Elusive Origins: The Enlightenment in the Modern Caribbean Historical Imagination

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments Recently, as I was in the final stages of preparing this book, I became engrossed in C. L. R. James’s “Lectures on The Black Jacobins” and was surprised to come across the following sentence by the great Trinidadian writer: “You don’t know the famous artist who has immortalized the struggle of the Spaniards against Napoleon, that helped to defeat Napoleon far more than Wellington? A man of the day, one of the most famous European artists, a man called Goya.” I felt I had come full circle. More years ago than I care to remember, this book had its genesis in my fascination with the art of Francisco Goya and its relationship to the Enlightenment. Today, two hundred years after Goya, I believe we would still be hard-pressed to find an utterance that captures the complex and conflicted legacy of the Enlightenment with the poetic precision of Goya’s formulation “El sueño de la razón produce monstruos.” Like Esteban crossing the Atlantic (and contemplating the guillotine aboard) in El siglo de las luces, I was led, through circuitous routes, to the Cuban author Alejo Carpentier, whose novel about the French Revolution imported to the Caribbean abounds in epigraphs from Goya’s etchings Los desastres de la guerra. Once I was rooted, or anchored, in the Caribbean, and with my training as a comparatist, the connections between Carpentier and James seemed clear and worthy of exploration. This book has taken shape from these initial constellations. This long journey was not traveled alone. Carlos Rojas first sparked my interest in Goya in a series of unforgettable graduate seminars at Emory University. Also at Emory I was fortunate enough to benefit from the teaching and friendship of the late Jean-François Lyotard, who encouraged me to think and work against the grain and across disciplines. I especially owe a debt of gratitude to Carlos J. Alonso, who fostered my x Acknowledgments interest in Carpentier and Caribbean literature and has never wavered in his support and wise counsel, from the beginning stages of the project up to the present time. It is safe to say that, whatever the flaws or virtues of this book, without Kevin Meehan, a virtual human sounding board for most of the ideas I have struggled to elaborate here, I would have written a far poorer book. Over the years he has worn the variegated masks of my collaborator , bibliographer, librarian, native informant, editor extraordinaire, and administrative assistant. I am grateful for his help in all these areas, but even more for his friendship. I would also like to thank Nick Nesbitt, il miglior fabbro, whose thoughtful reading of and commentary on the manuscript not only helped me to improve it but also provided an inspiring example of intellectual generosity I strive to emulate. I am indebted and grateful to Micheline Debrauwere, whose perennial kindness, hospitality and nurturing made it possible for me to work virtually without interruption on the revisions of the manuscript. Finally, I would like express my deepest gratitude to my wife, Nathalie , and our daughter, Noemi, whose steadfast love and patience make this, and everything that I am, possible. Chapter 1, on Alejo Carpentier, first appeared in Latin American Literary Review 29, no. 58. It is reprinted here, in expanded form, by permission of the publisher. Chapter 2, on C. L. R. James, also expanded , first appeared in MLN 16, no. 5 (December 2001): 1069–90. It is reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. Unless otherwise specified, the translations of all foreign-language quotations in this work are mine. Elusive Origins This page intentionally left blank ...