Sounding the Break: African American and Caribbean Routes of World Literature

3: Whiteness and World Literature

3 Whiteness and World Literature Alejo Carpentier, Racial Difference, and Narrative Creolization The complex intersection of early twentieth-century avant-garde literature with ethnography and racial “science,” exoticism and primitivism, negrophilia and indigenism, represents a welldocumented aspect of global modernism. The Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier joined many white intellectuals in perceiving racial difference as an opportunity for artistic innovation: Luis Palés Matos of Puerto Rico, Miguel Ángel Asturias of Guatemala, Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten of the United States, Federico García Lorca of Spain, and André Breton and Michel Leiris of France. Carpentier’s artistic investment in racial difference overlaps signficantly with these writers, many of whom he crossed paths with in Paris and New York, Havana and Port-au-Prince. In the marginalized cultural expressions of colonial subjects and internal others, they found unfamiliar and exciting linguistic and performance traditions that could serve a range of projects, from articulating new nationalist ideologies to experimenting with form and genre in poetry and prose. While racial difference helped these white writers develop novel ideas and forms, many of them recognized that their modes of appropriating nonwhite cultural expressions were exploitative and sensationalistic, betraying more about the observer than the observed. Carpentier in particular struggled with the gap between his desire to “make it new” by bringing attention to African diasporic cultural expressions and the way he mediated his attention through narrative tropes—the ethnographic voyeur, the scribe amongst the unlettered, and the fair intellectual rejuvenated by consorting with darker-skinned folk—that reproduced textually racial hierarchies he sought to distance himself from. Such struggles mark the way Carpentier’s work seeks to frame, from the explicit position of the white intellectual, an antiracist New World 62 Whiteness and World Literature aesthetics attentive to the historical fissures erected upon and constitutive of racial difference. His literary project continually revises the poetics of racial representation to work through discursive obstacles confronted by white Latin American as well as US modernists. At the theoretical level, Carpentier fashions the mid-century world-literary mode of magical realism as a constellation of strategies that could unhierarchically mediate the racialized terrain of American literature on both sides of the Río Grande/Río Bravo, despite the vexing discontinuities produced by the ongoing production of that border. Carpentier sharpens hemispheric continuities when, in a revisionist detour that affiliates him with Du Bois and Hurston, he grounds the emergence of marvelous and magical realism in the longue durée of world literature, evoking spectral, genealogical sites of circulation, translation, and revision before European hegemony—from medieval West Africa to al-Andalus—that inscribe African and diasporic performance and textuality into a deep history of cosmopolitan exchange. However, as witnessed in the case of Hurston , material processes of literary production and reception interfere with his efforts to inscribe African diaspora cultures into such worldly networks and archives. Namely, the racialization of Latin American difference in the United States’ book marketplace undermines Carpentier’s experimentation with marvelous realism as a mode of world literature capable of staging and deconstructing a racialized horizon of expectations that frames, and deforms, the historical specificities of African and diasporic verbal arts. The monolithic racialization of Latin American literary production as “Latin” overwrites even as it confirms the misrecognitions Carpentier lays bare as the enduring historical unconscious of New World literature. Carpentier’s literary and political commitments to African diasporic cultural expressions emerged during his early involvement with a contrarian strain of anticolonial Cuban nationalism, minorismo. At twentythree years old, he served seven months in prison for signing the 1927 manifesto of the Grupo Minorista, which protested the political and cultural corruption rampant under the Gerardo Machado dictatorship in Cuba (1925–33). In the aftermath of the Cuban War of Independence (1895–98) and the Spanish American War (1898), the United States had established direct rule over Puerto Rico and indirect rule over Cuba. The influx of North American capital and culture prompted intellectuals of both islands to defensively articulate national cultures as redoubts of independence, placing Havana and San Juan in a circuit of modernist cultural nationalism including locales such as Harlem, Port-au-Prince, 63 Whiteness and World Literature São Paulo, Dublin, and Prague. The classic Puerto Rican text of Antonio Pedreira, Insularismo (1934), affirmed the essentially Spanish basis of Spanish Caribbean culture, and the idealized peasant figures of the Puerto Rican jíbaro and Cuban guajiro...