Cultural Politics and the Politics of Culture in Puerto Rico and Cuba: Recent Studies on Their Literature, Culture, and Society

Humor and the Eccentric Text in Puerto Rican Literature. By Israel Reyes. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005. Pp. xiv+190. $59.95 cloth.)

Cuba: Un Siglo de Literatura (1902–2002). Edited by Anke Birkenmaier and Roberto González Echevarría. (Madrid: Colibrí, 2004. Pp. 437.)

Writing to Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States. By Rodrigo Lazo. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Pp. x+252. $49.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.)

The Myth of José Martí: Conflicting Nationalisms in Early Twentieth-Century Cuba. By Lillian Guerra. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Pp. xii+310. $59.95 cloth, $22.50 paper.)

Contemporary research on Caribbean literature, culture, and society cannot evade the impact of cultural and postcolonial studies and the impulse of hemispheric and transnational perspectives that has broadly influenced research in the humanities and social sciences. Unavoidable as well is the apparent tension—at times openly expressed—with more established critical work, nation-based research, and direct study of canonical works and writers, high culture, and "great" historical figures and moments. Recent critical trends within Caribbean scholarship have achieved higher visibility in part because of the support of various university and independent presses—such as the university presses of North Carolina and Florida and Editorial Callejón in Puerto Rico. Félix V. Matos Rodríguez's "New Directions in Puerto Rican Studies" (University Press of Florida) and Louis A. Pérez Jr.'s "Envisioning Cuba" (University of North Carolina Press) are seminal series in this regard.

The books considered in this essay evince all of these frictions as they themselves aspire to understand the dynamics of canon formations, the mediation of politics in cultural production, and the burden of national (and nationalistic) thinking in contemporary critical inquiries. None of the volumes resolves the ambivalence that pervades the field, for neither do they fully dissolve the hardened epistemological borders of the nation nor radically discard the persistence of hegemonic subjects, ideologies, values, and cultural commodities in their research. They do, however, offer a critique of how cultural products and political discourse reproduce nationalistic ideals of a specific sort, in a discreet historical context and a broad geopolitical framework. Israel Reyes's Humor and the Eccentric Text in Puerto Rican Literatures examines a limited grouping of literary texts that negotiate hegemonic values in Puerto Rican society (mostly within the island) and point to the cultural politics that erect a hierarchy of texts and authors. At the core of the edited volume Cuba: Un siglo de literatura (1902–2002) lies an examination of Cuban cultural politics, mostly through literature, at various key transitional moments. Rodrigo Lazo's Writing to Cuba delves into the print culture of Cuban exiles in the United States, coinciding with expatriate revolutionary activities during the nineteenth century and the transnational circuits of communication that they employed. The Myth of José Martí, by historian Lillian Guerra, discusses the conflicting symbolic labors of three political camps (pro-imperialist, revolutionary, and popular nationalist) and the articulation of contending national discourses. In all cases, the authors highlight the problematics of hardened national programs (patriarchal values in the Puerto Rican twentieth-century literary production; patrician and anti-abolitionist thinking in nineteenth-century Cuban separatists; and pro-imperialists and liberals in the Cuban early Republic).

The authors (mostly Guerra and Lazo) are aware of hemispheric circuits of power and frequently underscore the transnational and translocal dynamics at play in the cultural and historical spheres. They nevertheless retain the value of the nation as an indisputable epistemological coordinate, refrain from passing on to the post-national moment of critical thinking, and end up reproducing the nation as a transhistorical category. The books for the most part disregard recent works, produced by Caribbean intellectuals, that...