Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere: From the Plantation to the Postcolonial

Notes

Notes When translations into English are available, I have referred to the page numbers of the English version. When translations are not available, I have given my own translation in the body of the text and provided the original text along with page number in the endnotes. Preface 1. When I refer to the Caribbean region, I include the islands between Florida and South America as well as the parts of the mainland with historical and cultural connections to the islands. Because of my own language limitations, I leave to other scholars an examination of how the literary histories of the Netherlands Antilles compare to what I have found in the English-, French-, and Spanish-speaking parts of the region. 2. Donnell contends that she is not interested in Scott’s project of “determining at any conjecture what conceptual moves among the many available options will have the most purchase, the best yield” (Scott, Refashioning 7, qtd. in Donnell 5), though I am not sure it is so easy to get away from positioning one’s own priorities as a privileged conceptual move. In Donnell’s case, showing how the questions posed by the nationalist generation have made much pre-1950 Caribbean writing “unknown” and “unknowable” (11) emphasizes the urgency of formulating a different set of questions: “opening up an archive of uneven and unpredictable writings will yield a sense of an unstable past that may be less directly useful to a teleology of literary nationalism, but more honest to the cultural transitions and transactions from which Caribbean literature took its first soundings and made its first voicings” (50). In assigning her project such ambitious goals—to present a “more honest” view of literary history—Donnell makes a strong case for the purchase of her conceptual move, regardless of how she frames her “more modest objective” (5) and the misgivings she expresses regarding Scott’s mode of advocating certain critical moves instead of others. 3. Scott’s formulation of the relationship between problem-spaces—as one in which “old answers” can be dismissed as “lifeless” and “irrelevant” (Con- 242 Notes to Preface and Introduction scripts 4)—seems strangely romantic, especially in light of Scott’s observation that one of tragedy’s lessons is to question the view “that the past can be cleanly separated from the present” (12). In my conclusion, I describe my understanding of postcoloniality as constructing this kind of tragic mourning relationship with anticolonialism, acknowledging its passing but nostalgically refusing to give up its spirit. My “Emplotting Postcoloniality” goes into more detail on the ironies of Scott’s own embeddedness in the modernist desire for the new in his calls for understanding the present as something completely different from the past. Introduction 1. Baker refers to Robbins’s introduction to The Phantom Public Sphere and Fraser’s essay “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” 2. Habermas writes that “wherever the public established itself institutionally as a stable group of discussants, it did not equate itself with the public but at most claimed to act as its mouthpiece, in its name, perhaps even as its educator —the new form of bourgeois representation” (37). Speaking in the name of the public as a mode of national consolidation is one side of what we can see in Caribbean anticolonialism, although it is always tempered by the simultaneous awareness by members of this public sphere of their existence as a counterpublic. 3. For more on Bourdieu’s understanding of the workings of the literary field, see The Field of Cultural Production. 4. There are certainly major exceptions to this generalization about the Anglophone tendency toward a colonial/postcolonial framework versus the Francophone and Hispanophone preference for colonialism/modernity/postmodernity : my conclusion returns to some of the Anglophone objections to the idea of postcoloniality, and my introduction discusses Flores and Bongie as two critics who productively bring together the discussions of modernity/postmodernity and colonialism/postcolonialism. It is worth noting that Flores and Bongie each positions himself as something of an outsider to the fields of Latin American and Francophone studies. A number of critics associated with the Casa de las Américas in Cuba, such as Fernández Retamar in “Calibán,” also consider postcoloniality alongside postmodernity in ways that resonate with my own project; Cuba, too, might be understood to offer a critical positioning at a skew to dominant tendencies within the field. 5. “Una época en que se comienza a reconocer las...