El Poema, Revista literaria quincenal (1895–1896), and discusses in depth ten authors who wrote in Spanish, six of them of Jewish origin. The only novel in the selection, Decir mentiras para sacar verdades (To lie in order to get the truth),

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presents the young teacher Luis Beppino, who lives in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1870, as a protagonist. The plot, which concentrates on his love for a Cuban woman, has a happy end after many misfortunes.9 In addition, Victor Zwijsen, rector of the Catholic Colegio Santo Tomás on the island, which hosted many pupils from Venezuela and Colombia, wrote three dramatic pieces, all related to important men like Christopher Columbus, the viceroy of Peru, general Sucre or Francisco de Miranda. Most of this literary production was poetry and, as we deduce from Notas y Letras, poets from other Spanish-American countries published in Curaçao. Although Echteld mentions several times the book Del Curaçao que se va (About vanishing Curaçao, 1935) by John de Pool (1873–1947), she does not count this work as literature. Nonetheless, de Pool describes many details of the daily cultural life on the island in short chapters, full of personal experiences and emotional values. Being a native from Curaçao, de Pool had migrated to Panama, but during his frequent visits home he perceived rampant changes in comparison with the days of his youth. De Pool characterises his book as “pages torn out of the book of my memories,” and enlists customs, family life, cultural events, publications, celebrations, dances, music, marriages, photography, theatre and so on. In the epilogue, he dedicates his book to the youth of Curaçao, giving them advice regarding the relationship with the colonial government: The relations with the government, always and in all cases, have to be respectful and cordial, although you can differ in the appreciation of governmental measures. Do not forget the following point which in my opinion is very important. For us, Curaçao is big and very important, because it is ours. But for Holland, it is a very small colony, to which it is impossible to pay equal attention as to the big colonies of the East Indies […] There is an old saying in Curaçao that when they send us administrative officials from Holland, they have to pass them through a sieve. What remains, passes through another sieve. The finest stay in Holland, the ruder are sent to the East Indies, and the rudest to Curaçao. (de Pool 1935, p. 342)10

This is one of the rare occasions in which de Pool points to “Holland,” the other one being in the chapter on the governors he personally remembered (Kip, van Herdt, Barge, Brantjes, ex-governor Helfrich) (de Pool 1935, pp. 176–181), not only because of their eventual effectiveness in governmental matters, but also because of their behaviour. De Pool focuses on Spanish America, remembering the visit of Simón Bolívar to

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Curaçao, his rivalry with the Curaçaoan general Manuel Piar, the economic blockade installed by the government of Venezuela in 1871 or the admirals from Curaçao at the service of the government of Colombia. For de Pool, navigation is an important element, as shown in his description of the visit of the Spanish squadron in 1898 under the leadership of Admiral Don Pascual Cervera. The squadron, which had taken a detour on its way to Cuba to avoid meeting the North American fleet, was warmly welcomed by the Spanish consul on the island, Don Moisés Curiel, notwithstanding the fact that Curaçao was an ally to the USA in the anti-­colonial war in Cuba: The visit of these naval unities, in my opinion, was the most transcendental historical event since the squadron of Van Walbeeck entered the Harbour and took possession of the island in the name of Holland and, after the Peace of Paris, the arrival of the Prins van Oranje […] Although almost all Curaçao sympathised with the North Americans, the curiosity aroused by the opportunity to see up close the man who everybody thought was going right to his defeat, and the great popularity and sympathy of the gentlemanlike consul, made the party a big social success. The youth of Curaçao was unanimous in its sympathies for the Cuban cause. As children, all of us heard astonishing episodes of the war of 68. (de Pool 1935, p. 186)11

De Pool continues to narrate stories and anecdotes, which, as he says, are known by everybody. His familiarity with the members of the “white elite,” including foreigners and Jewish citizens, reveals how internationally oriented this elite was. Therefore, it calls attention the relevance that de Pool gives to his native Papiamentu, of which he inserts many instances in the book. He also gives a first account of publications in his mother tongue, mostly in the publishing house of Don Agustín Bethancourt, a migrant from the Canary Islands. De Pool’s correspondence with Rodolfo Lenz, the German-Chilean professor who wrote a first grammatical treatise of Papiamentu in Spanish, further attests for his unconditional respect for this language (Phaf-Rheinberger 2020).

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The Spanish Mainland The close links of Curaçao with Latin America were disappearing by the time de Pool published his memoires. The arrival of the oil industry altered the previous alliances in the island. The lifetime of Cola Debrot (1902–1981), who became the first native governor of the Netherlands Antilles between 1962 and 1970, is particularly illustrative of this change in orientation. Debrot, whose parents had European, Venezuelan, Amerindian and other origins, came from a typical creole family. He spoke Spanish at home with his Venezuelan mother, Papiamentu with his friends and Dutch at school, even before going to study in the Netherlands. He was in a permanent dialogue with the foremost intellectuals in pre-war Holland and started the edition of the magazine Antilliaanse Cahiers, where he published the translation of de Pool’s book into Dutch. In his foreword to this edition, Debrot wrote about de Pool’s—in his opinion “exaggerated”—interest in the squadron event in Willemstad in 1898. In contrast to his senior colleague, these maritime complications in the Spanish-American wars did not interest Debrot. Notwithstanding, he agreed that de Pool narrated what everybody in Curaçao knew at that time. Debrot authored one of the first overviews of Dutch Antillean literature, which included the “Spanish period” before 1634. It is significant that he wrote about “voids” (leemten) in the title of his essay. Obviously, among the Spanish-speaking countries, Venezuela was of special importance to him. From 1935 to 1947, he worked on his novel Bewolkt bestaan (Clouded existence), one of the main characters of which is Carlota Campbell, a woman from Caracas who has links to cocaine smuggling, suffers hallucinations and nervous breakdowns and ultimately represents the fear of rich families of losing their capital because of political unrest. Later on, during his tenure as governor, Debrot paid a first official visit to Venezuela in 1963 and had an excellent relationship with President Rómulo Betancourt. They planned collaboration in education, which according to Debrot was a recurrent topic in Curaçao, expressing his idea that the island might become a centre for Caribbean culture in the future (Oversteegen 1994b, p. 199). A few years later, in May 1969, Debrot was deeply affected by the revolt of the Curaçaoan Papiamentu-speaking population, for which he felt responsible as governor. The quatrains he wrote in Dutch and Papiamentu in the context of this event are well known. Debrot’s biographer, Jaap Oversteegen, however, also mentions a quatrain in Spanish

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“And your voice”: “Late arrived / rapidly gone” (Oversteegen 1994b, p. 251).12 Oversteegen interprets these verses as the expression of Debrot’s love for Papiamentu, the most discriminated voice at a time when the English-speaking migrants from the Caribbean obtained the jobs in the oil industry more easily.13 Another interpretation of these verses might consider Debrot speaking of the Spanish “voice.” At the end of his life, Debrot wrote another Spanish quatrain with the title “Maiquetía,” the name of the international airport “Simón Bolívar” of Caracas, in which he displayed his feeling of loss and abandonment and which Debrot sent on postcards to his friends before his death: without father, without mother, without brothers, without sisters, without fiancé, without love Oh Maiquetía! (Oversteegen 1994b, p. 325)14

Such an overwhelming solitude is also perceived in De foltering van El Dorado (The torture of El Dorado, 1983), a long treatise by Surinamese Albert Helman (1903–1996). Helman conceives an ecological history of the five Guianas (Venezuelan, English, Dutch, French and Brazilian) in order to reinstall the unity of their geological formation and the history of the Amerindians, the first and most permanent inhabitants of these regions. Helman did not write in Spanish but was familiar with this language and with historical facts from Latin America. He intended to demonstrate that, in reality, the Guianas had to be considered as one country, “not only originally, but also still today: a territory inhabited by people whose destiny is unconditionally related to the collective destiny of the others” (Helman 1983, p. 462).15 In his treatise, Helman makes a plea for complete integration in ecological, ethnical, historical and social-economic aspects, but he simultaneously confesses that such integration would be a myth invented for a better future, like the dream of El Dorado was in the past. Solitude is also a topic in the poetry of Michael Slory (1935–2018), the master poet from Suriname. He studied Spanish in Amsterdam and was a fan of Che Guevara and the Cuban revolution, an admiration he expressed in his volume Brieven aan de guerrilla (Letters to the guerrilla, 1968). Back in Paramaribo, he met the teacher René de Rooy, a specialist on Spanish America, who made him write texts in Spanish, a language Slory also taught in schools. He foremost wrote in Sranan, but after December 1982, when the government killed 15 intellectuals from the opposition,

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Slory abandoned his ideal according to which Sranan was a unifying language, and started writing in Dutch, English and Spanish. His Poemas contra la agonía (Poems against agony, 1988) expresses his feelings of hopelessness in a situation of no return. Michiel van Kempen, in De geest van Waraku (The ghost of Waraku, 1992), reproduces some of Slory’s 31 short poems, such as: “To the tempest // I would like / to tell the tempest / to calm down // To the darkness / to step back / and not to get / into my thoughts / nor frighten me” (Kempen 1993, pp. 215–216).16 In a conversation with Ezra de Haan in Paramaribo, Slory mentions the lack of interest of the Surinamese officials to maintain Spanish in the school’s curricula and to maintain contacts with Latin America: “There are so many Blacks there who make music, you cannot, we cannot leave them alone” (Haan 2014, p. 216).17 We find a similar feeling of solitude with respect to Latin America in recent poems by Bea Vianen (1935–2019), the most popular Surinamese author in the 1970s. In a series of novels, she confronts her characters, who come from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds, with urban environments. As was the case with Slory, Vianen was educated in a Catholic school and had affinity with Latin America.

“Voids” Spanish-speaking visitors of “Holland” in the Caribbean had different opinions about it, as we can see in the following examples. José Martí, who visited Curaçao in March 1881 on his way to Venezuela, reported: There they go, a degenerate race, a sick race, speaking rapidly, with the exuberant fluidity of the tropics, an ignoble language and a singular, incorrect and awful mixture of Castilian and the language of the Netherlands, a language which is complete in its name: Papiamento… (quoted in Godfried 2003)

Another Cuban, the poet Nicolás Guillén, was more positive during a stopover in the beginning of July 1959: That is to say, Curaçao irritates and oppresses the mood because of its aspect of being a colony, of a people without development, vegetating next to the Caribbean; but the people are sympathetic, clean, generous and not as passive concerning their destiny and condition as it would seem at the first sight […] Like in Canton at the margins of the Pearl River, small boats are balanc-

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ing at the dock. They are sailing ships from Venezuela that come from Puerto Cabello. They bring fruit, fresh and pickled fish, oranges and apples. Almost the entire crew comes from Margarita, the Venezuelan island. (Guillén 1962, p. 227)18

Such reports of visiting Spanish-speaking authors are not frequent. Although Benítez Rojo’s “repeating island,” with its saga of piracy and marooning, mentions a “Holland” perspective in Spanish literature from the Caribbean, this is but an exception in the literature of the Dutch regions in relationship to the Spanish-speaking world. Translations of works written in Dutch creole languages into Spanish are rare. The translation of the most famous volume, Wij slaven van Suriname (Nosotros, esclavos de Surinam) by Anton de Kom, a historical and emotional treatise on the history of Suriname from the perspective of slaves, published by the Caribbean Centre of the Cuban institution Casa de las Américas, is an exception to this rule. However, a permanent dialogue of people, practices and ideas in reference to the Spanish-speaking Transatlantic Caribbean (2014) does not seem to work too well at the literary level. Spanish, of course, is spoken more or less everywhere but we do not encounter narratives such as Carpentier’s novel mentioned above or Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá’s La noche oscura del Nino Avilés (The dark night of the Niño Avilés, 1984), which constructs a foundational myth for the Puerto Rican society, rooted in the eighteenth century. And what would have thought Slory, who was so interested in contacts with Spanish America, had he known about the Yoruba santeros from Cuba in Chávez’s socialist Venezuela? (Ayoh’Omidire 2014). Or what about the “efecto archipiélago,” as proposed by Juan Carlos Quintero Herencia (2016), according to which the aquatic space of the Caribbean is as a theoretical oxymoron, an empty-­ saturated extension of folds and differences, which connects the fragments into one single body in the literature of the Spanish islands? Neither authors nor literary critics concerned with “Holland” in Dutch Caribbean literature respond to such analytical concepts as developed in Spanish-­ Caribbean cultures. A consultation of historical research confirms that, in reality, the connections have been close. Linda Rupert published a fascinating study on Creolization and Contraband (2012), showing the strong relationships between Curaçao and the Venezuelan coast in the eighteenth century, not only concerning the slave trade and the search for fugitive slaves, but also in terms of the volume of contraband cargo. She gives examples of

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independent “free” people who set up plantations on the Spanish mainland, and provides complementary insights on historical events, such as discussed in Carpentier’s Explosion in a Cathedral. In the same way, the archiver of the historical archive of Coro made an effort putting together the folios with information about these contacts, one of which informs about the military involvement of the French and the English in Curaçao in 1800: Asked [to Juan Noru, native of Curaçao] about the “revolution that happens in the said island of Curaçao, he said: that escaping from it he left that island with six more companions in a canoe […] on the fourteenth of this month at night, and he arrived yesterday night in Puerto Real de la Vela; that all the other French citizens who lived there as well as the Blacks from the lower part united themselves with the French of the Revolution and together they might compose four thousand men; that they constructed an artillery unity […] to destruct the whole city and the castle, which consisted until he left of three cannons […] and they worked rapidly in it, because their intention is to master themselves of the Island and at the same day of his departure they opened the fire […] and many buildings were in ruins and many were dead […] that to the support of the French now came additional forces from the Island of Guadalupe, about three hundred man in two schooners, who arrived on the sixth or seventh day of this month; that the Governor of Curaçao asked for help to an English frigate that cruised there outside of the Harbour, and that this was the motif they solidarised with them, and it is said that Curaçao is for the English when they get rid of the French; that this frigate has sent for other English ships for help, that most of their officials are on land, very much friends and allies with the Governor”—10 September 1800–12 March 1801. (González Batista 1997, pp. 144–145)19

This report, written just five years after the slave rebellion in Curaçao under the leadership of Tula in August 1795 (Rupert 2012, pp. 207–209), reveals that Carpentier’s revolutionary spirit of the Haitian/French revolution was still in place. Contemporary authors are looking for deeper, familiar connections with the Spanish Mainland, such as Loekie Morales in her novel Overseas Bloodline (2010), in which she traces her family history from the Netherlands Antilles to Coro. With the collaboration of the radio station of the state of Falcón, Morales managed to reconnect with several of her “lost” aunts. Morales presented her book in a Spanish translation, La sangre llama (2019), at the International Book Fair in Havana, where

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she was invited along with other authors from these islands. Besides, as Slory had remarked, Latin American music is very popular (Allen 2012), and stars like Celia Cruz, among others, have visited the area, a fact seldom addressed in literature. Authors from Curaçao who write in Dutch, such as Boeli van Leeuwen and Tipp Marug, take an ironical, rational and Protestant stand, according to which Spanish America is a megalomaniacal, unpractical and chaotic continent. The voids (leemten) of which Debrot was speaking do exist between the Dutch and Spanish worlds of the Circum-Caribbean. It is difficult to find the feeling of a “repeating island,” of being part of the body of an archipelago connecting with Spanish-speaking areas. In his essay on Antillean literature, Debrot referred to the “Flemish-Spanish antagonism,” an expression of Venezuelan historian Carlos Felice Cardot (1973) that pointed to a colonial phenomenon. Due to my orientation to “Holland” and Spanish America, however, we have seen that Felice Cardot’s antagonism now represents contemporary voids in cultural collaboration. To fill this gap, and with a broad understanding of history and fiction, literature and literary criticism can play an important role, contributing a great deal to a better understanding of the emotional landscape and to create an “El Dorado” in the future, in which this amnesia and lack of partnership would be overcome.

Notes 1. In this chapter, I will concentrate on the literature from Suriname and Curaçao. 2. “Behelsende een pertinente en waerachtige beschrijving van alle de voornaemste roveryen, en onmenschelijcke wreedheden, die de Engelse en Franse rovers, tegen de Spanjaerden in America, gepleeght hebben […] Die self dese Roveryen, door noodt, bygewoont heft […] Die self dese Roveryen, en door noodt, bygewoont heft” (Korten 2011, p. 26). 3. “Mar-de-Islas” (Carpentier 1965, pp. 179–184). 4. “Vamos a una isla holandesa, donde venderemos el cargamento de negros” (Carpentier 1965, p. 193). 5. “Holanda tenía que reunir un ejército de mercenarios europeos para combatir, en las selvas de Surinam, las tremebundas fuerzas cimarronas de tres caudillos populares, Zan-Zan, Noston y Arabay” (Carpentier 1965, p. 238). 6. ‟Holanda era, por ahora, la única leal aliada que en estas tierras tenía Francia” (Carpentier 1965, p.  243). In those years, Holland was as the Batavian Republic a satellite state of France.

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7. Carpentier (1965) points to “Holland” on several occasions. His description of Suriname is found in pages 244 to 247. 8. Rupert reports that the same David Nassi from Pernambuco had first tried to establish a community in Curaçao (Rupert 2012, pp. 53, 55). 9. Echteld did not find information on this author. However, Juan Huyke is a current name in Puerto Rico and, therefore, her assumption that this author was a traveller is probably true. De Pool mentions him as a governor of Puerto Rico. 10. “Las relaciones con el Gobierno, siempre y en todo caso, han de ser respetuosas y cordiales, aunque pueda existir diferencia en la apreciación de medidas gubernativas. No se debe perder de vista este punto, que a mi modo de ver es muy importante. Curaçao para nosotros, es grande y muy importante, porque es nuestro. Pero para Holanda, es una colonia mínima, a la cual es imposible dar atención al igual que a las grandes colonias de las Indias Orientales […] Hay un Viejo decir de Curaçao, que al enviarnos oficiales administrativos de Holanda, se les pasa por un tamiz. Lo que queda, se pasa por otro tamiz. Los sumamente finos, se quedan en Holanda, los más gruesos los mandan a la India Oriental, y los gruesotes los envían a Curaçao” (de Pool 1935, p. 342). 11. “La visita de estas unidades navales, a mi juicio, fué un acontecimiento histórico, el más transcendental desde que entró en puerto la escuadra de Van Walbeeck y tomó posesión de la isla en nombre de Holanda, y después de la paz de París, la llegada del ‘Prinz van Oranje’[…] Aunque casi la totalidad de Curaçao simpatizaba con los norteamericanos, la curiosidad de ver de cerca al hombre que todos consideraban iba derecho a la derrota, y la gran popularidad y simpatía del caballeroso cónsul, hicieron de la fiesta un gran éxito social. La juventud de Curaçao era unánime en sus simpatías por la causa de Cuba” (de Pool 1935, pp. 185–186). The Prins van Oranje was a ship with Dutch officials sent to serve in Curaçao after the English occupation in 1816. 12. ‟Y tu voz // Tarde venido / pronto ido. / Y tu voz clara / en mi oído” (Oversteegen 1994b, p. 251). 13. One of the most famous novels of Curaçao, Double Play by Frank Martinus Arion, describes this conflict. 14. ‟En las calles del cielo hemos perdido nuestro sentido / y las nubes y las brumas sus dedos de filigrana / y al amanecer, la tierra quemada asada de Maiquetía / sin padre, sin madre, sin hermanos, sin hermanas, sin novia, sin amores / Oh Maiquetía” (Oversteegen 1994b, p. 325). 15. “niet alleen van oorsprong, maar ook vandaag nog: een grondgebied bewoond door mensen wier individueel lot onherroepelijk verbonden is met het collective lot van de overigen” (Helman 1983, p. 462).

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16. “A la tormenta // Yo quisiera / decirle a la tormenta / que se calme // A la oscuridad / que retroceda, / que no se meta / en mis pensamientos / que no me ponga miedo” (Kempen 1993, pp. 215–216). 17. “Er zijn zoveel negers daar die muziek maken, dat mag niet, we mogen hen niet in de steek laten. In heel Latijns Amerika heb je negers gehad, in al die landen, we hebben een gemeenschappelijk verleden met die mensen. En bovendien door de muziek zie je duidelijk dat we een band hebben” (Haan 2014, p. 216). 18. “Es decir, Curazao molesta y oprime el ánimo por lo que tiene de colonia, de pueblo sin desarrollo, vegetando junto al Caribe; pero la gente es simpática, aseada, generosa y no tan despreocupada de su destino y condición como pudiera parecer a primera vista […] Como en Cantón en las márgenes del Río de las Perlas, pequeñas embarcaciones se balancean amarradas al muelle. Son veleros venezolanos, que vienen de Puerto Cabello. Traen frutos menores, pescado fresco y en salmuera, naranjas y manzanas. Casi toda la tripulación está formarda por margaritenos, es decir nativos de la isla venezolana de Margarita” (Guillén 1962, p. 227). 19. “Preguntado [a Juan Boru, natural de Curazao] sobre la revolución que hai en la expresada Ysla de Curazao dijo: que huyendo de ella salió de dicha Ysla con seis compañeros más en una canoa […] el día catorce del corriente en la noche, y arivo el dia de aller por la noche al Puerto Real de la Vela; que a los Franseses de la Revolución se han agregado todos los demás franceses que allí estaban avecindados, y los negros de la parte de avajo todos los quales podrán componer quatro mil hombres; que han formado una Batería […] para echar toda la Ciudad avajo, y batir el castillo de ella, Cuya batería hasta la fecha de su salida tenía montados tres cañones […] y velosmente trabajan en ella, que sus intentos son apoderarse de la Ysla y el mismo dia de su salida rompieron el fuego de parte a parte, y a habido muchas ruinas y muertes … que a los Franseses les vino aora de fresco esfuerzo de la Ysla de la Guadalupe como de trecientos hombres en dos goletas, las quales llegaron como el dia seis o siete del corriente; que el Governador de Curazao pidió auxilio a una Fragata Ynglesa que crusaba hai en el Puerto afuera, y con ese motivo la tiene de su partido, y se dice que Curazao quedará por de los Yngleses si escapa de los Franzeses; que esta Fragata ha mandado buscar otras embarcaciones Ynglesas para socorro, que la mayor parte de sus oficiales están en tierra, de mucha amistad y alianza con el Governador”—10 de septiembre de 1800–12 de marzo de 1801. (González Batista 1997, pp. 144–145). I left the Spanish orthography unchanged but made corrections in my English versions.

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Bibliography Allen, Rose Mary. “Music in Diasporic Context: The Case of Curaçao and Intra-­ Caribbean Migration.” Black Music Research Journal 32, 2, (Fall 2012): 51–65. Arion, Frank Martinus. Double Play. The Story of an Amazing World Record. Translated by Paul Vincent. London: Faber and Faber, 1998. [1973] Benítez Rojo, Antonio, The Repeating Island. The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Translated by James Maraniss. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996. Carpentier, Alejo. El siglo de las luces. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1965. [1962] ———. Explosion in a Cathedral. Translated by John Sturrock, introduction by Timothy Brennan. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Debrot, Cola. Voorwoord bij John de Pool, Del Curaçao que se va, 159–165 [1960]; Verworvenheden en leemten van de Antilliaanse literatuur, 170–224 [1977]. In Verzameld werk 1, Over Antilliaanse literatuur, edited by Jules de Palm. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1985. ———. Verzameld werk 4. Bewolkt bestaan. Epilogue by Estelle Debrot-Reed, Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1986. [1948] Echteld, Liesbeth. Literatura en español en Curazao al cambio del siglo. En busca de textos desconocidos de la segunda mitad del siglo XIX y de las primeras décadas del siglo XX. PhD dissertation, Utrecht University, 1999. Exquemelin, Alexandre Olivier. De Americaensche Zee-roovers. Amsterdam: Jan ten Hoorn, 1678. ———. The Buccaneers of America. Translation by Alexis Brown. New  York: Dover Publication Inc., 2000. Felice Cardot, Carlos. Curazao hispánico. Antagonismo flamenco-español. Caracas: Fuentes para la historia colonial de Venezuela, 1973. Godfried, Eugène. “José Martí and Racism. His Visit to Curaçao.” AfroCubanWeb, 2003. Accessed September 2, 2019. www.afrocubaweb.com/eugenegodfried/ martiandracism.htm. González Batista, Carlos. Archivo histórico de Coro. Documentos para la historia de las Antillas Neerlandesas. Fondo Registro Principal I.  Coro: Universidad Nacional Experimental “Francisco de Miranda” (UNEFM), 1997. Guillén, Nicolás. “Habana-Zurich.” In Prosa de prisa. Crónicas, 226–230. Las Villas: Universidad Central de Las Villas, 1962. Haan, E. de. Zoeken naar Slory. Een reis door verrassend Suriname. Haarlem: In de Knipscheer, 2014. Helman, Albert. De foltering van Eldorado, een ecologische geschiedenis van de vijf Guyana’s. Gravenhage: Uitgeverij Nijgh & Van Ditmar, 1983. Herencia, Juan Carlos Quintero, La hoja de mar (:). Efecto archipiélago I. Leiden: Almenara, 2016.

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Kempen, Michiel van. De geest van Watapu. Kritieken over de Surinaamse literatuur. Haarlem/Brussel: Uitgeverij Zuid, 1993. Kom, Anton de. Nosotros, esclavos de Surinam. La Habana: Casa de las Américas, 1981. [1942] Korten, Henrike, Boeckeniers zijn gaeuw in het schieten. Jan ten Hoorns uitgave Americaensche zee-roovers. University of Amsterdam, 2011. Accessed September 2, 2019. www.scriptieonline.uba.uva.nl/document/221204. Kummels, Ingrid, Claudia Rauhut, Stefan Rinke and Birte Timm, eds. Transatlantic Caribbean. Dialogues of People, Practices, Ideas. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2014. Mann, Michael and Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger. “Introduction.” In Beyond the Line. Cultural Narratives of the Southern Oceans, edited by Michael Mann and Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger, 7–27. Berlin: Neofelis Verlag, 2014. Mello, José Antônio Gonsalves de. [1947], Tempo dos flamengos: influência da ocupação holandesa na vida e na cultura do norte do Brasil. Preface by Gilberto Freyre. São Paulo: Topbooks, 2002. Morales, Loekie. Overseas Bloodline. A Family Sketch. Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2010. ———. La sangre llama, Philipsburg, Sint-Maarten: Morales, 2019. Omidire, Felix Ayoh. “Petrodollar, Bolivarianism, and the Re-Yorubanization of Santería in Chávez’s Socialist Venezuela.” In Transatlantic Caribbean. Dialogues of People, Practices, Ideas, edited by Ingrid Kummels, Claudia Rauhut, Stefan Rinke and Birte Timm, 201–223. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2014. Oversteegen, Jaap. In het schuim van grauwe wolken. Het leven van Cola Debrot tot 1948. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1994a. ———. Gemunt op wederkeer. Het leven van Cola Debrot vanaf 1948. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1994b. Phaf-Rheinberger, Ineke. “David Nassy. The Portuguese Jewish Nation: An Enlightenment Essay on the Colony of Surinam.” In Caribbean Jewish Crossings. Literary History and Creative Practice, edited by Sarah Phillips Casteel and Heidi Kaufmann, 29–45. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2019. ———. “Papiamentu y el mundo hispanoamericano—John de Pool y Rodolfo Lenz.” In Caribbean Worlds—Mundos Caribeños—Mondes Caribéens, edited by Gabriele Knauer and Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger, 263–283. Berlin: Reihe Bibliotheca Ibero-Americana, Madrid and Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana/ Vervuert, 2020. Pool, John de. Del Curaçao que se va. Páginas arrancadas de “El libro de mis Recuerdos.” Santiago de Chile: Ercilla, 1935. Rodríguez Juliá, Edgardo. La noche oscura del Niño Avilés. San Juan: Huracán, 1986. Rupert, Linda M. Creolization and Contraband: Curaçao in the Early Modern Atlantic World. Athens and London: University Press of Georgia, 2012. Slory, Michael. Brieven aan de guerrilla. Amsterdam: Pegasus, 1968.

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———. Poemas contra la agonía. Paramaribo: Instituto Venezolano para la Cultura y la Cooperación, 1988. Stedman, John Gabriel. Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam. Edited and with introduction and notes by Richard and Sally Price. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1988. [1796] Strott, Annette. Holland-mania. The Unknown Dutch Period in American Art and Culture. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1998. Vianen, Bea. Begraaf mij in dit gruis. Gedichten. Haarlem: In de Knipscheer, 2002. Voltaire. Candide ou l’Optimism. Stuttgart: Reclam Verlag, 1986. [1759]

CHAPTER 10

The Caribbean Without a Sea: Approaches to Caribbean Immigration in Madrid Dagmary Olívar Graterol

Introduction Global changes, widespread crises and other national situations have contributed to the rapid change in the profiles of migrants to Spain and their impact on different areas, real and symbolic, where these migratory movements take place. From the 1980s to the first decade of the twenty-first century, the population of Hispanic Caribbean and Latin American peoples settled in the city of Madrid was composed mainly of Ecuadorians, Peruvians, Bolivians, Colombians, Dominicans and Cubans. However, the economic crisis suffered in Spain in recent years has led to a reconfiguration of the migrant subject (something not exclusive of the population coming from Latin America and the Hispanic Caribbean) according to an economic logic that affects its situation within the receiving country. In this chapter, we will study some characteristics of migrant groups of Hispanic Caribbean origin in the host society, considering their representativeness and presence through social, economic and artistic activities,

D. Olívar Graterol (*) YoSoyElOtro Asociación Cultural, Madrid, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. López, M. T. Vera-Rojas (eds.), New Perspectives on Hispanic Caribbean Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51498-3_10

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and cultural practices relating to national and/or regional practices of the Caribbean zone, which have been developed in the Spanish capital. We intend to study the interaction of these migrant groups with the society of Madrid and the strategies that entail such coexistence within a multidisciplinary and intercultural context, where aspects of the migratory event and the immigrant subject are highlighted. In addition, we will examine the reception of these subjects and their subjectivities within the social and cultural policies that the city promotes. Although the imprint of these migrant groups has been uneven, we aim to explore the visual, economic and socio-cultural impact they have left in Madrid. For this reason, we begin mapping out some of their actions and projects to see how they interact with the public and symbolic spaces of the city. To this end, we take into consideration the fact that Madrid hosts a large number of migrant population from different parts of the world with their corresponding cultures and traditions, which provide the city with a large and growing cultural diversity. Such impact, however, is affected by a lack of understanding of cultural difference and the full assumption of the citizenship of the migrant subjects. In this regard, it is important to clarify that we will focus on social, economic and cultural projects proposed and managed by the immigrant communities, and not on projects carried out and promoted by Spanish institutions or by the countries of origin of the migrants. Finally, let us note that this chapter is part of the author’s ongoing research and observation as an immigrant subject herself engaged in research and independent cultural management in Spain. Theoretically, notions of subjectivity and citizenship are intertwined in this chapter with different methodological and disciplinary approaches from the social sciences and cultural studies, in addition to paying attention to official statistics and public policies. All these approaches converge on the study of visual imprint and actions that different national and regional collectives deploy throughout the Spanish territory, and delimit a space of interaction, empowerment and, sometimes, controversy within the host society.

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Succinct Review of the Issue: Caribbean Migration in Spain and Madrid Since the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, the first migrations of people from Latin American and the Hispanic Caribbean countries began to take place in Spain, a country previously characterised by emigration. Common language and the (contradictory) notion of a common past, mixed with various processes, both internal and external, have facilitated the movement of migrants from several Latin American and Hispanic Caribbean countries to Spain. Migration from these regions has established in the Spanish territory for several decades, but it is experiencing a process of transformation. The migratory phenomenon in Spain, which increased exponentially in a few decades, is complex because of the perception of the migrant subject within the Spanish real and symbolic space. While in the 1980s, migrant population accounted for 0.52% of the Spanish population, the percentage neared 2% by the following decade and accounts nowadays for about a 12% of the population, with almost five million citizens of foreign origin (Madrid City Council). Given that racial origin determines the perception of difference and otherness, these new citizenships carry ethnic and cultural implications. In spite of the fact that a significant part of the migrant population in Spain is of European origin (about 37%), migrants of Latin American/Hispanic Caribbean origin are often perceived as a “threat” or sudacas, a derogatory term for the population of South America. Since the economic crisis of 2008, the number of Spaniards migrating to other countries for economic-professional reasons has grown considerably. Eight years after the beginning of the crisis, the number of migrants leaving Spain has nearly equalled the number of immigrants arriving. As pointed out by the Spanish National Statistical Office (2017, p.  6; all translations are the author’s own): the migration balance with the outside world increased by 89,126 people during 2016 and was positive for the first time since 2009. This was due to the fact that 417,033 people from abroad established their residence in our country, while 327,906 people left Spain with destination abroad.

In other words, for the first time after the beginning of the economic crisis of 2008  in Spain, there are more immigrants than emigrants. Different official sources have highlighted the benefits of migration for Spain, given

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the country’s low birth rate, ageing population and the importance of immigration for the survival of the system itself. However, and despite this reality, racism, policies regulating immigration and a number of inequalities continue to generate a biased view on migration by the Spanish society. Notwithstanding racism and migration policies, the imprint of migration, and its economic and social impact, is undeniable in contemporary Spain. Such is the case of the cohorts of Latin American and Hispanic Caribbean migrant subjects, which have had an important social visibility and have actively contributed to economic and social development. More than ten years ago, Juan Manuel Romero Valiente wrote about Dominican migration: It is explained by a number of general and more specific factors, which combine both structural and microsocial elements. The general and structural factors explain the evolution of the general migration process in both countries, that is, the impulse of emigration in the Dominican Republic and that of immigration in Spain. Specific factors, where microsocial aspects have a clear weight, are related to the increase of relations at all levels (economic, social, cultural, etc.) between the two countries, as well as the development in Spain of niches of labour demand, unsatisfactorily covered by local labour. (2003, pp. 148–149)

In Spain, these niches were the households from which many Spanish women joined the labour market beginning in the 1980s. This led to the arrival of immigrant women in the face of the high demand to cover domestic tasks which Spanish women could not take on, were not willing or refused to do. For that reason, migration from Latin America and the Hispanic Caribbean has been mainly female: thousands of women who have taken jobs (sometimes not even considered as jobs) in domestic service. Without entering into this debate, it is nonetheless important to note that over the last ten years, and because of the economic crisis in Spain, this type of immigration has undergone significant changes. In some cases, the crisis has triggered a reconfiguration of migrant subjects according to economic logics that have affected their situation within the receiving country. It has also led to circular migration, in particular of nationals of the Dominican Republic and Colombia, with an accentuated migration culture. In other cases, the crisis has led to the assumption of the failure of the migratory project and the return to the country of origin. Let us not forget the promotion and funding of policies and

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programmes of voluntary return to assist migrants who wished to return to their country of origin but have difficulties to do so. Due to a number of factors, statistics are not entirely conclusive to assess the number of migrants residing in Spain. In addition to some of the circumstances mentioned above, some migrants have a dual nationality or have acquired the Spanish nationality during the years of their migratory process. Moreover, some communities with longer time of residence in Spain are already in their second generation. In recent years, the change and evolution of some nationalities over others are evident. Such is the case of the Venezuelan migration, which in 1998 accounted for just 656 people registered at the Municipal Register of Madrid.1 In 2008, however, the number of Venezuelan migrants raised to 13,118 and, in 2016, to 15,345 (Madrid City Council). As the first report of the Venezuelan Diaspora Observatory (coordinated by the sociologist Tomás Páez) explains, this community has chosen Spain as the second destination for migration after the United States. The opposite has happened with Colombian migrants over the same period: from 67,390  in 2008, their number has been reduced to a half eight years later, with 33,747 Colombian inhabitants in the capital. Returning to the Venezuelan migration, their profile and number in Spain have increased substantially since 2016. The motivation lies in the deterioration suffered by Venezuelan institutions, economy and society, including an alarming health emergency, a persisting economic and political crisis and citizen insecurity. Katrien Dekocker (2018), who has carried out research on this community, has pointed out that, at the beginning of the second millennium, the Venezuelan nationality was an almost invisible in discussions about migration in Spain. Such phenomenon was due to a “high professional and cultural level of most of the collective, which facilitated access to the labour market, housing, health care, specialised education, cultural and social participation, key areas to ensure better integration into the destination” (2018, p. 297). The situation has changed over the past two years, both because the increase in the number of Venezuelans newly arrived in Spain and because the increasingly precarious legal and economic conditions under which they have established. In this way, and throughout the Spanish territory, “in 1998, those registered as born in Venezuela with Spanish or foreign nationality totalled 46,388; in 2018, they were 254,852, which means that in twenty years we have an increase of 450%” (Dekocker 2018, p. 301), or a 30% of Venezuelan migrants arriving to Spain between 2016 and 2018. According to Luis Cano, “Venezuelans are already the

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second largest foreign community in Madrid,  only outnumbered by the Ecuadorians” (2019). In 2019 (up to September), 60,000 Venezuelans had arrived in Madrid. Analysed at both national and local levels, each migrant community has a particular trajectory within the Spanish territory. Citizens of each of the nationalities of Latin America and the Hispanic Caribbean (former Spanish colonies) live in varying numbers in Spanish cities and towns. Despite differences in population, many of these migrants are second generation or arrived at a very young age, which marks new social issues related to identity and culture and that affect immigration and policies of every kind. Isabel Yépez and Amandine Bach have noted that the migration to Europe of the 1990s and the 2000s is characterised by a double crisis: “on the one hand, the crisis of the welfare state and, on the other hand, the crisis of the nation-state, facing new dilemmas, which will undoubtedly affect immigration policies” (2008, p. 27). For all the crises that mark political and social agendas within and outside Europe, political and social instability and insecurity in other countries and regions of the world continue nonetheless to foster the perception that European countries are better places to live in. Currently, the three largest migratory groups in Spain are Moroccans, Romanians and citizens of the United Kingdom, in this order (Spanish National Statistical Office 2017). However, migration of Latin Americans and Hispanic Caribbeans is very significant in the city of Madrid. According to the provisional results from 2018 provided by the Madrid City Council on its website,2 of 3,275,195 inhabitants listed in the city’s Municipal Register, 2,812,766 are Spanish and 462,343 foreigners. When the population census uses the variable of classification of “geographic-economic area,” 205,359 of these 462,343 foreigners are counted as Latin Americans and Hispanic Caribbeans, representing a 44.42 % and distributed in 87,430 males and 117,929 females. As we can see, feminisation remains an important characteristic for these groups. In comparison, migrants of Asian and Australasian origin account for 67,245, a 14.54% of the population; 35,653 are of African origin, representing a 7.71%, and the remaining 33.33% is composed of migrants from the European Union and other European countries (Madrid City Council). Currently, the population of Hispanic Caribbean origin in the capital of Spain amounts to: Honduras, 18,173, representing 3.93% of the population of foreign origin; Nicaragua, 5568 and 1.20%; Venezuela with 28,129 and 6.08%; Colombia, 25,214 and 5.45%; Dominican Republic, 17,837

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and 3.86%; and Cuba, 6187 and 1.34% (Madrid City Council). The first three countries of the list have little migratory tradition in Spanish territory. In the case of Nicaraguan and Honduran migrants, they still have no representation in the cultural and economic life of the city, although some restaurants are emerging in the city and some associations are becoming active. As for Venezuelans, which I will comment later in this chapter, they have a different migratory tradition and culture. The statistics reveal a shift regarding the Hispanic Caribbean migrant communities settled in Spain for a long time as they decrease in number, particularly because second generations born in Spain are not included in this survey. For its part, the Cuban community has been present in Spain for a long time and, despite its reduced numbers, it has had a significant representation and impact in the city. While it is not an organised community, there are businesses with Cuban identity in the city. The case of the Puerto Rican community in Madrid is also relevant. Even though it has grown in number in recent years, Puerto Ricans do not appear in the censuses, neither as Latin Americans nor as Hispanic Caribbean, because of their status as North-Americans. Although the number of nationalities and migrants has been changing in the city of Madrid in recent years, it is important to take into account some of these aspects in order to understand the actions, projects and businesses developed by migration from Caribbean countries in the Spanish capital.

Self-Organisation and Entrepreneurship for Territorial Action People from the same region or country usually socialise among themselves to help and accompany each other in the development of their migratory process. In the absence of institutions capable of addressing their needs and understanding their initiatives, they opt for self-­organisation as a means of making their interests visible and achieving common ends. Many formal and informal groups and forums exchange labour and legal information, care assistance, activities relating to customs and traditions, as well as affective relationships. Collectives, platforms and, above all, associations (NGOs) are the organisational models that migrants constitute for such purposes. Jaron Rowan (2017, p. 1) proposes the idea of “eccentric institutions” to refer to cultural institutions of an artistic-social nature conceived as an

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experimental and non-normative space. This approach may serve us to understand how, from the margins of the Spanish society, migrant associations, in any of their areas of action (assistance, artistic, social, national, etc.) generate spaces that are not available to migrants, or that official institutions, both of the host country and of the countries of origin, cannot provide migrants with. These eccentric institutions, even eccentric cultural and economic projects, seem to constitute a response, an action in the face of a situation that would otherwise be outside the margins, leading their promoters to remain invisible. Displacement may exacerbate the differences between the environment left behind and that in which the migrant subject is incorporated. In their migratory project, migrants carry to the new society culture, traditions as well as national, regional and other identities. Within the framework of this work, identity, identification (Hall 1996) and the sense of belonging which the migrant subject assumes with its origin, are also differential resources that can be used socially, culturally and economically in projects both within their own communities and in the host society. They are, as proposed by Bourdieu, “cultural capital incorporated” that contributes to social reproduction (2011): the cultural capital is a being, a property made “body,” has become an integral part of the “person,” an habitus. Who possesses it “has paid it personally,” and with its most personal possession: its time. Unlike currency, title or even title of nobility, such “personal” capital cannot be transmitted instantly by donation or inheritance, purchase or exchange; in substance, it can be acquired in a completely disguised and unconscious manner and remains marked by its primitive conditions of acquisition; it cannot be accumulated beyond the capacity of appropriation of a singular agent; but which, unlike this one, is not necessarily related to the free or intellectual culture, but, in these cases, to the popular culture, which we learn and carry. (2011, p. 215)

This capital takes shape materially and symbolically in the host society. As an embodiment, it becomes a body with ethnic and cultural features related to the Caribbean region, that is, relating to subjects that belong culturally and racially to that part of the world. This incorporation of migrant subjects of Caribbean origin has culturally and racially marked contemporary Spanish society. At this point, we will also use two ways to review their actions within Spain. Some initiatives start from the margins, some are very modest and local, but they all can be considered

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part of the construction of what Homi Bhabha calls “intermediate spaces” built by the migrant subject, and which “provide the ground to develop identity strategies (Selfhood) (singular or community) that initiates new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration and questioning, in the act of defining the very idea of society” (1994, p. 17). Cultural identity in the diasporic processes that these projects promote as spaces of “half and half or in-between” are, without a doubt, the location where the diasporic culture of migrants, in their displacement, is formed. Physical or immaterial spaces, or spaces of longing, like the ones which have multiplied as an emergency of this new citizenship seek, little by little, their place within the city. Hispanic Caribbean migrants recall the Caribbean Sea in a city like Madrid, located in the centre of a peninsula. These groups self-organise with a specific purpose under the umbrella of an association, platform or collective. According to Ricard Zapata Barrero, “to be part of an association is already to have some kind of democratic consciousness and relationship with the system from a position that is not isolated nor, at all, vulnerable. Many immigrant associations have been established to accompany other more disadvantaged immigrants, etc.” (2004, pp.  148–149). Zapata Barrero highlights several phases in the process of associationism among migrant groups, “from basic welfare, counselling, language teaching to a second phase, when they are already permanent residents and the associations seek social justice, full social rights, equal opportunities and the defence of cultural identities; to a third stage, which is already the language of discrimination” (2004, p. 150). Self-organisation of foreign collectives and their different levels of action, interests and demands point to different states of empowerment and agency within the receiving society. Such self-organisation has occurred in Spain since the beginning of these movements of people often due to the lack of interest and information by the local administrations, but also to the invisibility of the migrant’s problems in their countries of origin. In societies with major structural deficiencies, such as those of Latin America and the Hispanic Caribbean, self-management and personal and community self-organisation have always been important for survival. When citizens from these regions move to other countries, they bring along this baggage to subsist, in a process which, in turn, is empowered by typical situations experienced by the diaspora: the assumption of difference, national and cultural identification with the country of origin, the feeling of nostalgia or the shared difficulties that lead people to join and organise themselves to achieve common

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improvements. There is a long list of national associations, some of them with a long history, which have managed to improve the quality of life of their countrymen and women  in Spain. Others have had to close their doors after the economic crisis, but such forms of organisation and action have also allowed, and continue to do so, the reaching of solutions to practical and vital problems in their existence within the host country. Self-organisation has also helped governments in the countries of origin to acknowledge the value of their migrant population, both for the economic development of human resources in their country as well as for their political power as collective and social body. Self-organisation has activated the host population in the face of social injustice or racism. In this regard, it is important to note the case of organisations such as AMDE (Association of Dominican Women in Spain) and VOMADE (Dominican Mothers Volunteers), created at the beginning of the 1990s by the Dominican community. They aimed to attend and fight racism, and labour, economical and legal injustice experienced by the first Dominican women migrants in Spain, injustices that reached their greater tension in November 1992 with the assassination of Lucrecia Pérez Matos.3 Both AMDE and VOMADE are paradigmatic cases for the analysis of the history of Caribbean migrant groups in Madrid and their most recent actions. They heralded the beginning of social actions that actually achieved important advances in Spanish migration policies and fought racism in front of migrant subjects and bodies. In particular, the female subjects that characterised the migration that arrived in Spain. As Ninna Nyberg Sørensen points out, the feminisation of migration is closely linked to global economic transformations and the restructuring of their labour force. In Europe, many women work as domestic workers or in the service sector; others, in the sex industry, on occasions involuntarily in organised networks of trafficking. In general, most migrants share the experience of disqualification, that is, they lose their professional training. (2005, p. 163)

Entrepreneurship has also marked significantly the actions of different migrant communities outside their countries of origin. Shops, restaurants or hair salons have sought to reproduce social, economic and aesthetic models of different migratory groups and cater for their compatriots and other citizens who want to get to know other cultures in their own city. We understand this type of businesses belonging to “the industry of

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nostalgia,” formed by economic and cultural strategies that reproduce national or regional models in the diaspora. Nostalgia for the country of origin, for what has been left behind, such as food or music, the weather or social habits, is exacerbated during the migration process. It should not be confused with a return to the “vintage,” to the objects of the past, as the industry dedicated to the production of old objects labels it. It is rather a “migrant nostalgia industry” that creates businesses related to the “cultural capital” of migrants, and these new emerging identities. Although some researchers refer to them as “ethnic businesses,” we prefer the term “migrant nostalgia industry” as it serves a cultural capital related to a shared territory, in the distance, by several members of the community. Immigrants know that it goes beyond ethnicity, because it appeals to the emotions and subjectivity of migrated subjects. As an economic action, migrant nostalgia industry encompasses private entrepreneurial and self-­ employment that fits with entrepreneurship. Despite the instrumentalisation of the term “entrepreneur” by different official sectors, there are a number of benefits for entrepreneurs in Spain, even more so if compared to the rest of Europe. Entrepreneurship represents the spirit of individuals who, in vital terms, and while being motivated by different economic, professional, affective or social needs, have started a migratory project. In addition to the initiative of carrying forward an economic project, entrepreneurship also applies to the artistic-cultural domain, which, although with less economic risks, presents difficulties to materialise the projects, achieve the proposed goals and keep them afloat.

The Caribbean in Madrid: A Madrid with Beaches Located in the centre of the Iberian Peninsula, Madrid, is often looked down upon for the fact of being an inland city. Its distance from the sea has often made Madrid lose out in comparison to other Spanish coastal cities, especially Barcelona, its great city rival. Although Madrid does not have a beach, there are spaces where its migrant inhabitants can evoke the marine contact, with their presence. In what follows, we map specific projects representing intermediate spaces that, in the case of Hispanic Caribbean migration, converge on metaphorical beaches and islands where their culture finds expression. We aim at demonstrating that, to some extent, such phenomena in its interaction with the host city, proposes a vision of national or regional identity, Latin American, Caribbean or tropical. We refer to three coordinates, although

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many others may be part of this cartography, that serve as starting points to understand what is happening in the host city. These coordinates represent real and symbolic intermediate spaces on a map currently under construction, which comes out of regional, local and combined actions working as constructs to describe cultural, artistic and social migrant initiatives in the Madrilenian scene. We should keep in mind, however, that Madrid has also changed under common global factors, affecting politics and economics, and issues of coexistence and citizenship. From the economic crisis of 2008 to the present, Madrid has undergone different political, economic and social transformations. The 15M movement, which changed the forms of civic  participation, prompted changes in government policies and party agendas, although there is still a lot to work to do and achieve.

Coordinate 1: Caribbean Spaces Gastronomy, as a cultural value and as a source of economy, has traditionally been a resource for the entrepreneurship of migrant populations. When Caribbean migration began to settle in the city of Madrid, they opened traditional food shops throughout the city. The neighbourhood of Tetuán, northwest of Madrid, close by Cuatro Caminos, has become a “little Caribbean” or “little Republic,” due to a large concentration of Dominican migration which has lived and worked there for decades. Formerly known as a “red quarter” and a working-class neighbourhood, in recent years Tetuán has become a place distinguished by its migrant residents, particularly those of Caribbean origin. Like the Dominican diaspora in New York, the call effect of this community has had the effect to concentrate a significant number of Dominican migrants in this part of the city. A second generation has been born and raised here in a complex environment, in which the Caribbean cultural imprint is strong and remarkable. Old shops in Madrid neighbourhoods have been displaced by all sorts of business: hair salons, Internet-cafes/ international telephony shops (diminishing now due to the advances in access to technology), clothing and footwear shops, supermarkets, pastry shops, and so on, everything necessary to meet local demands in a Caribbean and Latino style. Although many have described it as a “ghetto,” Tetuán is a neighbourhood that hosts a diverse population, with its own identities and problems yet to be addressed, and with the migrant’s entrepreneurial impetus at play. Migrants have resisted in Tetuán the

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different crises that have affected Spain and its citizens at large, and continue to imprint this humble neighbourhood with a new character, markedly Caribbean.4 Until a few years ago, we could find small Dominican bars-restaurants throughout the city, but the economic crisis of 2008 forced their owners to close most of them. These modest places of affordable prices, tasty food and music playing at all times, have made way to another type of Caribbean enterprise in the hospitality sector, yet with a stronger entrepreneurial vocation. This is the case with Venezuelan restaurants and businesses, which has grown considerably in recent years in line with the increase of the Venezuelan population in the city. A case in point is Arepa-Olé franchise. On its website, the company explains, “it emerged as a restaurant in the centre of Madrid in 2012, thanks to the fusion of the Venezuelan and the Spanish cultures which merged in a concept of unique business in Spain.”5 They are “Caribbean food restaurants at affordable prices, with different formats of establishments oriented to all kind of publics.” As to september 2019, the franchise owns five restaurants in Madrid plus two on the outskirts of the city, in addition to one in Granada and another in Seville. The restaurants in the capital are located in emblematic places, such as nearby Plaza Mayor, Chueca neighbourhood and Montera Street in Huertas. The brand and the product offered by Arepa-Olé is characterised by the fusion of culinary cultures and different yet recognisable identities. In addition to arepas, the Venezuelan and Colombian staple, Arepa-Olé offers other products of the Venezuelan and Spanish culinary tradition, all wrapped in a packaging that features the silhouette of a flamenco dancer. As pointed out before, Venezuelan migrants who moved to Spain up until 2016 enjoyed an important economic capital and used investments as a strategy to become incorporated into the host society as a way of social reproduction (Dekocker 2018). Unlike other immigrant groups, Venezuelans are highly entrepreneurial, as noted by Leticia López Reinosa, an entrepreneurship technician for the NGO Action against Hunger (2017).6 The burgeoning economic situation experienced in this Hispanic Caribbean country until recently, the age of migrants and the economic situation of the host country have led many Venezuelan citizens to opt for entrepreneurship. However, and unlike entrepreneurship by other groups, the average migrant from this country possesses a higher education and capital to invest. Moreover, until recently, Venezuelans enjoyed professional and economic stability in their country of origin and in many cases

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could benefit, in the case of migration, from dual nationality due to their Spanish or European ancestry. The social and political crisis, rather than the economic situation, has been the drive behind their displacement, and so their way of investing and generating businesses brings cultural capital to another level, reminding us that, as Bourdieu noted: Cultural property can be the object of a material appropriation, that supposes economic capital, and a symbolic appropriation, that supposes the cultural capital. It follows that the owner of the production instruments must find a means of appropriating either the capital incorporated which is the specific appropriation requirement, or the services of the holders of that capital. (Bourdieu 2011, p. 218)

Although the case of Arepa-Olé is paradigmatic, other Venezuelan franchises have also taken up space in the city, such as Burger Goyko Grill, which is opening a growing number of establishments in the city. An in-depth analysis of these activities also reveals other aspects within each of the communities, the economic policies and regulations that apply to them, as well as the reception of these undertakings in the host society. The migration processes of Dominicans and Venezuelans correspond to different periods in the recent history of migration to Spain. Dominicans, who pioneered among the Hispanic  Caribbeans in migrating to Spain, began their process of settlement in the late 1980s and early 1990s, while Venezuelan migration is more recent. Apart from this obvious difference, pointed out  in previous sections, the type of economic resources and of establishments created in the host city also differentiates these communities. Feminisation characterises Dominican migration, as many Dominican women joined domestic service, but entrepreneurship has become a way out of precariousness in addition to achieving labour independence. Although there is a need for more research on the turnover of these businesses and their finances, entrepreneurship undertaken by the Dominican community in the hospitality industry often started from a modest capital, so that many of these businesses could not endure the economic crisis of 2008 and its consequences. In these projects, the entrepreneurial desire of their promoters was evident. They bet on an economic project with very little capital for the sake of creating a future and, in addition, to get out of the precariousness of working for others. These were projects that targeted mainly their compatriots, as part of the “migrant nostalgia industry,” characterised by the simplicity, popular feel and, in many cases, a noisy environment that favoured

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the creation of meeting and leisure spaces for Dominicans, other Latin American and Caribbean communities, and some Spaniards. The entrepreneurial and business initiatives of a large part of the Venezuelan community, for their part, have been formed as economic projects organised and developed using all available contemporary financial and marketing tools. Venezuelans have often had capital to launch their businesses, often as franchises. More related to international trends in vogue at the business level, the projects of the Venezuelan community offer the fusion of the Caribbean/Venezuelan style with the Spanish or international trends. They target a general customers,  not necessarily Venezuelan but where nonetheless the Venezuelan community can regularly taste a typical dish. Although they are also part of the migrant nostalgia industry, Venezuelan businesses have an impetus for relocation and internationalisation different from the examples of Dominican migration in the Spanish territory. An international drive is a characteristic of Venezuelan society and comes from the last century and the oil boom. For that reason, these are proposals that do not emphasise a Caribbean identity or a difference, but rather neutralise these elements in a cultural fusion adapted to the international public. Many of these spaces are relaxed places that employ the Venezuelan immigrant people, that is, where nationality prevails in hiring staff, but which are nonetheless designed for a general, urban public willing to try new things and tastes. Certainly, when comparing the two types of ventures, aspects of race, class and gender of both countries play a role.

Coordinate 2: The Danceable Spaces Hispanic Caribbean music and dance are probably their most welcome cultural expressions abroad, given the internationalisation of Latin American and Caribbean popular music. As Juan Flores points out: “Today’s Caribbean music remains as popular music in the deepest sense, either in the region, or in its localities and diasporic settlements, as in its migration back and forth, where he lives as the expression of the people and communities seeking and finding their own voice and their own rhythm” (2006, p. 128). In this way, and sometimes supported by digital culture, there has been a promotion of a type of musical hybridisation and intercultural interaction with festive elements, as in the case of the Colombian band Guacamayo Tropical. The Hispanic Caribbean diaspora music par excellence, salsa, finds a spot in Madrid’s El Salsódromo. Both

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initiatives have pioneered for their high quality and popularity, and we will opt for them as dance spaces. Unlike the entrepreneurial coordinate previously discussed, the danceable space is a portable space that, although occupying specific spaces of the city, it has a limited and intermittent duration. Guacamayo Tropical advocates a tropicalisation of the Madrid music scene by means of  traditional Latin American rhythms and electronics, with the symbolism of regional ancestry and folklore of their  performances.7 The group, made up of Colombian DJs David Echeverría and Andrés Ramírez, has been carving a space in the city nightlife for more than eight years. While they began to pitch (pinchar) and to get gigs in small spaces, they had become “entrenched” in Sala Caracol, near Embajadores, where they continue to organise parties, bring musicians from Latin America and other Sures on tour, and offer another view of the music of the region: “A cultural work throughout the musical history of regions little known and with little diffusion in traditional media, played in a space of leisure and entertainment, in order to show the other side of the Latin American sound and to make known all the values they possess.”8 In recent years, Guacamayo Tropical has gone from the underground scene to possessing a space within the regular programming carried out by the Madrid City Council, such as the “Fiestas of San Isidro,” patron saint of the city. Guacamayo Tropical and El Salsódromo have become official resources of an alternative scene supported by the institutions, especially within the period of the progressive government in the city.9 El Salsódromo is a project of the association La Parcería, an entity mostly made up of Colombian immigrants: El Salsódromo is a dissemination project focused on the popular and cultural Latin American manifestations, in this case, salsa dance. We create a space for intercultural dialogue through dance and enjoyment with classic salsa from  the seventies, salsa brava, salsa del barrio. El Salsódromo was born outdoors, in Campo de La Cebada, in the center of Madrid, during the summer of 2012. There we returned salsa to the neighbourhood and witnessed a unique moment in the history of Madrid, and vice versa: salsa returned to the neighbourhood and Madrid took witness of this event… we took salsa to the neighbourhood, to uncommon places, thus inspiring new projects and sharing the presence of being a salsero.10

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As its promoters point out, El Salsódromo started in Campo de la Cebada, an outdoor space self-managed by several non-profit organisations of the area, next to the subway of La Latina, in the historical centre of the city. Julio Porras, one of the promoters of this project, comments that when he moved to Madrid from Medellin, he was surprised by the scarcity of dance culture and music in the public spaces of the city. The promoters of the project agreed that they should do something about it. Inspired by similar venues in their country and the Caribbean at large, they designed El Salsódromo. At first, it was an event “for the small Colombian Latin ghetto, but it has been growing and attended by people from different nationalities residing in Madrid, as well as tourists from northern Europe and also from Asia…an impulse to cultural exchange.” The music, dance and joy that these actions bring to the public, “to put aside differences, it’s a meeting point.”11 El Salsódromo’s activities have been mainly scheduled, until recently, in Campo de la Cebada, as part of the official programme of cultural activities of Madrid City Council. Porras acknowledges the relationship with the city government and his participation in some of the assembly processes carried out in the city. The members of La Parcería are aware of their social commitment as active members of the host society, which is expressed through another project, Mutant Motherhood, although El Salsódromo is undoubtedly the one that bears this cultural identification with Latin America and the Hispanic Caribbean, as well as with the diaspora, through a festive appropriation of the territory, real and symbolic, of the city. As Julio Porras affirms, they create “spaces for discussion, for fun and to appropriate their bit of the city.”

Coordinate 3: Collective/Associative Spaces As we have seen, the self-organisation of collectives and associations has different levels and registers within the migrant activity in the host society of Madrid. This section focuses on the initiatives of some non-profit groups without legal entity that work on the artistic/cultural aspects of the reality of the immigrant subjects and second generations. Although the previous examples would also be considered in discussing this coordinate, it is worth to differentiate them given the importance of music and dance in the Hispanic Caribbean culture. In this sense, the collective NGO (acronym of the Nelson Garrido Organisation), an initiative of Venezuelan photographer Nelson Garrido,

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has become a kind of artistic multinational which has organised “headquarters” in the different corners of the planet where the Venezuelan diaspora has established. Garrido has been the teacher of many young people interested in photography in his country. Cities like Barcelona and, of course, Madrid have a group of young photographers formed by Garrido, whom he supports through his project. Another collective is Migrantes Transgresorxs-Ayllu, consisting of Latin American and Caribbean migrants, who take the body as the political territory and emotional centre of their work: We are a collective of racialised people, migrants, negros, diverse shades with different sexual and gender identities (neo-colonised, precarious, transfeminists and intercultural—LTGB), we move among physical, emotional, and symbolic geographies and territories to de-construct and build spaces for which we propose political and sociocultural representations that link transgressive actions. The body is always the first territory through which the migratory experience passes. Migration and its corresponding racialisation.12

Asked about the motivations that led them to organise as a group, Alex Aguirre points out: Out of the need to do something. A few years ago we (Leticia Rojas and Alex Aguirre) arrived in  Madrid with the experience of being activists on LGBT issues in Ecuador. When we arrived here, we saw that the rights (of the collective) were much more advanced, at least what they sell us. However, when I arrived I also came across a lot of barriers. At that time, I identified myself as a lesbian and, because of my sexual orientation, the barriers were for immigrants and the issue of race. I could not find spaces where the topics of race, immigration and the LGBT issue were discussed. I started visiting organizations, COGAM, Triangle Organization, to different sides. But it was simply not an issue in the agenda, nothing was done about it, there was no interest, no funding. I even looked to do something there, work, and nothing. (Migrantes Transgresores-Ayllu 2018)13

Every day they experience a double discrimination: for their sexual orientation and for their immigrant status. Since mid-2017, Migrantes Transgresorxs-Ayllu has been critically reviewing migration in the Spanish territory in terms of race, sexual diversity and colonialism. Renaming themselves as “Ayllu” in reference to their Latin American roots, they have been residents in Matadero Madrid-Centro de Creación14 with the exhibition

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“Return the gold” and the P.O.P.S. (Program Oriented to Subordinate Practices), among other initiatives. In addition to the previously mentioned La Parcería, and among the associations with legal personality and identification with the territory, it is worth mentioning entities such as the Cultural and Cooperative Association for the Development Library of the Dominican Republic (ACUDEBI, after their name in Spanish, Asociación Cultural y de Cooperación al Desarrollo Biblioteca República Dominicana), which promotes a return action between the Dominican Republic and Spain, passing through other territories where the diaspora resides. They have been carrying out information, publishing, educational projects (including sending books to libraries in the Dominican Republic) and artistic projects for more than ten years, mainly in the Tetúan area. Finally, I would like to mention the work that YoSoyElOtro Cultural Association, an association of which I am one of the founders, that  has been carrying out in Madrid since 2008.15 Its activities have turned them into exceptional witnesses of several of the changes and initiatives outlined in this chapter. A non-profit organisation founded in Madrid, YoSoyElOtro is interested in the culture of the Caribbean and its diaspora in Spain, and although it also conducts activities that deal with social and cultural management, academic activities and research have always been an important part of its projects. As Jesús Del Valle, a founding partner and member of the association until recently, points out: Starting from our networks and contacts, and assuming the symbolic capital provided by Madrid (and its nightlife), we managed to hold three international congresses at the intersection of Caribbean Studies and Gender Studies. The conjunction was rather fortuitous given that the Carlos III University of Madrid and its Kóre Group of Gender Studies, guided by Dr. Carmen González Marín, generously provided us with the institutional access that our new organization, outside the formal circuits of thought production, was unable to obtain on its own. The International Congress on the Caribbean became the main project of the association, and it was completed with initiatives of cultural management and social activism given our character of immigrants in Spain. The three congresses were titled “The myth of the Caribbean woman” (2009), “Cartographies of gender (s)” (2012) and “New subjects and subjectivities in the Hispanic Caribbean” (2014) […] The freedom of not belonging to an official institution allowed us to network and have a combination of synergies that still remain, but that

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do not hide the difficulty of a task that is carried out without economic support, to look for others with whom to share our research experiences and interests. (Del Valle 2017)

The work carried out by YoSoyElOtro results from the desire to create spaces for the production and dissemination of intellectual thought, and for cultural and artistic exchange, with the Caribbean diaspora as a centre of interest, despite the economic instability and precariousness of the cultural and academic sector in Spain. It implies a  fragility further exacerbated in spaces created by migrants that operate independently of institutions, often self-managed. Currently, YoSoyElOtro works in smaller settings, closer to community formats, managing artistic, socio-cultural, educational, academic and care activities at the local level. We should not forget the investigation and diffusion of the migrant work  in the construction of the Spanish society at the present time, as this type of research accounts for.

By Way of a Conclusion With about 45% of the foreign migration settled in the city of Madrid, the presence of Caribbean migration is undeniable. There are migrants, who inhabit the city, their bodies, their businesses, associations, hairdressers… However, although this migrant community has been settled in the territory for a long time, even going through a second generation, as in the case of the Dominican community, the signs of otherness or difference that are representative of Caribbean people within Spanish society are evident. Especially if we think of migrants in terms of race, class and gender and, with it, their representativeness of difference as expressed in their actions and participation in society through different social, cultural or economic initiatives, such as those described. An alterity highlighted by “racial homogeneity in Spain, with the notable exception of the Gipsy population, historically discriminated, has been a fact deeply entrenched in the awareness of national identity since the fifteenth century” (Eskalera Karacola 2004, p. 19). It has been a society in which foreign non-EU subjects, especially when they are non-white, shake a cultural tradition that seems homogeneous, and  also shake  a cultural identity that denies plurality and diversity. In these contradictions, in the antagonism between the Caribbean migration and the

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Spanish society, the need for self-­organisation and entrepreneurship arise. They are actions that function as means to correct, solve, contribute and participate within the territory at different levels: social, economic, cultural and political. However, what happens in Madrid in terms of coexistence? Is cultural diversity promoted? How are the new Madrilenians descendants of the Caribbean? Do they have the right to participate in society? Are they second-class citizens? What do the city’s public policies do about them? Let us use the “creolization” approach of Édouard Glissant (2002) to Caribbean culture to shed some lines of interpretation on what happens in Madrid. Glissant defines “creolisation” as a phenomenon or approach in which the “cultures of the world, in instantaneous contact and absolutely aware of each other, alter each other by mean of exchanges, irremissible shocks and battles to the death, but also through progress of conscience and hope that authorize to affirm […] that the different current human families get rid of with difficulty of what they have insisted on since old times, that is: the fact that the identity of an individual it is not valid or recognized as such unless it is exclusive regarding to that of all other individuals” (2002, p. 17). The Martinican author explained that this process is able to offer a new way of seeing the humanities from the diversity that currently characterises the world. Creolisation has occurred in the Caribbean region for centuries, leading to clashes and contacts that have modified the cultures involved in this process, and generated new ways of relating between cultures. This cultural interconnection allows other identifications no longer based on  pre-established and defined identities. Creolisation, as a way to understand and assume social, ethnic and cultural diversity, seems still far from being achieved in Spain, even in its capital, because creolisation implies that  “the cultural elements that concur must necessarily be equivalent in value, in order that this creolization really takes place. That is, if of these cultural elements in interaction, some are undervalued compared to the others, creolization does not really occur” (2002, pp. 19–20). all of these, despite the fact that, over the recent history of Spain, the “immigration phenomenon” has left an imprint at different levels of society, both public and private, communal and personal, producing a questioning of traditional values and identities, and installing the problematic of racism, xenophobia or labour rights, among others. A reason for this is that some of the cultural elements are not

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equivalent: the Spanish identity positions itself “over” the other Hispanic Caribbean-­ Latin American  identities. Coloniality discriminates  Caribbean migrants, their actions, thoughts and expressions within the host territory; Spanish superiority is a brand that prevents a creolisation. A real interconnection between cultures is needed, not only with the Caribbean migrant community, but also with other migratory groups that cohabit in the country. Cultural interconnection  at the macro level, between the receiving society and migratory groups, will take much longer. The presence of these diverse Caribbean groups will leave their mark in language, food, leisure and political struggles. Interests and problems unite in areas where empathy and action among the inhabitants of the cityare generated on a limited yet effective scale. The examples described in this chapter are part of this small-scale action. There are other organisations and ventures that can also be included in this map, of course, but we have chosen several of  the most representative among private, collective and individual initiatives, because they expose the work of the population of Caribbean origin in the host society. The study of them points out the participation, sharing and generation of exchanges that encourage understanding, clashes, questioning and, hopefully, the assumption of cultural and racial diversity that today inhabits the city of Madrid and the rest of the Spanish territory. We must add the change in the associative paradigm of migrant groups of Hispanic Caribbean and Latin American origin in recent years. It has gone from welfare activities and the struggle for fundamental rights, to citizen visibility, equal rights, and the manifestation of Caribbean cultural diversity. Many social rights have been obtained, thanks to the struggles of the first associations. We believe that a change in migratory profile is key to understand the change in migrant associations, especially when they move from welfare activities to social and cultural participation. This change has also influenced the progressive government that controlled the city between 2015 and 2019. It is difficult to raise conclusions  about  civil participation which, though for us are central, is in the margins of society. All things considered, the evolution of the migratory process should be as an advantage for the city, for the wealth of its artistic and cultural life, for the construction of a diverse and intercultural society in the midst of  the

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advancement of globalisation. Certainly, there are challenges and problems to solve, and those responsible for public policies must bear them in mind. Although the political and social environment of the city is validating “other” cultural initiatives, crammed with different identities and identifications, we need to examine the underlying political intentions, the influence of these movements and their proponents in society, to see if there are long-term benefits for the migrant community in general, or, at least, if they help to improve the perception and recognition of migrants within society. The situation is complex. The practices that recognise and provide progress for the national or regional communities must be seen and addressed beyond the exoticisation of the migrant subject. It is decisive to compensate for what citizens and their projects do with institutions or outside of them. Some institutions are doing it little by little. In the case of culture, it turns out to be the last resource in a political and social agenda, a fact that affects not only the migrant population but also, the artistic and cultural Spanish system in general. More contact is needed to establish equal relationships, and for Spanish society to approach the spaces that migration is creating, and vice versa. The manifestation of diversity occurs in exchanges and interconnections, through shock or encounters. Self-organisation, motivation and the will to create intermediate spaces as ways of exercising our differences and of—sometimes intermittently— intervening are necessary to make visible the place of migrants in the host society. In the case of cultural associations,  these are precarious spaces, maintained by a collective commitment. Others are economic spaces to remember and try to realise the dream of a better life. Spaces that in a city like Madrid, and, in the case of Caribbean migration, emulate the always-­ noisy blue beaches, sometimes the hurricane-like forces, in the way of this Peninsula.

Notes 1. As indicated by the Spanish Statistical Office: “The Municipal Register is the administrative record  of the residents of the municipality. Your data constitutes proof of residence in the municipality and of the habitual address in it. Any person living in Spain is obliged to register in the Municipal Register in which they habitually reside.” It is important to note that in the Municipal Register of Spain any citizen can be registered,

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regardless of their legal status, that is, that contains the information of immigrants without legal permission of residence and work in the country, as long as they have registered in it. In spite of this, and for reasons such as those previously mentioned, it is difficult to have the exact data of the population of migrant origin both in the country and in its capital, but it is the most appropriate tool to know the approximate number of immigrants residing in the country, in determined municipality. For more information: https://www.ine.es/. 2. More information on census and population in the city of Madrid can be found at: https://www.madrid.es. 3. “At 9.00 pm on November 13, a quarter of a century ago, Civil Guard Luis Merino Perez, 25 years old, fired the shots that killed Lucrecia while Felipe Carlos Martín, Víctor Julián Flores and Javier Quílez, 16 years old, accompanied him. It was an immigrant hunt organized by far-right followers  in the ruins of the Four Roses nightclub in Aravaca, where migrant homeless people took shelter. The assassins fired indiscriminately against the Dominicans who dined a soup by candlelight. They fled in a car waiting for them while two bullets mortally wounded thirty-three years old Lucrecia, one of them reaching her heart. Porfirio Elías, also a Dominican, was also seriously wounded.” Recovered from: http://www.publico.es/ sociedad/lucrecia-perez-25-anos-del-primer-asesinato-racista-democraciaespanola.html. 4. The same happens in the southern area of Legazpi, where we can find different Caribbean flavour. 5. Excerpted from http://arepaole.com/. 6. Leticia López Reinosa, email to the author, May 18, 2017. 7. Quite similar has been the process with migrants of Latin American origins in the United States and their representations in the cultural scene, as it is studied in Tropicalizations. Transcultural Representations of Latinidad, edited by Frances R. Aparicio and Susana Chávez-Silverman (1997). 8. Excerpted from http://tierracandela.com/artistas/guacamayo-tropical/. 9. In the municipal elections of 2015, an coalition  of leftist parties, Ahora Madrid, headed by Manuela Carmena, won the elections and, consequently, control of the local government, after more than 20 years of government led by the right wing party Partido Popular (PP). In the 2019 election, the right wing  parties recovered the city and region governments. 10. Excerpted from http://laparceria.com/salsodromo/. 11. Julio Porras, in discussion with the author, March 2017. 12. Migrantes Transgresorxs-Ayllu, “¿Quiénes somos?,” Migrantes Transgresorxs-Ayllu (blog), January 15, 2019. http://migrantestransgresorxs.blogspot.com/.

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13. Migrantes Transgresores-Ayllu, in discussion with the authors, February, 2018. 14. More information can be found at: http://www.mataderomadrid.org/. 15. More information can be found at: www.yosoyelotro.org.

Bibliography Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Bourdieu, Pierre. Las estrategias de la reproducción social. Madrid: Siglo XXI Editores, 2011. Cano, Luis. “El éxodo venezolano empuja a Madrid a su récord histórico de población extranjera.” ABC , April 17, 2019. Accessed September 10, 2019. https://www.abc.es/espana/madrid/abci-exodo-venezolano-empujamadrid-record-historico-poblacion-extranjera-201904170054_noticia.html. Dekocker, Katrien. “La comunidad venezolana en España. De una estrategia migratoria de reproducción social a una creciente pobreza emergente.” In El éxodo venezolano: entre el exilio y la emigración, edited by José Koechlin y Joaquín Eguren, pp. 293–336. Lima and Madrid: Organización Internacional para las Migraciones/Observatorio Iberoamericano sobre Movilidad Humana, Migraciones y Desarrollo (OBIMID), 2018. Del Valle, Jesús. “Cuatro estados de la materia: sobre los estudios caribeños en España a partir de la experiencia de la asociación YoSoyElOtro.” Paper read at the International Seminar “Current State of Cultural and Literary Studies of the Caribbean.” Lisbon, University of Lisbon, March 31, 2017. Eskalera Karakola. “Prólogo. Diferentes diferencias y ciudadanías excluyentes: una revisión feminista.” In Otras inapropiables. Feminismos desde las fronteras, bell hooks et al., 9–32. Madrid: Traficantes de sueños, 2004. Flores, Juan. “‘Creolité’ en El Barrio: la diáspora como fuente y desafío.” Nueva Sociedad 201 (enero–febrero, 2006): 117–128. Accessed January 15, 2019. https://nuso.org/articulo/la-diaspora-como-fuente-y-desafio/. Glissant, Édouard. Introducción a una poética de lo diverso. Barcelona: Ediciones Del Bronce, 2002. Hall, Stuart. “Introduction Who Needs ‘Identity’?” In Questions of Cultural Identity, edited by Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, vii–ix. London: SAGE Publications, New Delhi: Thousand Oaks, 1996. López, Leticia. Email questionnaire on immigration in Madrid/ Accomplished by Dagmary Olívar. Unpublished, 2017. Madrid City Council. Estadísticas. Accessed January 22, 2019. https://www. madrid.es/portales/munimadrid/es/Inicio/El-Ayuntamiento/Estadistica/ Areas-de-informacion-estadistica/Demografia-y-poblacion/Poblacionextranjera/Poblacion-extranjera-en-la-ciudad-de-Madrid/?vgnextfmt=default

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&vgnextoid=c289d54944580510VgnVCM2000000c205a0aRCRD&vgnextc hannel=9ce23636b44b4210VgnVCM2000000c205a0aRCRD. Migrantes Transgresores- Ayllu. Interviu about Ayllu/Accomplished by Dagmary Olívar. Unpublished, 2018. Nyberg Sørensen, Ninna. “Migración, género y desarrollo: el caso dominicano.” In La migración, un camino entre el desarrollo y la cooperación, coord. by Nieves Zúñiga Garcïa-Falcës, 163–182. Madrid: Centro de Investigación para la Paz, 2005. Accessed September 15, 2019. https://www.fuhem.es/media/ecosocial/file/Cohesi%C3%B3n%20Social/Inmigraci%C3%B3n/NYBERG%20 SORENSEN,%20Ninna,%20Migraci%C3%B3n,%20g%C3%A9nero%20y%20 desarrollo.pdf. Romero Valiente, Juan Manuel. “La migración dominicana hacia España, factores, evolución y desarrollo.” Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales 19, 1 (2003): 147–171. Accessed May 3, 2019. https://journals.openedition.org/ remi/387?lang=es. Rowan, Jaron. “Cultura, experimentación e innovación: una defensa de las instituciones excéntricas.” Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte, 2017. Accessed December 18, 2017. https://culturayciudadania.culturaydeporte.gob.es/ dam/jcr:239fa746-66c0-4eb5-825e-e8cb00e573ac/Jaron-Rowan.pdf. Spanish Statistical Office. “Cifras de Población a 1 de julio de 2017. Estadística de Migraciones. Primer semestre de 2017.” December 14th, 2017. Accessed January 24, 2019. https://www.ine.es/prensa/cp_j2017_p.pdf. Yépez, Isabel and Amandine Bach. “La migración latinoamericana en Europa: reflexiones sobre género y ciudadanía.” In América Latina migrante: Estado, familias, identidades, edited by Gioconda Herrera y Jacques Ramírez, 25–44. Ecuador: Flacso. 2008. Zapata Barrero, Ricard. Multiculturalidad e inmigración. Madrid: Editorial Síntesis, 2004.

Index1

A Agualusa, José Eduardo, 8, 48, 57, 59, 61–63, 64n5 Aguilera, Carlos A., 8, 70, 77–79 Amerindian, 39–41, 173, 174 Angola, 8, 48–57, 59–64, 64n3, 168 Archipelago, 3, 7, 14–16, 18, 20–29, 35, 73, 74, 86, 131, 134, 135n4, 178 archipelagic effect, 7, 13–31, 80 Art institutions, 119, 120, 123 Artistic creativity, 118–123, 126, 131 B Benítez-Rojo, Antonio, 4, 5, 15, 31n3, 35–38, 48, 68, 80, 81n2, 82n8, 127, 160n3, 168, 176 BetaLocal, 116, 121, 123, 132, 133 Bosch, Juan, 4, 6

C Cabral, Amílcar, 51–53 Canarian identity, 131 Canary Islands, 9, 131–134, 172 Cárdenas, Israel, 9, 89 Caribbean art, 126, 129–131, 134 Caribbean artists, 119, 120, 124, 128, 129, 147 Caribbean Enlightenment, 168–170 Caribbean identity, 4, 5, 8, 48, 128, 160n3, 199 Caribbean landscape, 8, 44n2, 86, 87, 89–92, 95, 98, 99, 102, 103, 105, 106, 135n1, 143 colonial landscape, 86 marine landscape, 98, 99, 105 Caribbean Sea, 40, 193 Caribbean seascape, 19

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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212 

INDEX

Carpentier, Alejo, 4, 168–170, 176, 177, 178n3, 178n4, 178n5, 178n6, 179n7 Césaire, Aimé, 3, 6, 52 Civil Rights Movement, 9, 141 Colombia, 37, 40, 170–172, 188–190, 197, 200, 201 Colonial gaze, see Véase; Imperial gaze Colonial imaginary, 36, 86, 91, 92, 134 Colonialism, 4, 6, 51, 52, 54–56, 64n2, 92, 93, 125, 131, 150, 151, 161n7, 202 Colonialismo, 64n2 Creolisation, 5, 10, 127, 205, 206 Crioulidade, 50–52, 56, 61, 62 Cuba, 2, 6–8, 14, 37, 38, 48, 49, 54–57, 62–64, 67–70, 72, 74, 79, 81n3, 109n5, 124, 126, 132, 144, 153, 161n7, 169, 172, 176, 179n11, 191 Cubacentrism, 38 Cuban revolution, 6, 54, 55, 57, 60, 62, 72, 174 Cuban Revolution, 14, 15, 74, 142, 143, 145, 160n7 Cultural capital, 192, 195, 198 Cultural identity, 193, 204 Curaçao, 10, 166, 167, 170–173, 175–177, 178n1, 179n8, 179n10, 179n11, 179n13 D De Burgos, Julia, 7, 21 De Lauretis, Teresa, 88 De Pool, John, 171–173 Debrot, Cola, 173, 174, 178 Decolonial studies, 2, 4–6 Deterritorialisation, 8, 67–81 Diaspora, 5, 151, 158, 193, 195, 201, 203 Diaspora studies, 2

Displacement, 10, 40, 43, 72, 77, 81, 122, 192, 193, 198 Dominican Republic, 89, 91–94, 96, 110n8, 120, 127, 144, 154, 188, 190, 203 Dutch Caribbean, 9, 166, 169, 176 Dutch maritime history, 167–168 E Eccentric institutions, 10, 191 Echevarría, Ahmel, 8, 73–75 Ecological history of the five Guianas, 174 Entrepreneurship, 10, 195–198, 205 F Fanon, Frantz, 3, 6, 52 Female body, 88–90, 93, 95, 98–100, 102–105, 107 Feminism, 150 black feminist thought, 161n8 decolonial Canarian feminism, 134 Puerto Rican feminist movement, 9, 142, 147, 148, 150, 151 Fernández Retamar, Roberto, 6, 54, 55, 59, 160n3 Caliban, 6, 36, 54, 64n2 Flemish-Spanish antagonism, 178 Freyre, Gilberto, 50, 62 Fuentes, Norberto, 8, 48, 57 G Gender, 2, 4, 88, 110n8, 145, 149, 152, 158, 199, 202–204 Gender and sexuality studies, 2 Generación Cero, 70 Glissant, Édouard, 3, 7, 15, 19, 31n3, 47, 51, 55, 64n1, 73, 80, 127, 205 Guzmán, Laura Amelia, 9, 89

 INDEX 

H Helman, Albert, 174, 179n15 Hernández, Rita Indiana, 9, 142, 147, 152, 154, 155, 162n11 Hispanic Caribbean cinema, 88, 100, 109n5 Hispanic Caribbean queer authors, 142, 152 Hispanic Caribbean studies, 1–10 Homoeroticism, 88 homoerotic desire, 90, 96, 97, 111n10 homoerotic relationship, 92, 93 I Identity politics, 68, 142, 151 Imperialism, 4, 6, 49, 55, 60 imperial gaze, 87, 92, 105 imperial language, 6 Imperialist anti-imperialist, 48, 143, 155 Insularism, 4–7, 36, 38, 39 insularity, 2, 39, 44n6, 124, 126, 134 Intermediate spaces, 193, 195, 207 Irigaray, Luce, 98, 107 Island trope, 35–39, 44n1 J Jewish Savanah, 170 K Kaplan, E. Ann, 87, 92 Kempadoo, Kamala, 85, 87, 88, 108n1 L Lage, Jorge Enrique, 8, 70, 77–79, 82n7 Latin-African identity, 54, 57, 58

213

Latin-Africanness Latin-African identity (see Véase) Latin American studies, 2, 4 Lesbian desire, 9, 85–108, 109n5 Lesbian movement in Puerto Rico, 9, 147–149, 151 Lesbian subjectivity, 90, 92 Lezama Lima, José, 7, 26 Liberationist myth, 4, 6, 48 Liz in September, 8, 85–108, 110n9, 111n12 López Acosta, Pedro de Jesús, 8, 71, 72 Luso-Tropicalism, 48–53, 56, 62 M Male gaze, 8, 87, 88, 90, 97–99, 101, 107, 108n4 Martí, José, 4, 49, 50, 54, 175 Marxism, 6, 53, 54, 57, 146, 150, 156 Marxist thought, 143–146 Mateo, Margarita, 8, 73, 74, 81 Mechanics of fluids, 98 Mestizaje, 3, 4, 8, 37, 38, 42, 43, 48–50, 54, 56, 59, 62, 63 Migration, 187, 188, 190, 191, 194, 195, 207 Dominican community, 194, 198, 204 Dominican migration, 188, 194, 196, 198, 199 Hispanic Caribbean migration in Spain, 10, 187–191, 195, 196, 199, 203, 204, 207 Hispanic Caribbean migration in Spain Hispanic Caribbean migration in Spain, 187 migrant nostalgia industry, 10, 195, 198, 199 Venezuelan community, 189, 199 Venezuelan migration, 189, 191, 197–199, 202 Modernity, 2, 4, 43, 143

214 

INDEX

N Nassy, David, 170 Nation, 2, 5, 40, 48, 50, 53–56, 58, 61, 64, 64n5, 67–81, 154, 190 national identity, 5, 52, 54, 61, 79, 87, 121, 204 nationalism, 51, 52, 151 post-national, 7, 61 Negrón, Luis, 139, 140, 159, 160n1 Negrón-Muntaner, Frances, 9, 142, 147–151, 158, 159, 161n9 Neoliberalism, 57, 119, 142, 148, 155, 159, 161n8 O Ortiz, Fernando, 4, 49, 58 P Palés Matos, Luis, 7, 21, 24 Perrin, Michel, 42, 43 Piñera, Virgilio, 7, 17, 18 Poetry, 14–16, 21, 26, 52, 62, 152, 156, 171, 174 Portela, Ena Lucía, 8, 9, 71, 72, 142, 147, 152, 153, 162n10 Postcolonial studies, 3, 53 Puerto Rico, 9, 37, 89, 109n5, 115, 117, 121–123, 129, 130, 132, 133, 135n3, 142, 144, 148, 150, 151, 156, 158, 159, 168, 169, 171, 179n9 Q Queer bodies, 141, 144 Queer Caribbean genealogies, 139–159, 161n8 Queer Caribbean Studies, 146 Queer Caribbean subjects, 141, 143, 147, 150 Queer subjects of color, 110n7

R Race, 5, 49, 50, 53, 58, 61, 64, 92, 96, 97, 99, 175, 199, 202, 204 racial categories, 8, 49, 53 racial identity, 4, 49, 53 racial utopia, 51, 55 Racism, 55, 59, 188, 194, 205 Red Atlantic, 8, 47–64 Rich, Adrienne, 98, 100, 102 Rodríguez, Legna, 8, 75, 76 S Salas Rivera, Raquel, 9, 142, 148, 152, 156, 157 Sand Dollars, 8, 85–108 Sea fluids, 9, 85–108 Segarra, Marta, 88 Self-organisation, 191, 193, 194, 201 Sensorial, 3, 4, 7, 8, 13, 17, 19–29 Sex trade, 91–99, 110n7 Sexuality, 4, 102, 110n8, 145, 150, 154, 157, 202 Afro-Caribbean women's sexuality, 108n1 Caribbean sexuality, 87, 93, 108n3 Caribbean women's sexuality, 9, 85, 86, 90, 102 female sexuality, 87, 90, 93, 98 lesbian sexuality, 100–103, 109n5 South Atlantic, 48–51 Special Period, 57, 68 Suriname, 10, 166, 167, 169, 170, 174–176, 178n1, 179n7 T Theory, 13, 14, 26, 44n3, 68 dependency theory, 143–145, 147, 156 film feminist theory, 88 metaphorical theory, 14 theory of the image, 26

 INDEX 

Tinsley, Omise’eke Natasha, 86, 90, 92, 99, 161n8 Torres, Fina, 100, 110–111n9 Trace, 14, 22, 25, 26, 28, 31n2 Transatlantic identity, 59, 63 Transnational identity, 124 U Uprootedness, 64 Utopia, 3, 22, 36, 57, 59, 60, 77–79, 87, 89, 95, 103, 108n3

215

V Venezuela, 37, 40, 89, 100–102, 109n5, 110n9, 127, 169–173, 175, 176, 178, 189, 190 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, 39, 44n4 W Wayuu, 7, 35–44 Y Yemayá, 105, 106