Out of Bounds: Islands and the Demarcation of Identity in the Hispanic Caribbean (review)

In this detailed and exacting study, Dara E. Goldman presents a cogent argument regarding the significance of the island as trope in Caribbean national discourse. She focuses on cultural production from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic, as well as from the Caribbean in the United States. It comes as a surprise to read that, previous to this analysis, there has not been a focused inquiry into the utilization of this island metaphor throughout the region. Still, Goldman does a commendable job of formulating a cohesive line of reasoning that highlights the role of the insular within nationalist rhetoric of these three island-nations. In her preface, “Insular Tales,” Goldman reviews the myriad ways in which the concept of the island fascinates: as hallowed space; as mini-world; as site of exile. This is land where boundaries are both fixed and yet permeable. She posits that for many, islands seemingly mirror the fundamental nature of humanity itself: “They clearly dramatize the basic dialectic of isolation and connectedness as well as the interaction between people and the world they inhabit” (9). Whether it is television’s Survivor or Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the appeal of beginning civilization anew persists unabated; this task occurs, more often than not, on an island. In the cases of the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and Cuba, the island as a free-standing structure is often equated with a nation’s sovereignty. Goldman sets out to show how this association is fundamentally flawed, revealing instances in the histories of these three countries that disrupt the notion of an impermeable nation.

In her first chapter, “Between Island and Nation: The Evolution of Hispanic Caribbean Self-Fashioning,” Goldman reveals the relationship between insularity and Caribbeanness itself. At the crux of Goldman’s analysis is a concerted focus on space and spatiality: she brings together the work of Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja, David Harvey, and Denis Cosgrove, resulting in an original examination of the island trope in these national literatures. She discovers that regardless of the symbolic qualities ascribed to the island, those characteristics themselves become the means by which to define the nation. She examines several writings by Cuban poet José Lizama Lima, in which he posits that insularity is innate to poetic language and an integral part of Cuban sensibility. Next, she looks at Antonio Pedreira’s Insularismo (1934), an influential essay that continues to play a significant role in debates about Puerto Rican nationalism. Again, she demonstrates that while Pedreira’s argument has been subject to more than seventy years of debate, few disagree with his emphasis on the importance of Puerto Rico being an island. She then moves to Antonio Benítez Rojo’s La isla que se repite (1989), in which he calls for the development of new theoretical frameworks that would better assess Caribbean reality: indeed, because the region is composed of islands, it has continued to be misunderstood. Goldman then includes concise analysis of novels that serve as foundational fictions in the region: Eugenio María de Hostos’s La pregrinación de Bayoán (1863); Salvador Brau’s La vuelta al hogar (1877); Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab (1841); Manuel de Jesús Galván’s Enriquillo (1881). In all of these works, she finds that the writers are consistently trying to escape “discourses of identity in terms of the very circumstance that they desire to overcome” (56). They endeavor to break from a rhetoric of insularity that is deeply entrenched in the region. Goldman focuses on the fractures in this discourse, on where it breaks and fails.

In her next chapter, “Out Elsewhere: The Limits of Normative Sexualities,” Goldman examines how homosexuality presents a threat to the heteronormative Caribbean subject and, by association, national space. She convincingly reveals how, according to nationalist rhetoric of these islands, there is literally no space for queer subjects: because they do not contribute reproductively to the nation, they...