Recent Work in Caribbean Literature

Fifteen years ago, scholarship that addressed Caribbean literature in light of the region’s linguistic diversity was relatively limited. The issue was not necessarily a preference for national genealogies, as the region’s major works have long been studied in transnational contexts—variously divided into postcolonial, francophone, and Latin American frames of reference. Rather, the institutional divisions of language departments and the competencies of individual scholars made linguistic barriers more tenacious, such that Derek Walcott would be placed in conversation with Salman Rushdie or Wole Soyinka more often than fellow poet Nicolas Guillén. That tendency has shifted, however, and the four works reviewed here are symptomatic of those changes. Each of them brings together texts from the English, French, and Spanish-speaking Caribbean, stressing the broader interconnectedness of the region over and against what the editors of Reimagining the Caribbean call a “balkanizing” approach (xvii). Taken together, these works implicitly raise the question: what, precisely, are the grounds for comparison? What are the mechanisms that make such comparison plausible, convincing, and effective?

The historical processes that encourage treating the Caribbean as a coherent cultural space are by now well rehearsed. All territories have been subject to some form of radical external domination, at times by multiple colonial powers; most were deeply marked by slavery and plantation labour; intraregional migratory flows in the twentieth century continued the creolizing process; peoples from various parts of the Caribbean frequently live side by side in the diaspora. That said, there remain good reasons for treating literary traditions separately. While some writers like Jacques Stephen Alexis, Eric Walrond, Alejo Carpentier, and Maryse Condé demonstrate a robust sense of a pan-Caribbean literary and cultural formation, many others are monolingual and, given the comparative difficulties of regional travel, may not have first-hand experience of other parts of the region. In a context where translations are not always forthcoming, cross-linguistic intertextuality is frequently limited to a number of usual suspects, chief among them Aimé Césaire. It is thus telling that none of the studies here focus on documenting concrete intellectual exchanges between major authors, such as the Jacques Roumain, Nicolas Guillén, and Langston Hughes triad. Instead, they opt for thematic analyses that seek resonance between contexts that can be considered in some way parallel. In justifying this approach, Édouard Glissant and Antonio Benítez-Rojo emerge as clear theoretical favourites, as both push against nation-based frameworks to reach for more evocative imaginings of the region: for Glissant, it is an “archipelago” that enables non-hierarchical cultural exchange, while Benítez-Rojo famously uses the metaphor of the repeating island to capture the tension between fragmentation and resemblance.

Of the texts reviewed here, Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel’s excellent Coloniality of Diasporas: Rethinking Intra-Colonial Migrations in a Pan-Caribbean Context is the most explicitly concerned with disrupting nation-based interpretive models. She continually turns to moments when nationalism falters, whether they be in nineteenth century novels that are too ambivalent to serve as foundational fictions or twentieth century narratives of women forced into exile because of their transgressive sexual practices. Though she also deals with writers from the Anglophone Caribbean, her most important examples are from Puerto Rico and Martinique, islands whose continued attachment to imperial powers denaturalizes the ideal of the sovereign nation state. Martínez-San Miguel is furthermore interested in the formative role of “intra-colonial migration” in the region, or migration within the bounds of a former or actual empire, emphasizing that such movement reveals the contradictory status of many Caribbean subjects, who may be legal citizens and...