Introduction
What are the main contributions of Hispanic cultural products and practices today? New Perspectives on Hispanic Caribbean Studies explores new critical trends to the analysis of recent cultural phenomena. It offers an update on the state of Hispanic Caribbean studies through the discussion of theoretical perspectives around notions of affect, archipelagic thinking, deterritoriality, queer experiences and subjectivities, eccentric Caribbean and aquatic imaginaries instead of merely those circumscribed to identity, nation, insularity and colonial epistemologies derived from these conceptions.
This volume pursues two aims. Firstly, it examines diverse modes of experience in literature, film, visual arts and other cultural productions that impel us to re-evaluate the approaches of Hispanic Caribbean studies in the twenty-first century. And secondly, it explores the scope and limitations of transnational dialogues between Hispanic Caribbean studies and theoretical perspectives like postcolonial and decolonial studies, gender and sexuality studies, the posthegemonic turn and diaspora studies. We contend that, due to its cultural and historical specificities, the Hispanic Caribbean constitutes a focus of study crucial to re-thinking global dynamics today. Being the inaugural place of the multiples intersections and economic, imperial, ethnic, geographic and cultural flows that defined Western modernity, the Hispanic Caribbean outlines the complexity of the processes of so-called globalisation and its ambiguous consequences in vast segments of the world population.
Area studies emerged from the geopolitical knowledge dynamics of the Cold War. Starting in the 1960s, Latin American studies became an essential part of US and European academic landscapes. While area studies seem to suffer some exhaustion since the end of Cold War, we have witnessed in recent years a renewed interest in the analyses of the sociocultural dynamics of the Hispanic Caribbean. This has resulted in an increasing number of university courses and the funded research projects in this field, as well as expanding of congresses and dossiers in academic journals. As a location where diverse colonial, national, racial, gender, sexual, diasporic and even ecological issues converge, the Caribbean is today a particularly effective lens through which to consider complex and ever-changing cultural relations at both local and global levels.
The burgeoning interest in the Hispanic Caribbean contrasts with, and in a way responds to, the marginal position it has occupied in academia up to now. Traditionally, studies of the Hispanic Caribbean have been subsumed under the scope of Latin American Studies in the United States, and Hispanism in Europe. In both cases, and with the exception of Cuba, analyses of Hispanic Caribbean cultural productions have been overshadowed by other sources of interest, such as literature or audio-visual productions from Spain, Argentina or Mexico. Within the broader field of Caribbean studies, the cultural dynamics of Spanish-speaking territories have often suffered the same fate vis-à-vis their Anglophone and, to a lesser extent, French-speaking counterparts. Something similar occurs in postcolonial studies. Although the works of Anglo and French Caribbean authors such as C. L. R. James, Aimé Césaire y Frantz Fanon were key in the establishment the field, the Hispanic Caribbean region has been almost completely bypassed in critical debates, with notable exceptions, like Shalini Puri’s The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity (2004). Such invisibilisation responds to Anglo-cultural hegemony, but most importantly to the historical-cultural specificities that differentiate this region from most of its Latin American and Caribbean counterparts.
A central issue for the different contributions in this volume is the need to avoid the ontologisation of the Caribbean by means of different identitarian proposals. In this sense, it offers a critique to the different cultural categories under which the region has been defined, while it examines possible ways to think about the Caribbean in contingent, open-ended and mobile modalities. New Perspectives on Hispanic Caribbean Studies presents varied analytical approaches that de-territorialise conceptual frameworks for the study of the Hispanic Caribbean and its cultural productions. The different authors share a problematisation of the trends towards essentialisation, which has traditionally characterised approaches in area studies, and share the goal to conceive a Hispanic Caribbean “in relation to.” In his well-known book, Poetics of Relation (1997), Martinican writer Édouard Glissant proposes a “relational concept of being” to conceive the Caribbean away from any fixed notion, a sort of deconstruction of insularist and nationalist notions that have framed studies on the Caribbean. In line with Glissant, the different chapters of this book are informed by alternative notions to conceive Hispanic Caribbean studies, such as those that take into consideration bodies and affects, the unexpected and the sensorial, or even the materiality of a landscape to account for a different Caribbean, such as the “archipelago effect” as posited by Juan Carlos Quintero Herencia (2016); the notion of an eccentric Caribbean glimpsed by Juan Duchesne Winter (2012); and the experience of failure discussed by Magdalena López (2015). These authors propose a departure from the archive of the hegemonic Caribbean criticism, including its (de)colonial or insular determinants, the sugar plantation machine, the locus of mestizaje and the utopia of emancipation.
In this regard, contributions from the so-called posthegemonic, postsovereign or infrapolitical turn help us to delve into the Caribbean and its diverse cultural practices from a posthumanist, sensorial perspective from which to consider its politics beyond notions of representation, sovereignty and identity. In blurring geographic or national boundaries, the different chapters of this volume focus on the different networks and interrelations, with the effect that literary, conceptual and aesthetic debates, and debates about gender and sexuality, politics and social issues on the Hispanic Caribbean are also relevant for Latin America, Africa and the so-called Global South.
Identitarianism, Insularism and Liberationism in Hispanic Caribbean Studies
Latin American studies have often placed centre stage the colonial experience in America since the sixteenth century. A telling example is the by now canonical text El Caribe, frontera imperial (1970) by Juan Bosch, in which the region is determined by the imprint of European colonialism and US imperialism. More recently, so-called decolonial studies have updated an understanding of the colonial experience through “the coloniality of power,” a notion by Peruvian socialist Aníbal Quijano (1992) by which he accounts for the impact of the matrixes of global power of modernity on Latin American societies. In discussing the Caribbean, issues like the plantation economy and the related slave trade have been considered keys to unlock its sociocultural composition (Benítez Rojo 1992; Mintz 1986; Moreno Fraginals 1978) and its entry into global capitalist modernity (Buck-Morss 2009). These theoretical approaches are useful to understand the different historical power asymmetries in the system-world, but they have also implied certain degree of ontologisation, which in the Caribbean case has manifested in two ways: first, in the formulation of national, racial and insularist categories of identity, which solidify cultural dynamics; secondly, in the epistemic dependence of the Caribbean from Europe and in the historical development of the liberationist myth.
Alberto Moreiras (2015) has adverted about the identitarian obsession of Latin American literary and cultural studies, which answers to a humanist conception that understands the subject, and politics, in unitary and closed terms. The notion of a clearly defined Caribbean identity, even when the definition has embraced the region’s diversity, has permeated proposals that range from Martí’s mestizaje , Carpentier’s (1996) lo real maravilloso and Ortiz’s (1987) transculturación to Puri’s hibridity, Buscaglia-Salgado’s (2003) mulataje and Hall’s (1994) creolisation. These last three, the most recent of them, have certainly tried to provide certain dynamism but do not dispense from the defining notions often associated with national identities and racial paradigms.
Usually framed within debates about the nation and national identity (i.e., La raza cómica de Rubén Ríos Ávila (2002); Gay Cuban nation by Emilio Bejel (2001); and Escrituras del desencuentro en la República Dominicana by Nestor Rodríguez (2007)), Hispanic Caribbean studies have seldom concentrated on the social imaginaries...