Full Description
The Hispanic Caribbean is not easy to define or locate, and such processes of naming are necessarily fraught with tension: where is the Hispanic Caribbean? What is distinctive about this region? What challenges face those who attempt to define and locate it? The essays collected in this volume individually and collectivity expose some of these tensions. The use of the term "culture" in the plural is meant to register the dialectic of homogeneity and diversity which Antonio Benitez Rojo reminds us characterizes the Caribbean as a whole. These cultures do not only exist in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the half-island of the Dominican Republic but are also located in the coastal regions of continental Spanish America. Equally interestingly, they converge in particularly close ways in New York and to a lesser degree in Miami. The representation of nations which have common histories of colonialism, slavery, emancipation and rise of nationalisms, yet have very different contemporary political characteristics, is very complex indeed. How to reconcile revolutionary dictatorship in Cuba, democratic authoritarianism in the Dominican Republic, and the continuing colonization of Puerto Rico by the United States? What is the role of tradition within the modern Hispanic Caribbean? What is the function of the intellectual, wht writer or other cultural voices within these changing societies? How is the individual subject best positioned in relation to dominant conceptions of nationhood and identity? The chapters in this volume revolve around issues such as these.
Contents
Fernando Ortiz and Allan Kardec - tramsmigration and transculturation; Puerto Rico afloat; the nomadic subject in the poetry of Julia de Burgos; women, life-writing, and national identity in Suba - Excilia Saldana's "Mi nombre: antielegia familiar"; the nation from "De donde son los cantantes to Pajaros de laplaya"; "Tuntun de pasa y griferia" - a cultural project; discovering Nicolas Guillen through Afrocentric literary analysis; Nancy Morejon - nation, negritude, and marginality; notes on the history of blacks in Cuba... and may Eleggua be with me; transculturation and integration of the Afro-Venezuelan world in the contemporary Venezuelan novel; Dominican writers at the crossroads - reflections ona conversation in progress; the role of science in Cuban culture - some observations; traumaas of modernity in the Caribbean - Virgilio Pinera and Hector Rojas Herazo; little stories of Caribbean history and nationhood - Edgardo Rodriguez Julia and Luis Rafael Sachez; some critical observations on cult of Maria Lionza in contemporary Venezuelan narrative; cultural ethnocentricity in commercial cinema - representation and self-identity; breaking the spell of our "hallucinated eucidity - surveying the Caribbean self within Hollywood cinema.
