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A HISTORY OF LITERATURE IN THE CARIBBEAN
A COMPARATIVE HISTORY OF LITERATURES IN E U R O P E A N L A N G U A G E S SPONSORED BY T H E INTERNATIONAL COMPARATIVE L I T E R A T U R E ASSOCIATION HISTOIRE C O M P A R É E DES LITTÉRATURES D E L A N G U E S EUROPÉENNES SOUS LES AUSPICES D E L'ASSOCIATION INTERNATIONAL D E L I T T É R A T U R E COMPARÉE VOLUME I EXPRESSIONISM AS AN INTERNATIONAL LITERARY PHENOMENON (ED. ULRICH WEISSTEIN) VOLUME II THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT IN THE LITERATURE OF EUROPEAN LANGUAGES (ED. ANNA BALAKIAN) VOLUME III LE TOURNANT DU SIÈCLE DES LUMIÈRES 1760-1820 LES GENRES EN VERS DES LUMIÈRES AU ROMANTISME (DIR. GYÖRGY M. VAJDA) VOLUME IV LES AVANT-GARDES LITTÉRAIRES AU XXe SIÈCLE: HISTOIRE (DIR. JEAN WEISGERBER) VOLUME V LES AVANT-GARDES LITTÉRAIRES AU XXe SIÈCLE: THÉORIE (DIR. JEAN WEISGERBER) VOLUME VI EUROPEAN-LANGUAGE WRITING IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA (ED. ALBERT GÉRARD) VOLUME VII L'ÉPOQUE DE LA RENAISSANCE (1400-1600) I. L'AVÈNEMENT DE L'ESPRIT NOUVEAU (1400-1480) (DIR. TIBOR KLANICZAY, EVA KUSHNER, ANDRÉ STEGMANN) VOLUME VIII ROMANTIC IRONY (ED. FREDERICK GARBER) VOLUME IX ROMANTIC DRAMA (ED. GERALD GILLESPIE) VOLUME X A HISTORY OF LITERATURE IN THE CARIBBEAN (ED. A. JAMES ARNOLD)
A HISTORY OF LITERATURE IN THE CARIBBEAN VOLUME 1 HISPANIC AND FRANCOPHONE REGIONS Edited by A. JAMES ARNOLD Subeditors JULIO RODRIGUEZ-LUIS J. MICHAEL DASH At-Large Editors JOSEPHINE V. ARNOLD MARIE A. HERTZLER NATALIE M. HOUSTON
JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA
Coordinating Committee for A Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages Comité de Coordination de l'Histoire Comparée des Littératures de Langues Européennes 1992-95 Honorary Members/Membres d'honneur Henry H.H. Remak, György M. Vajda, Jacques Voisine, Jean Weisgerber President/Président Mario J. Valdés Vice-President/Vice-Président Mihâly Szegedy-Maszák Secretary/Secrétaire Daniel F. Chamberlain Treasurer/Trésorier Djelal Kadir Members/Membres assesseurs A. James Arnold, Anna Balakian, Jean Paul Bier, Francis H. Claudon, Theo L. D'haen, Wlad Godzich, Manfred Gsteiger, Linda Hutcheon, Giselle Matheau-Castellani, Virgil Nemoianu, Józef Pál, Jürgen Wertheimer Published on the recommendation of the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies with the financial assistance of UNESCO
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A history of literature in the Caribbean / edited by A. James Arnold, with Julio RodriguezLuis, Michael Dash. v. cm. ~ (A Comparative history of literatures in European languages = Histoire comparée des littératures de langues européennes, ISSN 0238-0668 ; v. 10) Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents: v. 1. Hispanic and francophone regions. 1. Caribbean literature-History and criticism. I. Arnold, A. James (Albert James), 1939II. Rodriguez-Luis, Julio. III. Dash, J. Michael. IV. Series: Comparative history of literatures in European languages ; v. 10. PN849.C3H57 1994 809'.89729-dc20 94-3353 ISBN 90 272 3442 6 (Eur.) / 1-55619-601-6 (US) (alk. paper) CIP © Copyright 1994 - John Benjamins B.V./Association Internationale de Littérature Comparée No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. • P.O.Box 75577 • 1070 AN Amsterdam • The Netherlands John Benjamins North America • P.O.Box 27519 • Philadelphia, PA 19118 • USA
GENERAL PREFACE
This is one of a series of volumes in "Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages" (hereafter "Comparative Literary History") sponsored by the International Comparative Literature Association. The series is under the supervision of a coordinating editorial committee consisting of sixteen scholars from various countries. The committee appoints the directors of the particular research projects, issues general guidelines to them, monitors the genesis of the manuscript, and gives final approval before publication. The "Comparative Literary History" series was launched by the International Comparative Literature Association in 1967. It is based on two fundamental premises: one, that the writing of literary history confined to specific nations, peoples, or languages must be complemented by the writing of literary history that coordinates related or comparable phenomena from an international point of view; two, that it is almost impossible for individual scholars to write such comprehensive histories and that we must now rely on structured teamwork drawing collaborators from different nations. Within these principles and criteria, the scholars entrusted with each project are given the latitude needed to put together the best possible volume. Writing a comparative literary history by way of international teamwork is a revolutionary procedure in literary historiography. Few scholars can claim ability to cover the entire range of literature relevant to the phenomenon under study. Hence the need for partial syntheses, upon which more and more truly international syntheses will be built as our series progresses. The "Comparative Literary History" series consists of volumes composed in either French or English. Most contributions will be originally written in these two languages, some will be translated into them from other languages. But we emphasize that the decision to write our volumes in English or French does not reflect a hierarchy of values. The literary specificities of every nation or cultural entity, large or small, acclaimed or neglected, will be valued. As a matter of fact, no discipline is as apt to do justice to the literatures of smaller diffusion as Comparative Literature.
The volumes in this series are collaborative projects of many scholars from different countries, cultures and procedures, but volume editors and the Coordinating Committee have worked to produce well defined historiographic systems of explanation that give literary scholarship a broader and more accurate assessment of the cultural past. As the current President of the Coordinating Committee I have been entrusted with the responsibility of continuing and expanding the series of "Comparative Literary History" launched by Professor Jacques Voisine of the University of Paris III, and continued by Professor Henry Remak of Indiana University and brought up to its present level of achievement by Professor Jean Weisgerber of the Free University of Brussels. Literary scholarship is indebted to the project directors for their scholarship, undaunted courage, patience and faith in the international community of scholars. Mario J. Valdés President, Coordinating Committee
Acknowledgments
This project has been made possible by the generous assistance of several institutions and not a few individuals. First among the institutions for consistent support is the University of Virginia, which graciously hosted the Editorial Colloquium from which this three-volume History emerged in October 1986. The Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African Studies of the University of Virginia has faithfully provided logistical and technical support since that time. Gail H. Moore, Director of the Word Processing Center of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, solved our numerous problems of electronic document conversion and printed the final draft. The Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Raymond J. Nelson, provided the Editor with an assistant in 1991-92 who made timely completion of this first volume possible. The National Humanities Center offered the Editor a quiet haven and collegial support in 198990 in the form of a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Much of the work on this first volume, and the planning for the two subsequent volumes, was completed there. Translation of articles from Spanish was arranged by Marilyn Gaddis Rose, Director of the Center for Research in Translation of the State University of New York at Binghamton. The Department of Comparative Literature at the Universidad de Puerto Rico in Río Piedras organized its eleventh Encuentro Caribeno around our project. The final outline for the History was worked out there in an editorial meeting in March 1988. The New World Studies Program of the University of Virginia, which sponsored the UNESCO conference on the General History of the Caribbean in March 1991, also made possible a third meeting of the majority of the editorial team at that time. The International Comparative Literature Association provided the Editor with a small grant to cover costs that could not be absorbed by these universities and research centers. The International Federation for Modern Languages and Literatures (FILLM) successfully applied to UNESCO for a grant of five thousand dollars to underwrite the publication of volume one. Many colleagues and employees of our respective institutions have given loyal and unfailing support to efforts that have, at this writing, taken over seven years from the inception of the project to the completion of volume one. May they all be assured of the genuine gratitude of the editorial team. A. James Arnold, Editor November 1992
Contents Editor: A. James Arnold
Charting the Caribbean as a Literary Region A. James Arnold
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HISPANIC LITERATURE Subeditor: Julio Rodríguez-Luis Introduction Julio Rodriguez-Luis
3
Language, Popular and Literate Cultures, Regions The History of Literary Language Humberto López Morales
9
Popular and Literate Cultures Education in the Hispanic Antilles Julio Rodriguez-Luis
27
Listening to the Reader: The Working-Class Cultural Project in Cuba and Puerto Rico Maria Elena Rodriguez Castro
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Islands and Territories Dominican Literature and Its Criticism: Anatomy of a Troubled Identity Silvio Torres-Saillant
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Colombian Literature Seymour Menton
65
West Indian Writing in Central America Ian I. Smart North of the Caribbean: An Outline for a History of SpanishCaribbean Literature in the United States Efrain Barradas
75
Afterword Julio Rodriguez-Luis
85
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A History of Literature in the Caribbean
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Literary Genres Introduction Julio Rodriguez-Luis
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The Colonial Period to the Early Nineteenth Century (All Genres) Colonial Voices of the Hispanic Caribbean Raquel Chang-Rodriguez
111
From Romanticism Through Modernismo and Naturalism Fiction Carlos J. Alonso
141
The Poetic Production of Cuba, Puerto Rico and The Dominican Republic in the Nineteenth Century Ivan A. Schulman
155
The Twentieth Century The Novel William L. Siemens
177
The Short Story in the Hispanic Antilles William Luis
191
The Caribbean's Contribution to the Boom Gustavo Pellón
209
Poetry Emilio Bejel
221
The Theater Sandra M. Cypess
239
The Essay Peter Earle
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Literature and Politics in the Cuban Revolution: The Historical Image Adriana Méndez Rodenas
283
Conclusions Julio Rodriguez-Luis
295
Contents
xi FRANCOPHONE LITERATURE Subeditor: J. Michael Dash
Introduction J. Michael Dash
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Language, Popular and Literate Cultures, Regions The Formation and Evolution of a Literary Discourse: One, Two, or Three Literatures? Ulrich Fleischmann
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Popular and Literate Cultures Literature and Folklore in the Francophone Caribbean Maximilien Laroche
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The Caribbean in Metropolitan French Writing Régis Antoine
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Islands and Territories Haitian Sensibility Léon-François Hoffmann
365
Martinique and Guadeloupe: Time and Space Randolph Hezekiah
379
French Guiana Bridget Jones
389
Conclusions J. Michael Dash
399
Literary Genres Introduction J. Michael Dash
407
The Novel Novels of Social and Political Protest to the 1950s Frederick Ivor Case
415
A New Cry: From the 1960s to the 1980s
427
Marie-Denise Shelton Realism Redefined: The Subjective Vision Beverley Ormerod
435
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Exile and Recent Literature J. Michael Dash
451
Poetry Poetry Before Negritude Jack Corzani
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Negritude: Then and Now A. James Arnold
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New Voices Anthea Morrison
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Theater Marronnage and the Canon: Theater to the Negritude Era Juris Silenieks
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Toward créolité: Postnegritude Developments Juris Silenieks
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Essay Before and Beyond Negritude J. Michael Dash
529
Colonialism as Neurosis: Frantz Fanon Were Knight
547
The Essay and / in History A. James Arnold
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Index to Names
567
Charting the Caribbean as a Literary Region
The History of Literature in the Caribbean breaks new ground in several respects. It is the first comprehensive attempt to chart the Greater and Lesser Antilles and the Caribbean rimlands as one literary region. Heretofore all literary histories covering the Caribbean have focused on one linguistic and cultural region in relation to its former colonial metropole. In the case of the Netherlands Antilles no literary history existed even in Dutch prior to our undertaking. Book-length studies of the anglophone region date from Kenneth Ramchand's The West Indian Novel and Its Background, 1970. The francophone region was not examined thoroughly in its historical context until nearly a decade later, when Régis Antoine's Les écrivains français et les Antilles (French writers and the Antilles) and Jack Corzani's six-volume La littérature des Antilles-Guyane françaises (Literature of the French Antilles and Guiana) were published in the same year, 1978. The Hispanic Antilles have by far the best-known literature in the region, as well as the oldest, which includes an established critical tradition. Even there, however, the continental margin had not previously been studied in relation to its Antillean center, except for one brief monograph by Ian Smart, Central American Writers of West Indian Origin: A New Hispanic Literature, 1984. Indeed, the literature of the Hispanic Antilles has generally been subsumed under the history of LatinAmerican literature, rendering its associations and connections with the other Antillean literatures quite problematical. These are all facts that faced the editorial team of the History when it was organized in 1985 at the behest of the International Comparative Literature Organization. At its triennial meeting in Paris that year the ICLA named an editor and four subeditors whose task would be to constitute the teams of scholars charged with preparing a history of the Caribbean literatures written in Dutch, English, French, Spanish, and the Creoles related to them. The ICLA further authorized the editor to establish a center at the University of Virginia to organize and prepare a three-volume history of literature in the Caribbean, of which this is the first volume. The following year an editorial colloquium was held at the University of Virginia to study the structure and organization of the History. The position papers delivered by the subeditors and discussed at that colloquium were published in the journal Callaloo in 1988 under the general title "Caribbean Literary Historiography." Our 1986 colloquium demonstrated the extent to which the critical and scholarly habits and practices of literary Caribbeanists derive from those same colonial traditions that have divided the literatures of the region to the present. In these circumstances we deemed it impossible to impose a critical perspective or a single theoretical position upon the contributors, since such a decision would have limited our choice of participating scholars in the extreme. The overriding imperative for the editors was to bring together the most distinguished team of literary Caribbeanists possible, regardless of individual preferences as to method. We realized that differences in point of view between individual contributors were unavoidable and resolved to smooth them out in the introductions and conclusions to the various sections of the History, which have been written by the respective subeditors. The synoptic aspect of the History was to be found in its comprehensiveness and its range, rather than in its method.
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A second colloquium held at the Puerto Rican universities of Río Piedras and San Germán in March 1988 around the theme of unity and diversity in Caribbean literatures permitted the subeditors to agree upon the principles of organization of the four parallel histories that constitute our first two volumes. We reached the decision to organize our work so that the first section of each linguistic division would reveal the social, economic, and political conditions in which literatures emerged in the several island and continental areas of the Hispanic and francophone Caribbean (volume one) and the anglophone and Dutch- and Papiamentu-speaking areas (volume two). Several of the papers presented at the Puerto Rican colloquium were edited by Susan Homar and published in the journal of the University of Puerto Rico, La Torre, in 1989. The first section of each linguistic division, devoted to the institution of literature under the heading Language, Popular and Literate Cultures, Regions, was the hardest to organize, precisely because it represented the greatest departure from current practice among literary historians. Assessing the extent to which European languages have been creolized in the Caribbean region and have given rise to a literature that is linguistically and culturally distinct from the metropolitan literature has been a particularly arduous task. Readers of volumes one and two will see that both the degree of distinctiveness and the rate of linguistic change vary widely across the region. Our goal from the earliest stages of preparation has been to create a history of Caribbean literature that could be read across the linguistic divisions both for commonalities and for regional cultural differences. We hoped thereby to present a contrastive view of how literature emerged as a social institution in the several areas of the Caribbean region. For instance, a reader interested in the development of printing with respect to the evolution of literature can expect to find the indispensable information under the same subhead of Language, Popular and Literate Cultures, Regions in each of the four linguistic divisions. To our knowledge there has been no prior attempt to collect and analyze such information on a pan-Caribbean scale. The ways in which folk elements and forms have been used and interpreted in Caribbean literatures written in European languages differ greatly, whether we read these cultural phenomena diachronically (within one linguistic division) or synchronically (across linguistic divisions). One of the first discoveries we made is that within the four major language divisions specific literatures have been neglected. In this respect the literature of the Dominican Republic stands out in the Hispanic division of volume one, as does the literature of French Guiana in the francophone division. Furthermore, the literature of the Dominican Republic has historically been treated in isolation from the literature of Haiti, although Dominican and Haitian cultures, residing side by side on the island of Hispaniola, have been intimately intertwined from the colonial period to the present. We find in this phenomenon more than the usual linguistic legacy of colonialism. The history of racism in the Caribbean region is indissociable from the phenomenon of Dominican literature refusing to recognize that the black Other (Haiti) is also present in its own national identity and in its history. (See Marquez [1989], 302-03 for a significant exception to this neglect.) The literature of French Guiana has suffered from a different error in perspective. Sparsely populated, compared to the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, French Guiana has also been passed over precisely because its literature does not fit the island model. French Guiana belongs to the continental rimland; it has a vast hinterland and major rivers, as well as indigenous Amerindian peoples and long-established communities descended from escaped slaves. French Guiana can thus stand as an example of the necessity to reassess literary cultures with respect to their neighbors who
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speak other languages, rather than to continue viewing them exclusively within the cultural orbit of the islands that share both a major European language and Creole. Our working definition of the Caribbean rimland as potentially distinct from the Antilles has led to stimulating results in the essays on French Guiana, Guyana, Colombia, and Suriname, as well as the one on Central American writing by descendants of anglophone West Indians. We originally planned an essay on coastal Venezuela as well but could find no scholar able to undertake it at this time. Recent studies of the literary representation of the absent indigenous peoples of the Greater and Lesser Antilles have likewise focused on individual language areas. Our concern has been to draw out these elements in such a way that users of the History will be able to read across linguistic divisions to interpret phenomena that may appear identical or very similar in literary form but that represent responses to different historical forces. Surely the best-known aspect of Caribbean literature among the general public has been the "discovery" in the first half of this century of Afro-Caribbean culture and its recuperation by literary movements across the region. We have been attentive to the various political, economic, and ethnic contexts in which these literary movements were born and evolved, so as to present a more historically informed view of their respective significance. Likewise, the articles that treat the political exile, the regional concentration, or the economic diaspora of writers of color have the net effect of producing a richer, more complex, and more thorough literary-historical account of the Afro-diaspora originating in the Antilles. Some unavoidable omissions from the Hispanic division should be noted here. The scholar who was to have written on Central American literature left the U.S., spent a few years in Nicaragua and, when last we had news of her, was in Havana where she no longer answered letters concerning the project. An eminent Cuban colleague, the editor of Anales del Caribe in Havana, agreed in 1989 to write an important essay on literature and the oral tradition in the Hispanic Caribbean, but since 1990 we have lost contact with him. We had exactly the same experience with an editor of Del Caribe in Santiago de Cuba who agreed to write an essay on religion and literature for volume three. We have had no news of him in two years. These sad facts are noted here without acrimony, merely to illustrate the point that a Cold War that is considered to be over elsewhere still obstructs international scholarship concerning the Caribbean region. In selecting genre as the organizing principle of the second section of each of the four linguistic divisions in this History, we were cognizant of the theoretical research that denies the pertinence, or even the possibility, of generic definitions in literature. However, it was incumbent upon us to give an accurate representation of the emergence of Caribbean literatures as they have been seen in history, while laying the groundwork for new research in the future. The reader will find articles that are largely expository side by side with contributions having a decidedly theoretical slant. We have in fact resisted the temptation to minimize the differences that must result from marked divergences in approach and in at least one case we have highlighted them, attempting thereby to accurately represent the tensions that characterize research on central issues of Caribbean literature. To cite only the most widely discussed phenomenon, studies of the negritude movement in the francophone Antilles have been generally overdetermined by ideological considerations. The heroic vision of negritude has led to assessments of the literature of the region that are male-centered, aggressive, and characterized by a revolutionary discourse. R. Hezekiah's presentation of the literature of Martinique and Guadeloupe in the section on Language, Popular and Literate Cultures, Regions
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is informed by just such a vision, which Marie-Denise Shelton, writing about the novel as a genre, modulates in her assessment of the emergence of important women writers in the area during the 1960s and 1970s. Claiming that the negritude movement in poetry was posited on a gendered vision of literature and society, the editor, in his articles on "Negritude: Then and Now" and "The Essay and / in History," shows that negritude as a concept has been demystified by the best research carried out in the 1970s and 1980s, with the result that early (and still popular) assessments of its significance must be entirely rethought. In this respect these articles on the francophone novel, poetry, and the essay open up a necessary new dialogue on the historiography of literature. One literature stands out in the genre division because of its much longer history and its abundant production. In order to respect our uniform outline and, at the same time, demonstrate the distinctiveness of Hispanic Caribbean literature, the editors decided early on to include in the Hispanic division a substantial essay on early colonial literature and two on the nineteenth century. The other three literatures of the region, to the extent that they can be called indigenous, are essentially twentieth-century phenomena. Thus, the twentieth-century grouping of essays on Hispanic Caribbean literary genres is meant to be read in parallel with the genre divisions of the other literatures, where there was no need to establish century divisions. The ample treatment given to the major literary genres also permitted us to remedy lacunae in the section on Language, Popular and Literature Cultures, Regions. The reader interested in the specificity of the literatures of Cuba and Puerto Rico will find them treated extensively in the Genres section, although they are absent from the Regions grouping. A few of the essays devoted to literary genres are resolutely positivistic in conception and recognize no theory of literary change other than a succession of dates. The limitations of such work were as clear to the editors as they will be to many of our readers. We have included those essays in the interests of providing information necessary to any future comparative study of literary genres in the region. We expect quibbles over the boundaries of specific genres as well. The essay genre is no doubt most open to question. It was very important in the Caribbean region in the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, during a period when a literature of ideas was often more compelling than the nascent novel. In the contribution on the Hispanic Caribbean essay, for instance, the editors decided to resist the temptations of theoretical purity in favor of an approach that, by throwing its net very wide, undoubtedly took in a somewhat disparate catch. The editor is not exempt from this objection, having included in "The Essay and / in History" in the francophone division a recent work that most scholars have treated as a poem, Frankétienne's Ultramarine. Here as elsewhere, our principal aim has been to assure that the wealth of comparative information provided in these volumes will counterbalance the unavoidable theoretical inconsistencies. Every effort has been made to provide editorial consistency throughout the three volumes; but of course, in a work as complex as this History, carried out by scholars who work in quite different traditions and in several languages, slips are bound to occur. To minimize them the decision was taken at an early date to use the Chicago Manual of Style, 13th edition, as the authority in matters of syntax, style, notation, and bibliography. Webster's IIId New International Dictionary (unabridged), 1981, was similarly adopted as the final authority on spelling and on the italicizing of terms. Some terms peculiar to the Caribbean have proved especially slippery as we have moved from one critical tradition to another. The most obvious example is Creole. We have retained the capital letter only for the proper nouns designating a specific language or referring to people born in the region. All
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other uses have been lower-cased and printed in roman except, of course, in quoted passages. Another troublesome example is modernismo, the Hispanic Caribbean movement that has more affinities with Parnassianism than with international modernism. We have italicized modernismo to highlight its regional specificity and to differentiate it from modernism. Like other literary movements it is lower-cased according to the preference of the Chicago Manual of Style. The question of where to put the dates of writers was a vexing one. Good reasons exist for placing them in each essay as they occur; but, given the repetition of many names throughout volumes, and from one volume to another, we felt the repetition would be intolerable. Therefore the decision was taken to group them in an Index to Names, which will be placed in the back matter of each volume. Since the inception of our project, a number of books have appeared which, taken together, point toward a growing recognition of the need to reconceptualize the literary history of the region. Between the years 1990 and 1992 three volumes published in the United States testify to this need. Gustavo Pérez Firmat edited a collection of thirteen essays under the title Do the Americas Have a Common Literature? (Pérez Firmat [1990]). Caribbean authors are treated in theoretical or literarycritical pairings with others from the Western hemisphere (frequently U.S. writers) in its thirteen chapters. Pérez Firmat's project overlaps with one of the focal points of our Cross-Cultural Studies (volume three). The following year Earl E. Fitz published a monograph entitled Rediscovering the New World: Inter-American Literature in a Comparative Context that, nowhere in its ten chapters, allows for any Caribbean literary specificity in the Americas. However, in the year of the quincentenary of the Columbian Encounter, an English-language edition of Antonio Benítez Rojo's La isla que se repite (The repeating island), 1989, proposed to fill the glaring lacuna left by Fitz. Benítez Rojo sees Caribbean literature as "an island bridge connecting, in 'another way,' North and South America" (Benîtez Rojo [1992], 2). Antonio Benîtez Rojo has also brought the theoretical vision that informs his monograph to the essay on "Caribbean Culture: A Carnivalesque Approach," which he contributed to our volume of Cross-Cultural Studies. J. Michael Dash's work in progress, The Other America, which will be published by the University Press of Virginia in its New World Studies series at about the same time our first volume appears, will synthesize the best features of these three books. Literary scholarship devoted to the Caribbean has clearly begun to work toward the ideal Roberto Marquez articulated in 1975: "what I would . . . like to see - and believe we desperately need-is nothing less than a comprehensive literary history of perhaps encyclopedic scope. A work that, taking the entire archipelago as its legitimate province, will combine [an] all-embracing theoretical ambition . . ., the dialectical rigor and dynamic appreciation of complex economic and social forces . . ., and an equally keen regard for the peculiar integrity and materiality of esthetic conceptions and cultural production. . . ." (Marquez [1983], 103). Seven years of teamwork have shown the editors of the present History that a perfect marriage of theoretical rigor with a concern for aesthetic integrity can exist only in Utopia. We expect the theoretical rigor to be supplied in a second stage of scholarship that will build upon the foundation we hope our work will provide. A. James Arnold, Editor Charlottes ville-B rus sels, June 1992
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Bibliography Antoine, Régis. 1978. Les écrivains français et les Antilles: Des premiers Pères Blancs aux surréalistes noirs. Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose. Arnold, A. James and Josephine, eds. 1988. Caribbean Literary Historiography. Callaloo. 11.1:93-185. Benítez Rojo, Antonio. 1992. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Post-Contemporary Interventions. Durham: Duke University Press. Corzani, Jack. 1978. La littérature des Antilles Guyane françaises. 6 vols. Fort-de-France, Paris: Désormeaux. Fitz, Earl E. 1991. Rediscovering the New World: Inter-American Literature in a Comparative Context. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Homar, Susan, ed. 1989. XI Encuentro caribeno. Special issue of La Torre, n.s. III.11:457-563. Marquez, Roberto. 1983. Towards a Theory of Caribbean Culture and a Holistic View of the Antilles. Process of Unity in Caribbean Society: Ideologies and Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. —. 1989. Nationalism, Nation, and Ideology: Trends in the Emergence of a Caribbean Literature. The Modern Caribbean. Ed. by Franklin W. Knight and Colin A. Palmer. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press. Pérez Firmat, Gustavo, ed. 1990. Do the Americas Have a Common Literature? Durham: Duke University Press. Ramchand, Kenneth. 1970. The West Indian Novel and Its Background. New York: Barnes & Noble. Zavala, Iris. 1992. Colonialism and Culture: Hispanic Modernisms and the Social Imaginary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
HISPANIC LITERATURE Subeditor: Julio Rodríguez-Luis
Introduction
JULIO RODRÍGUEZ-LUIS
University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
The heart of the Hispanic Caribbean is made up of three island nations, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. They occupy the largest, the second largest, and the smallest island, respectively, of the Greater Antilles. (The name Antilles is reserved for the islands; the term Caribbean refers to the basin filled by the Caribbean sea, and includes the continental coastal zones washed by it.) The Cuban and Puerto Rican nations are coextensive with the islands they occupy; the Dominican Republic shares the island of Hispaniola with a creolophone nation, Haiti. The cultural similarities between Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo (as the Dominican Republic was called during colonial times and is still very often called) require that we define them as a particular area within the Caribbean. These three islands were inhabited prior to the arrival of the Spaniards by peoples varying in degree of development from the very primitive Guanajatabeyes of the Western tip of Cuba to the much more advanced Taínos of Puerto Rico, who were originally from the Orinoco basin region. Considerable numbers of these peoples were exterminated during the conquest of the islands by the Spaniards. Even more of them perished afterward due to heavy work, punishments, epidemics, and the starvation caused by the abandonment of crops. By the middle of the sixteenth century the indigenous population of the three islands had been practically extinguished and the survivors gradually disappeared as a distinctive ethnic element through their integration within the European and African populations, a process that was completed by the middle of the nineteenth century. The enslavement of the natives was supplemented from the very beginning of the colonization process, and eventually replaced by, that of Africans. African slaves and their descendants attained a majority of the total population in Cuba and Puerto Rico during a period between the end of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth. While in Cuba the whites eventually surpassed in number the blacks and mulattos, due to the increase of immigrants from Spain, the mixture of black and white predominates in Santo Domingo and Puerto Rico. The white population of the three islands is basically of Spanish origin, although since the end of the eighteenth century other European immigrants have settled in them as well. The Africans came principally from the area around the Gulf of Guinea, but also from Angola and the Congo. Because of the relative proximity of the northern Antilles to the Canary Islands, commercial relations linked the archipelagos during the first centuries of the colonial period. The canario contribution to the population, especially to the peasant population of the Hispanic Antilles, is noteworthy. During the nineteenth century (and in Cuba well into the twentieth) the influx of Spaniards to Cuba and Puerto Rico increased. They came from all the regions of the country, but especially from its periphery: Galicia, Asturias, Cantabria, Vizcaya, Andalucía, Cataluna. The Catalan and
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Julio Rodríguez-Luis
Mallorcan immigration was quite considerable in the case of Puerto Rico, as was also the immigration from Corsica. After 1815 the Spanish government embarked on a policy of attracting white immigrants in fear that the blacks would revolt if they became the dominant component of the population. The recent example of Haiti stood behind this policy. From 1847 onward sizable numbers of Chinese were brought to Cuba to work in the sugar industry; many remained and more came in the next century. Jamaicans and Haitians also emigrated to Cuba in the twentieth century in order to work in the sugar mills. There was some immigration from the Middle East to the three islands. Many thousands of Jews from central and northern Europe settled there in the period between the two world wars. Because of its larger size and greater prosperity, Cuba was the nation of the Hispanic Antilles that received the most immigrants during the twentieth century. The Spanish language of the white, black, and mulatto populations of the region has responded largely to the same influences and has evolved in very similar ways, showing in the contemporary period a considerable influence from English, especially in Puerto Rico. The culture of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico - like the language - is essentially of Spanish origin with an important African influence. The patterns of cultural evolution over the course of four centuries of intermittent Spanish rule run parallel to the linguistic patterns, although Santo Domingo presents a special case. Among the new cultural influences, the U.S. influence has been dominant in the three island nations since the second half of the nineteenth century. Venezuela, the Caribbean region of Colombia, Mexico, and the Central American nations (except for Guatemala and El Salvador), share the same sea with Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo. Some of these countries and the Yucatan coast of Mexico share other characteristics with the Hispanic Antilles: large populations of African origin in northern Colombia, Venezuela, and even more so in Panama; similar linguistic traits in Caribbean Colombia, Venezuela, and Panama; and what might be called a distinctive Caribbean culture (a concept whose problematics will be treated in volume three of the History). The Central American Hispanic nations share with the Hispanic Antilles a direct and oppressive dependence upon the United States (or, conversely, a militant opposition to that dependence, as in Cuba and in Nicaragua under the Sandinista government). Notwithstanding all these factors, the differences between the Hispanic nations of the Antilles and those of Central and South America are more striking than their similarities. There are large indigenous populations in most of the countries of the second group and in some of them Amerindians contribute a very important presence to the country's overall cultural personality. The linguistic evolution of Mexico and the Central American nations has been different from that of the Hispanic Antillean islands. The population of African origin is rather small in most Central American countries. And, most importantly perhaps, dependence upon Spain was severed in the case of México, Central, and South America close to a century before this happened in Cuba and Puerto Rico. Because both Venezuela and Colombia endured a long and bloody fight in order to attain their independence, a national consciousness developed there rather early. Caribbean Colombia, although possessing very definite charactistics of its own, is not independent of the nation's continental cultural personality. It must be noted, however, that the Caribbean area of Colombia, Venezuela - especially in the last decades, as Caracas and the coastal zone have outweighed the influence of the Andean and the plains regions in the process of national definition - and some regions of Central America claim a Caribbean identity. Belize and the Mosquito coast of Nicaragua, for instance, are very definitely
Introduction
5
Caribbean, but their cultural identity falls within the anglophone Caribbean orbit. This situation calls for an exploration of the literature produced in these regions with a view to identifying its Caribbeanness (i.e., what it has in common with the literature of linguistic and cultural regions that underwent quite different historical processes). The reader of the History will be able to examine both differences and similarities by reading across the literary history of the four major European languages of the Caribbean that are treated in volumes one and two. In the particular case of the Hispanic Antilles, the major synthesizing factor that contributed to the strong similarities between the three nations' evolution is their long colonial dependence, first upon Spain - until 1898 for Cuba and Puerto Rico - and, since the end of the nineteenth century, upon the United States. Santo Domingo's dependence upon Spain ceased initially in 1821. However, the country was immediately occupied by Haiti, a situation that lasted two decades. Soon after regaining its independence from Haiti, Santo Domingo again became a Spanish colony. Not long after that dependence ended, Santo Domingo fell under the sway of the United States. Puerto Rico is the only Spanish-American country that is still a colony. The Dominican Republic, after having endured one of the bloodiest and longest dictatorships in the history of Latin America, in 1965 experienced an armed intervention by the United States that was prompted by Washington's determination to preserve the Dominican Republic's client state status. Until 1959 Cuba was, for all practical purposes, an American protectorate. The abrupt termination of that situation has greatly harmed the country's development because of the former master's permanent hostility toward Cuba and because of the U.S. blockade of trade with the island. Thus, in an entirely negative way, Cuba continues to be dependent, to some extent, on the United States. The prolongation of their colonial or semicolonial status probably provides the strongest link betwen the Hispanic and the non-Hispanic Antilles. It points to these nations' common heritage as plantation colonies and suggests that that past, together with the African presence in them, continues to unite them in the present. Whereas the non-Hispanic islands seem to still depend in several ways upon their former or continuing metropolises, in fact they also (or mainly) depend upon the United States: witness the recent invasion of Granada. The area that we call the Caribbean has been identified by the United States as its mare nostrum since at least the end of the nineteenth century. That the U.S. is determined to maintain it as such was demonstrated most recently by its military intervention in Panama. The history of colonial dependence is essential to understanding present-day literary production in the Hispanic Antilles because the literature of the region is deeply marked by its writers' reaction, manifest or implicit, to that humiliating situation and their nations' concomitant underdevelopment. They reject both in various forms ranging from angry protest to the characteristically HispanicCaribbean form of mockery called choteo. In other words, the colonial or semicolonial status of the Hispanic Antilles permeates not only the themes of its literature in explicit ways but is the main force shaping its voice, the tone of that voice, its way of projecting itself, and the aims it proposes for itself. The critic who does not search for the mark of the political in the literatures of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico is more likely to end up with an impoverished interpretation than would be the case of other Latin-American literatures. Furthermore, the risk of misinterpretation is as great as the risk of impoverishment. It could be argued that the fact that Cuba severed its political dependence upon the United States has also freed its literature from expressing that depen-
6
Julio Rodríguez-Luis
dence. This dependence, however, surely continues to manifest itself in the work of many of the older Cuban writers, including those who left soon after the revolution, whereas, on the other hand, Cuba's cultural dependence on the United States is far from over. Finally, the country's thirty-year dependence on the Soviet Union may yet make itself felt in its literature. Not all the literary texts produced in the three Hispanic Antillean nations are politically oriented or even politically aware and many, in fact, eschew all overt political connotations. This is not an argument in favor of reading the literature of the Hispanic Antilles exclusively to search out its political context. The methodological approach we would propose here seeks rather to develop an awareness of historical conditions that could facilitate understanding the ideological patterns that shape the production of literature. If literary history is to be the discourse that organizes literary production for understanding, disseminating, and teaching it, then literary history cannot limit itself to narrating the canon (i.e., to describing in chronological order those works that traditional aesthetic criteria have selected and consecrated as a particular country's literary thesaurus). On the contrary, literary history has to be permanently aware of the interaction between the canon and the society that has contributed directly to elevating it to its present po