Creating a Caribbean Discourse

Ana’s Second Chunk

Glissant, Edouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Tran. Michael J. Dash. Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1989. Print.

In Caribbean Discourse, Edouard Glissant discusses the need to create a Caribbean poetics that re-writes history, is grounded on solidarity, is committed to the establishment of collective memory within a regional identity, and dismisses any notion of individualism. By using a deconstructivist approach, Glissant, through a collection of essays, lectures, and anecdotes, uses as his object of study, the island of Martinique, as a focal point from which he theorizes the Caribbean. He traces the history of the Caribbean, or “the Other America,” and its literature since the colonial period. The colonial European historical stronghold has deprived the Caribbean from (re)establishing a collective unconscious. This has resulted in instability, fragmentation, and dislocation in the region and literature, subsequently,  has also fallen prey to this forced colonial domination. However, “the [Caribbean] writer’s function is perhaps to propose language as shock, language as antidote, a nonnuetral one, through which the problems of the community can be restated.” This community, Glissant proposes, needs to be grounded in the demystification of the author and the reappropriation of space (landscape) and time (History), for which control of the self is necessary: “To move from the oral to the written is to immobilize the body, to take control (to possess it)”. However, while this self-possession produces literature, it is ultimately the responsibility of the writer to move and create “A Caribbean Future” and a “Caribbeanness” for “those who cannot see the Caribbean world in its diversity or hear the word sung right.” This tension between movement and self-control, stability and instability, regionality and universality, speaks to the struggles of writers in exile. Latin American and Caribbean writers in exile seek to create solidarity and a collective memory away from their places of “origin”, however, their literature cannot remove itself from this History and thus can serve a contact zone between past and present where they can begin to create a new global Caribbean identity.

The Creation of an Exiled Caribbean Identity

Beaseley-Murray, John. “‘El arte de la fuga’: Cultural Critique, Metaphor and History.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 9 (2000): 259-272. Print.

Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence and Wishart. 222-237. Print.

Benítez Rojo, Antonio. La isla que se repite. Ediciones del Norte, 1989. Print.

Antonio Benítez Rojo, John Beaseley-Murray, and Stuart Hall address literary theories that include the conceptualization of the Caribbean from a post-modernist lens; art and politics as performance; and the creation of a diasporic identity and its complexities. In his book, La isla que se repita, Benítez Rojo describes the Caribbean as a chaotic region that espouses an internal order that is repeated throughout each island. Benítez Rojo believes that modernity is the history of the Caribbean and that the performance of this history can deterriotorialize any previous notions of a linear history. In the article, “‘El arte de la fuga’: Cultural Critique, Metaphor and History,” Beaseley-Murray directly responds to work of the Chilean writer, Nelly Richard, in her book Residuos y metáforas: ensayos de crítica cultural sobre el Chile de la Transición in which she commends marginalized communities for their artistic and performative creativity compared to the lack of creativity of the political upper class in Chile. Beaseley-Murray accuses Richard of aestheticizing history in the way that she focuses on a “politics of form forced always to deny complexity to dominant forces” (269). Along similar lines of cultural and political productions, Hall in “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” uses the theoretical framework of deconstruction to discuss the complexities of black cultural identities of the Caribbean from a global diasporic perspective. Hall proposes that the Caribbean identity must be deconstructive in its nature and should problematize any existing binaries while emphasizing the essence of Derrida’s differance. This selection of works touch upon the debates concerning cultural representations in Latin America during the twentieth-century that will lead me into my analysis of key Caribbean scholars and theorists who specialize in the history of Caribbean literature to understand the formation of a regional (and global) exiled identity.

Ana Almeyda-Cohen