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
globecultureform 