Reterritorializing Caribbean Diaspora Literature

The historical and cultural contours of the Caribbean have been defined by the traumatic dislocations of the Middle Passage and indenture as well as subsequent patterns of internal and external migration. Accordingly, Caribbean studies has foregrounded questions of mobility and displacement. In academic discourse more broadly, the Caribbean is often cited as the paradigmatic instance of the deterritorialization of culture. This emblematic reading has the unfortunate effect of decontextualizing the Caribbean as well as some of its most influential paradigms. In what Mimi Sheller labels an act of “theoretical piracy,” the concept of creolization, for example, has been appropriated by globalization theorists (195). Three new studies of Caribbean literature by Stanka Radović, Elena Machado Sáez, and Bénédicte Boisseron challenge the persistent, often delocalizing identification of the Caribbean with deterritorialization by suggesting that greater attention needs to be given to the processes of reterritorialization in which Caribbean diaspora cultures are perpetually engaged. These studies point to reterritorialization both as a function of Caribbean diaspora literature and as conditioning its production and reception. In so doing, Machado Sáez and Boisseron in particular also challenge the celebratory narratives of diaspora that became entrenched in the 1990s, suggesting that the position that contemporary Caribbean diaspora writers occupy is a profoundly ambivalent one marked by fears of commodification and inauthenticity.

Taken together, these scholarly interventions call for a reorientation of Caribbean literary studies—as well as diaspora studies more broadly—toward the question of locality. The importance of locality is a theme that runs through all three studies, but each critic develops a distinct theoretical model and approach. Radović’s study in particular stands apart because of its sustained engagement with spatial theory and analysis of how literary texts reclaim contested spaces. By contrast, Machado Sáez’s and Boisseron’s interests are less in the localizing or place-making function of literature itself than in how local conditions of production and reception mark Caribbean diaspora texts. Moreover, while Radović focuses on the reclamation of Caribbean island and mainland spaces, Machado Sáez and Boisseron draw attention to diasporic settings of Caribbean literary production in North America and Europe. Both frameworks illuminate the questions of locality and territoriality.

While Caribbeanists have been critical of readings of cultural formations as emblematizing deterritorialization and globalization, their analyses have also stressed the primacy of movement. Privileging migration over settlement, Caribbean studies has largely conformed to a broader pattern in diaspora studies in which deterritorialization is celebrated, and mobility and sedentarism are polarized. Relatedly and somewhat paradoxically, discussions of Caribbean and other diaspora literatures have not engaged significantly with critical space theory. Redressing this lacuna, Radović’s Locating the Destitute: Space and Identity in Caribbean Fiction argues for the importance of space as a category of analysis. She observes that not only accounts of the Caribbean as “an emblem of the new global diversity” (31) but also the powerful geocultural metaphors that Caribbean theorists have generated—Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s “meta-archipelago,” for example—risk obscuring the specificity of the region. She illustrates how Caribbean writers, by contrast, establish the archipelago’s singularity through the particular spatial topoi that they elaborate. Drawing inspiration from the broader turn to spatial theory in the humanities over the past several decades and leaning heavily on the insights of Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja, and Doreen Massey, she contends that “the conclusions and concerns of contemporary spatial theorists find resonance and further development in the postcolonial Caribbean discourse” (4).

Radović demonstrates that space and identity are tightly intertwined in Caribbean literature. Highlighting colonialism as a form not only of historical and cultural but also of geographical dispossession, she traces how, in the aftermath of colonial displacement, the protagonists of Caribbean literature “struggle to redefine their understanding of this diasporic location and of their identity in it” (8). Literature, in her analysis, has a key role to play in “bring[ing] into being another form of spatial and historical identity” against the background of colonial spatial hierarchies and the identities that they imposed onto colonial subjects (9). Emphasizing “postcolonial literature’s transformative potential in producing alternative images [End Page...