Lección errante: Mayra Santos Febres y el Caribe contemporáneo ed. by Nadia V. Celis and Juan Pablo Rivera (review)

The collection of essays, Lección errante: Mayra Santos Febres y el Caribe contemporáneo, edited by Nadia V. Celis and Juan Pablo Rivera, is an important collection on the work of one of the most important writers in Puerto Rico today and should read by anyone interested in her work as well as Puerto Rican literature and culture in general. It would also be of interest to those looking for critical perspectives that deal with neoliberalism and globalization. It provides an excellent and innovative analysis of Santos Febres’s work and contributes greatly to the decolonial critical paradigm that is forming in reaction to neoliberalism among many important and younger scholars. The essays in this collection not only show how an author such as Santos Febres writes from a position of border gnosis, they also perform a type of thinking that is entirely “other wise” in relation to the current dominant paradigm; one that seems to be yet another iteration of the colonial world system. Puerto Rico and its artists are in a peculiar position. The United States wants to forget about Puerto Rico because it is an unwelcome reminder of its own imperial project. Compounding the problem of silencing, Puerto Rico rarely forms part of any critical discourse that treats Latin America and the Caribbean perhaps because of its small size in relation to larger countries or because of what might be perceived as a relationship that is too close to the US. Whatever the reason, critics interested in how to deal with the expansion of neoliberalism and globalization would do well to turn their attention to Puerto Rico, a place that has a long tradition of dealing with similar problems, and to the work of Mayra Santos Febres. This collection of essays would be a good place to start.

It is usually difficult to review an anthology or collection because of the polyphony created by the disparate authors and their points of view. While each author in this volume adds an important and original perspective to our understanding of Santos Febres, the editors have done an admirable job making sure there is coherence between each chapter. The single unifying thread that connects the book is concerned with how Santos Febres brega (“deals”) with her situation as an Afro-Puerto Rican woman, a colonized subject. As always, the problem is how to engage the colonizer in a way that shifts the power dynamic. The colonial relationship is notoriously difficult to confront since the colonizer has already determined the dialectic in a way that is to his advantage. Here the authors adopt several different approaches, but the most common is the increasingly popular nomadology proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri. Framing the collection in this way connects it and Santos Febres to other theorists dealing with border subjects in other contexts. It is a way of avoiding other theories built on a Hegelian foundation that would demand that the subject take up a place within a language system determined by coloniality, thus forcing the subject into a position of accepting the limits imposed by colonial reason. However, it would be a mistake to say that the authors here simply adopt a critical posture articulated by French theorists—no matter how radical—and apply it. Rather, they reshape criticism by adding to it a decolonial perspective “de una cierta manera” as Antonio Benítez Rojo says, that creates something new and important for those interested in Santos Febres’s work or in Puerto Rico and in the relations between neoliberalism and those who choose to resist it. In the interview that Celis conducts of Santos Febres at the end of the book, Santos Febres urges a more global understanding of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean saying, “Creo que hay que escribir más novelas globales” that show how the Caribbean (264)—and its migratory, nomadic response...