Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere: From the Plantation to the Postcolonial by Raphael Dalleo (review)

Raphael Dalleo’s Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere delves into specific peculiarities that, he argues convincingly, define the region’s literary production, be it written in English, French, or Spanish. He follows to a point Antonio Benítez Rojo’s assertion that the Caribbean is a sea of historical and economic significance, which surrounds a cultural meta-archipelago lacking borders and a precise center. This island, which replicates itself despite each version’s inherent uniqueness, allows Dalleo to trace meaningful tangents and to discuss within the book’s eight core chapters authors and texts perceived perhaps as quite dissimilar by a less perceptive critic. He does so elegantly in a monograph whose complexity never alienates readers, causing them continuously to reflect upon the provocative notions he posits.

The author defines lucidly in the preface and introduction the nature of a project guided to an extent by what he terms “the modernist impulse for categorization” (xii), albeit responding fundamentally to the open canon proposed by postcolonial studies. In these initial pages, as well as elsewhere in the book, he alludes specifically to the literary critics and cultural philosophers who ground his outlook: Theodor W. Adorno, Benedict Anderson, Jean Franco, Édouard Glissant, Jürgen Habermas, Pierre Bourdieu, Benítez Rojo, Ángel Rama, Julio Ramos, Aimé Césaire, C. L. R. James, and so forth. Throughout the monograph he evinces profound acquaintance with these writers’ ideas, as well as with those of countless scholars who have written eloquently about Caribbean history and culture. At its core, the introduction strives to characterize the public sphere as it emerges or evolves in the region. Declaring that Habermas’s Eurocentric bourgeois marketplace could not be transported to the Caribbean, he examines a multiplicity of spheres, concentrating his analysis on three historical periods: plantation slavery, modern colonialism, and postcoloniality. In so doing, he posits initially the prevalence of a tacit or marginalized discourse in which the oppressed folk, as represented by the enslaved Africans, either had their voices translated by abolitionists indebted ideologically to the metropole or, as a counterpublic, expressed themselves exclusively through music, religion, or rebellion. This is superseded by an anticolonial discourse associated particularly with heroic figures, often literary intellectuals, intent on redeeming the people in order to bring forth their participation in a public sphere, in a nation “for all and for the good of all,” as Martí desired. Finally, postcoloniality, what Dalleo describes as “a new context that goes beyond political status to include economic, social and technological changes” (12), implies the inability of the literary intellectual to speak directly for the people, having to surrender the public sphere, therefore, “to the popular elements of the newly forming nation-state” (17).

The book’s first chapter, “The Abolitionist Public Sphere and the Republic of the Lettered,” explains the discursive monopoly exercised by abolitionism during the plantation period, when so-called slave narratives addressed enlightened Europeans rather than a Caribbean democratic space à la Habermas, simply because such a locus did not exist. Although begrudgingly at times, writing and the forums in which it appeared protected a status quo entwined despite contradictions with the ruling plantation society that comprised Rama’s republic of the lettered in the Caribbean. Within this context, Dalleo studies Manzano’s Autobiografía and Mary Prince’s History to illustrate how the voices of the oppressed required validation from the quasi-hegemonic literary intellectual class to transcend regional borders and acquire political significance. A subsequent chapter, “The Public Sphere Unbound: Michel Maxwell Philip, El laúd del desterrado and Mary Seacole,” on the other hand, inquires into writers’ endeavor “to mobilize a Caribbean public through literature” (59), with the conscious or unconscious intention of developing a relationship with what the critic identifies as a “counterpublic of resistance” (59) that foreshadows late nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary anticolonialism.

Chapters 3 and 4, which focus on Martí, Stephen Cobhan, Jacques Roumain...