Writing the Caribbean in Magazine Time by Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann (review)

In Writing the Caribbean in Magazine Time, Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann traces how, during the 1940s, a set of “little magazines” in Cuba, Martinique, and Barbados served a crucial role in the process by which the idea of a Caribbean or West Indian or Antillean region came to be. In doing so, she brilliantly underscores the critical necessity of attending to how “literary infrastructures” (Gonzalez Seligmann’s term) produce uneven access to literary reception and literary world-making because of colonial power that centers European and US American metropoles. Yet the thrust of her book is not to reproduce that colonial literary infrastructure by giving too much attention to the failings of the publishing industries in these metropolitan centers. Instead, the book turns to shorter- and longer-lived Caribbean literary magazines from linguistically diverse areas of the region to underscore the way such magazines represented (and continue to represent) a challenge to the systematic infrastructural divestment—perhaps more than divestment, perhaps extraction—that has undergirded relationships between imperial publishing centers and Caribbean literary communities. The paradox, of course, is that the literary magazines themselves are “fragile and limited as infrastructure”; however, as Gonzalez Seligmann puts it, “these forms of literary infrastructure have sustained the development of Caribbean literatures, just as they have carried many marginal and avant-garde literary movements throughout the world” (14).

Gonzalez Seligmann’s title, Writing the Caribbean in Magazine Time, economically and generatively traverses what her book sets out to do: (1) tackle the very concept of writing via the conceptualization of “location writing”; (2) outline the way the Caribbean-as-region experiences a becoming in the post-war 1940s; (3) foreground the role of literary magazines in the tentative forging of that regional becoming; and (4) underscore the unique reading temporality that magazines foster, and in a particular time of empire for the Caribbean, as the post-WWII founding of the IMF definitively cements the shift of imperial power from Europe to the US. Her introduction elaborates upon each of these terms—“Writing,” “Caribbean,” “Magazine,” “Time”—as it moves breathtakingly across Caribbean cultural and political theory, theories of nation formation and reading publics, and critical studies of magazines. Gonzalez Seligmann argues convincingly that one set of stakes in attending to these literary magazines is their long-lasting impact: “literary magazines produced during the 1940s assembled and advanced the debates that structure many of the Caribbean’s political, social, and aesthetic trajectories until the present” (2). This includes the way these magazines participated in the attempts to forge Pan-Caribbean or Pan-Antillean social, political, and artistic projects.

In addition to situating her study in relation to Caribbean political and cultural formation, Gonzalez Seligmann positions it within conversations about studies of magazines, periodicals, and journals. Early in the introduction, she elaborates on why she landed on the term “literary magazine” to describe the artifacts she examines, distinguishing it from “cultural journal” and “little magazine” and the associated terms in Spanish (literary or cultural “revista”) and French (“petit revue”), the former too broad in scope as it covers an array of literary and nonliterary magazines, the latter more oriented toward a modernist literary/aesthetic project than the conceptualization of literary magazines Gonzalez Seligmann is after. She specifically cites Jill Lepore’s discussion of magazines as metaphorical weapons, seeing a direct link between this conceptualization and the work of the Caribbean literary magazines she studies across the 1940s, with particular attention to imperial political economy, or the way empire materially affected infrastructural capacities to publish literary work. The book traces the way those Caribbean magazines could and in many cases did function as weapons against this particular effect of empire. Or, as Gonzalez Seligmann memorably puts it, “Up against the imperial Goliath of the global book industry, these Caribbean literary magazines waged a guerrilla pursuit of geopolitical and literary dimensions for the terms of Caribbean representation” (7).

This point raises one of the central archival stakes of the project. Gonzalez Seligmann asks, pointedly...