Practices of Resistance in the Caribbean: Narratives, Aesthetics, Politics 9780415789493, 9781315222721

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of figures and table
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Narratives, politics, and aesthetics of resistance across the Caribbean and its diasporas
PART I Narratives of/as resistance: Languages, poetics, and politics in Caribbean literatures
1 Using folklore to challenge contemporary social norms: Papa Bois, Mama D’Lo, and environmentalism in Caribbean literature
2 Shadows pass the surface: Decolonial (re)configurations of indigenous presence in Merle Collins’s The Colour of Forgetting
3 Acts of translanguaging and marooning as forms of resistance in French Caribbean literature
4 From anti-colonial to anti-modernist resistance: Historiopoetic transformations of the Maroon in slected works of Édouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant
5 Cultures of resistance: Dialectical images of the Haitian Revolution in Haitian culture and literature
6 Postcolonial poetics: El reino de este mundo and the resistance of lo real maravilloso
PART II Resistance in/as activism: From theory to practice and back
7 Caribbean activism for slavery reparations: An overview
8 Debated existences, claimed histories: Black Indigenous women’s diasporic lives in Costa Rica
9 Una Universidad Tomada: Resistance performances in the (re)construction of spaces of resistance and contention during the first wave of the 2010–2011 University of Puerto Rico student movement
10 Troubling our intersections: A Caribbean feminist methodology as resistance approach
11 Practices of resistance and cyberfeminism in Cuba
12 Racism vs. socialism in Cuba: A misplaced conflict (notes on/against internal colonialism)
13 “Let us be Moors”: Conversion to Islam in Cuba
14 Thinking resistance: Critique and resistance in the philosophical concepts of Foucault and in the postcolonial and decolonial theories of Bhabha and Mignolo
Index

Citation preview

Practices of Resistance in the Caribbean

The Caribbean has played a crucial geopolitical role in the Western pursuit of economic dominance, yet Eurocentric research usually treats the Caribbean as a peripheral region, consequently labelling its inhabitants as beings without agency. Examining asymmetrical relations of power in the Greater Caribbean in historical and contemporary perspectives, this volume explores the region’s history of resistance and subversion of oppressive structures against the backdrop of the Caribbean’s central role for the accumulation of wealth of European and North American actors and the respective dialectics of modernity/coloniality, through a variety of experiences inducing migration, transnational exchange, and transculturation. Contributors approach the Caribbean as an empowered space of opposition and agency and focus on perspectives of the region as a place of entanglements with a long history of political and cultural practices of resistance to colonization, inequality, heteronomy, purity, invisibilization, and exploitation. An important contribution to the literature on agency and resistance in the Caribbean, this volume offers a new perspective on the region as a geopolitically, economically and culturally crucial space, and it will interest researchers in the fields of Caribbean politics, literature and heritage, colonialism, entangled histories, global studies perspectives, ethnicity, gender, and migration. Wiebke Beushausen, researcher and doctoral candidate, University of Heidelberg, Germany. Miriam Brandel, lecturer and doctoral candidate, University of Bielefeld, Germany. Joseph Farquharson, lecturer, University of the West Indies, Mona. Marius Littschwager, postdoctoral research assistant, University of Bielefeld, Germany. Annika McPherson, junior professor, University of Augsburg, Germany. Julia Roth, postdoctoral researcher and lecturer, University of Bielefeld, Germany.

InterAmerican Research: Contact, Communication, Conflict Series Editors: Olaf Kaltmeier, Josef Raab, Wilfried Raussert, Sebastian Thies

The Americas are shaped by a multitude of dynamics which have extensive, conflictive and at times contradictory consequences for society, culture, politics and the environment. These processes are embedded within a history of interdependence and mutual observation between North and South which originates in the conquest and simultaneous ‘invention’ of America by European colonial powers. The series will challenge the ways we think about the Americas, in particular, and the concept of area studies, in general. Put simply, the series perceives the Americas as transversally related, chronotopically entangled and multiply interconnected. In its critical positioning at the crossroads of area studies and cultural studies the series aims to push further the postcolonial, postnational, and cross-border turns in recent studies of the Americas toward a model of horizontal dialogue between cultures, areas, and disciplines. The series pursues the goal to ‘think the Americas different’ and to explore these phenomena from transregional as well as interdisciplinary perspectives. For more information about this series, please visit https://www.routledge.com/ InterAmerican-Research-Contact-Communication-Conflict/book-series/ASHSER1426 Entangled Heritages Postcolonial Perspectives on the Uses of the Past in Latin America Edited by Olaf Kaltmeier, Mario Rufer Mobile and Entangled America(s) Edited by Maryemma Graham and Wilfried Raussert Practices of Resistance Narratives, Politics, and Aesthetics across the Caribbean and its Diasporas Edited by Wiebke Beushausen, Miriam Brandel, Joseph Farquharson, Marius Littschwager, Annika McPherson and Julia Roth Political Protest and Undocumented Immigrant Youth (Re-)framing Testimonio Stefanie Quakernack

Practices of Resistance in the Caribbean Narratives, Aesthetics, Politics

Edited by Wiebke Beushausen, Miriam Brandel, Joseph Farquharson, Marius Littschwager, Annika McPherson and Julia Roth

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Wiebke Beushausen, Miriam Brandel, Joseph Farquharson, Marius Littschwager, Annika McPherson and Julia Roth; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Wiebke Beushausen, Miriam Brandel, Joseph Farquharson, Marius Littschwager, Annika McPherson and Julia Roth to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Beushausen, Wiebke, editor. Title: Practices of resistance in the Caribbean : narratives, aesthetics, and politics / edited by Wiebke Beushausen, Miriam Brandel, Joseph Farquharson, Marius Littschwager, Annika McPherson and Julia Roth. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2018. | Series: Interamerican research : contact, communication, conflict | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017048610| ISBN 9780415789493 (hbk) | ISBN 9781315222721 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Caribbean Area—Social life and customs. | Government, Resistance to—Caribbean Area. | Insurgency—Caribbean Area. | Caribbean Area—Social conditions. Classification: LCC F2169 .P73 2018 | DDC 972.9—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017048610 ISBN: 978-0-415-78949-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-22272-1 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon, UK

Contents

List of figures and table List of contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: Narratives, politics, and aesthetics of resistance across the Caribbean and its diasporas

viii ix xiv

1

WI EB K E B E U S H A U S EN , M I RI A M BRA N D EL, J O S E PH FAR QUHAR SON, MA R I U S L I TT S CH W A G ER, A N N I K A M CP H ERS ON, AND J UL IA R OT H

PART I

Narratives of/as resistance: Languages, poetics, and politics in Caribbean literatures 1

Using folklore to challenge contemporary social norms: Papa Bois, Mama D’Lo, and environmentalism in Caribbean literature

23

25

G I S E LL E LI Z A A N A TO L

2

Shadows pass the surface: Decolonial (re)configurations of indigenous presence in Merle Collins’s The Colour of Forgetting

40

G E O F F R E Y M A CD O N A LD

3

Acts of translanguaging and marooning as forms of resistance in French Caribbean literature

56

P A U L A P R ES C O D

4

From anti-colonial to anti-modernist resistance: Historiopoetic transformations of the Maroon in slected works of Édouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant SARAH GRÖNING

76

vi 5

Contents Cultures of resistance: Dialectical images of the Haitian Revolution in Haitian culture and literature

104

P A T R I C K E S ER

6

Postcolonial poetics: El reino de este mundo and the resistance of lo real maravilloso

122

MA R I U S L I TTS CH W A G ER

PART II

Resistance in/as activism: From theory to practice and back 7

Caribbean activism for slavery reparations: An overview

135

137

C LA U D I A RA U H U T

8

Debated existences, claimed histories: Black Indigenous women’s diasporic lives in Costa Rica

151

C H R I S T I N A S CH RA M M

9

Una Universidad Tomada: Resistance performances in the (re)construction of spaces of resistance and contention during the first wave of the 2010–2011 University of Puerto Rico student movement

169

A L ES S A N DRA RO S A

10

Troubling our intersections: A Caribbean feminist methodology as resistance approach

194

A N D R EA N . BA LD W I N A N D M A RV A CO S S Y

11

Practices of resistance and cyberfeminism in Cuba

215

S A N D R A ABD ’ A LLA H - Á LV A REZ RA M I REZ

12

Racism vs. socialism in Cuba: A misplaced conflict (notes on/against internal colonialism)

227

R O B E R T O ZU RBA N O TO RRES

13

“Let us be Moors”: Conversion to Islam in Cuba I L JA LA B I S CH I N S K I

248

Contents vii 14

Thinking resistance: Critique and resistance in the philosophical concepts of Foucault and in the postcolonial and decolonial theories of Bhabha and Mignolo

264

MA R I TA R A I NS BO RO U G H

Index

280

Figures and table

Figures 8.1 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6 9.7 9.8 9.9 9.10 9.11 9.12 9.13 9.14 9.15 9.16 10.1 10.2 10.3

Transcription legend (based on transcription rules suggested by Christa Hoffmann Riem (331)) Protest march I Student activists blocking the highway CAED banner Campus protest Barriers Campus map of protest camps Collage of protest action I Collage of protest action II Assembly Collage of protest action III Police officers at the campus gate Protest march II Desde Adentro / Student activists’ online newspaper – editorial office poster Radio Huelga / student activists’ radio station National Negotiating Committee (CNN) after the negotiation Universidad Tomada / occupied university banner Feminism as a top-down approach: Working ‘on’ the local and grassroots levels instead of working ‘with’ them Feminism as collaborative and engaging Synopsis of the meta-road-map

Table 10.1 Sub-road map 1 – feminist academy, theme 1 – more inclusive research methods

Contributors

Sandra Abd’Allah-Álvarez Ramírez is a Cuban researcher, essayist, activist, and blogger. As an activist she advocates for the rights of women and Black and Afrodescendant persons as well as for LGBT persons. She currently lives in Havana, Cuba, and Hannover, Germany, from where she operates her blog “Negracubanateniaqueser” and directs the digital archive “Directorio de Afrocubanas.” She is a founding member of the collective Afrocubanas and author of the volume Afrocubanas: historia, pensamiento y prácticas culturales. Giselle Liza Anatol is a Full Professor of English at the University of Kansas. She received her M.A. and Ph.D degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of The Things That Fly in the Night: Female Vampires in Literature of the Circum-Caribbean and African Diaspora (Rutgers 2015) and numerous articles and book chapters, including work on Jamaica Kincaid, Derek Walcott, Audre Lorde, Nalo Hopkinson, Langston Hughes, and Jacqueline Woodson. Anatol edited the essay collections Reading Harry Potter: Critical Essays (Praeger 2003), Reading Harry Potter Again: New Critical Essays (Praeger 2009), and Bringing Light to Twilight: Perspectives on the Pop Culture Phenomenon (Palgrave 2011). She has received a fellowship in residence from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a Haines Faculty Research Fellowship, the 2016 Ned Fleming Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the 2011 Mabel S. Fry Teaching Award. She is currently serving as the president of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers & Scholars. Andrea N. Baldwin is an attorney-at-law and transnational feminist, who holds a Ph.D. in gender and development studies, and an M.Sc. in international trade policy. Dr. Baldwin is a visiting Assistant Professor in the Gender and Women’s Studies Department, and the associate director for praxis at the Center of the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE) at Connecticut College. Her research interests include transnational feminist epistemology, theorizing pedagogy as a form of feminist activism, and Caribbean cultural studies.

x

Contributors

Wiebke Beushausen is a researcher and doctoral candidate associated with the Transcultural Studies research group at the University of Heidelberg and a lecturer in International Cultural Studies at the University of Mannheim, Germany. She has finished her Ph.D. thesis on body and gender politics and coming of age in contemporary women’s writing of the Caribbean diaspora. Her research interests include Caribbean literatures, feminisms and body studies, diaspora studies, and decolonial and postcolonial approaches. Miriam Brandel is a lecturer and doctoral candidate at the chair of North American Literary and Cultural Studies at Bielefeld University. Her research and teaching is located in the fields of Interamerican, North American, and Postcolonial Studies. Her research interests include Caribbean diasporic Anglophone literatures and sociocultural approaches to international migration processes and multiculturalism. She has published on the concept of home and translocational identity in film and literature. Marva E. Cossy, a Barbadian journalist and feminist, holds an M.Sc. in international trade policy and a B.Sc. in economics. She is a freelance journalist and a consultant on public relations, communications and international trade. Her research interests include communications, international trade policy, Caribbean socio-economic development, attitudes towards disabled and vulnerable people, and feminist activism. Patrick Eser is Feodor Lynen Research Fellow of the Humboldt Foundation at the University of La Plata/Argentina and Assistant Professor at the department of Romance Philology at the University of Kassel. Eser studied Political Sciences, French, and Spanish Philology at the Universities of Marburg and Valencia. He completed his Ph.D. on Catalan and Basque Nationalism at the University of Marburg (2013). His research interests are Memory Studies (Spain/Cono Sur) and cultural representations of violent pasts in transnational perspectives, urban fictions in contemporary Latin American literature/cinema, and intellectual cultures in the Romania. He is the author of Fragmentierte Nation – globalisierte Region? Der baskische und katalanische Nationalismus im Kontext von Globalisierung und europäischer Integration (2013) and editor of El atentado contra Carrero Blanco como lugar de (no-)memoria. Narraciones históricas y representaciones culturales (2016, with Stefan Peters) and Machthaber der Moderne - zur Inszenierung politischer Herrschaft und Körperlichkeit (2015, with Jan-Henrik Witthaus). Joseph T. Farquharson holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of the West Indies, Mona, where he is currently a lecturer in the Department of Language, Linguistics and Philosophy. During the period 2013–2016 he held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for InterAmerican Studies, Bielefeld University. His current research focuses on language, migration and identity, and he has published on language variation, the morphology of contact languages, linguistic ideology, language and music, and slang.

Contributors xi Sarah Gröning holds a Ph.D. in Francophone literature from Heinrich-Heine University in Düsseldorf. With a special interest in postcolonial studies, philosophy of history, and narratology, she developed and defended the concept of “historiopoetic writing” which allows for a better understanding of the multidirectional relations between past and present, history and memory, and historiography and poetry that preoccupy postcolonial literatures. Ilja Labischinski studied Latin American Studies, Anthropology, and History in Bonn, Berlin, and Madrid with a focus on the Colonial History of Central America and the Caribbean. In 2013, he conducted field research in Cuba with the Muslim Community of Havana. Since 2015 he has been working for the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in the Department of American Ethnology of the Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Marius Littschwager holds a Ph.D. in Interamerican Studies and is a postdoctoral research assistant in Romance Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Bielefeld, Germany. His publications include articles and essays on Edgar Allan Poe, Roberto Bolaño, Chilean exile literatures, recent Mexican fiction, and Caribbean cultures. Also operating as editor for the online journal fiar (Forum for Interamerican Research), he is responsible for Spanish speaking sections and contributions. His main fields of research are 20th- and 21stcentury Latin American fiction, Postcolonial Studies, Cultural Translations, and Visual Cultures of the Americas. Geoffrey MacDonald teaches and researches global anglophone literature and resistance theory, with special attention to how Caribbean and Indigenous North American textualities intersect with feminism, decoloniality, and aesthetics, the subject of his dissertation, “Liberation Textualities.” Other interests include queer theory, and South Asian, South Pacific, and African literatures. He has presented on the aesthetics of globalization, madness in Canadian novels, and imaginative challenges to settler colonialism at the Caribbean Studies Association, the American Comparative Literature Association, and the University College London Institute of the Americas. He served for four years as editor of Pivot: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies and Thought. Annika McPherson is Junior Professor for New English Literatures and Cultural Studies at the University of Augsburg, Germany, president of the Association for Anglophone Postcolonial Studies (GAPS), and an associate of the interdisciplinary Wits Centre for Diversity Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Her research and teaching areas include postcolonial studies; theories, policies, and literary representations of cultural diversity in comparative perspective; Caribbean, West African, South African, and Indian literatures in English; diaspora studies; as well as speculative fiction and Afrofuturism. Her current project focuses on notions of enslavement and freedom in Anglophone fiction, poetry, film, and music.

xii

Contributors

Paula Prescod was a part-time lecturer in the English Language and Literature Department at the University of Bielefeld and is now Associate Professor of French Linguistics and Teaching French as a foreign language at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne. Among her most recent edited works are Language issues in St Vincent and the Grenadines (John Benjamins Publishing Co. 2015), Le nom sans déterminant dans l’apprentissage des langues non premières (éla, Klincksieck 2016), and Approches plurielles du nom sans déterminant : interprétations, distributions, fonctions (Peter Lang 2017). Marita Rainsborough is working on her professorial thesis (Habilitation) at the University of Hamburg and lectures at the University of Kiel. Her primary areas of interest are French Theory, Subject Philosophy, Cultural Philosophy, Philosophical Aesthetics, Intercultural Philosophy, Philosophy of History, Cosmopolitanism, African Philosophy, Postcolonial Theory and Philosophy, Art Theory, Theories of Literature and Media, as well as Lusophone Literature, Culture, and Theory. Within the scope of her Ph.D. dissertation she developed the concept of subject-oriented discourse analysis, based on the works of Foucault and Butler. It was published under the title Die Konstitution des Subjekts in den Romanen von Rachel de Queiroz: Eine diskursanalytische Untersuchung (2014). She has also published essays on Foucault, Kant, Cosmopolitanism, and on emotionality in literature and film. Claudia Rauhut is research associate and lecturer of Cultural and Social Anthropology at the Institute for Latin American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin since 2010. She has done her Ph.D. on Afro-Cuban religion Santería, its globalization, re-africanization and trans-local reconfiguration at the University of Leipzig. She currently works about transregional Caribbean activism for slavery reparations focusing the case of Jamaica, a research project founded by the Fritz-Thyssen-Foundation. Her teaching and research interests include Afro-Atlantic traditions, social practices of racism and antiracism, postcolonial theory and political activism, slavery and its legacies, memory politics, reparations for historical injustices. She has published the book Santería und ihre Globalisierung in Kuba. Tradition und Innovation in einer afrokubanischen Religion (2012) and numerous articles on Cuban religions and social change. She is also the co-editor of Transatlantic Caribbean: Dialogues of People, Practices, Ideas (2014), together with Ingrid Kummels, Stefan Rinke and Birte Timm. Alessandra Rosa is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Arts and Science at Lynn University. She has a B.A. from the University of Massachusetts (UMass)-Amherst, a postgraduate degree from the Universidad de Valladolid (UVa)- Spain, two master’s degrees from Florida International University (FIU), as well as her Ph.D. As a sociocultural anthropologist and research activist, her area of expertise is in social movements, education, media, and discourses with a focus on student activism and Internet activism. The topic of her dissertation was “Resistance Performances: (re)Constructing Spaces

Contributors xiii of Resistance and Contention in the 2010–2011 University of Puerto Rico Student Movement.” Her work has been published in academic journals including the International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, Sargasso, Teoría y Praxis Investigativa, as well as electronic journals, including Mobilizing Ideas. Julia Roth is postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the research network “The Americas as Space of Entanglements” at the Center for InterAmerican Studies and the department for North American Literary and Cultural Studies at Bielefeld University in Germany. Her research interests include postcolonial and gender approaches, critical race studies, intersectionality and global inequalities. Her current projects focus on gender and citizenship, Caribbean anti-racist feminisms, intersectionality, and hip hop and feminist knowledge production. Alongside her academic work, she organizes cultural-political events. Christina Schramm graduated in 2013 with highest distinction from the doctoral program in Studies in Society and Culture at the University of Costa Rica, in San José, Costa Rica – her place of residence since 2004. She also holds a master’s degree in Political Science with a minor in Latin American Studies from the University of Hamburg, Germany. The doctoral dissertation is in the process of publication. Research areas are feminist, queer, post- and decolonial studies, cultural studies, ethnographic studies, ethical and epistemological questions, indigenous and African Diaspora studies. Her postdoctoral research focuses on queer migration and diasporas. She has presented numerous papers at international academic conferences in the Americas, Europe, and Africa, has published scientific articles in English, Spanish, and German, and, since 2015, has been an active member in the International Association for the Study of Religion and Gender (IARG). Roberto Zurbano Torres is an essayist, editor and cultural critic specializing in literature, race and alternative music. He is a member of La Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba (UNEAC), the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) and of the executive committee of the Regional Articulation of African Descendants from Latin America and the Caribbean (ARAC). He is the author of the books Elogio del lector; Los estados nacientes: Literatura cubana y postmodernidad and La poética de los noventa and of papers such as El triángulo invisible del siglo xx cubano: Raza, literatura y nación; El rap cubano: Discursos hambrientos de realidad y Cuba: Doce dificultades para enfrentar los (neo) racismos. He has written forewords for books by Frantz Fanon, Georgina Herrera and Simone Schwarz-Bart. He works at the Literary Research Center in the Casa de las Américas in Havana, Cuba.

Acknowledgements

This volume is based on contributions to the international and interdisciplinary junior research conference “Cultures of Resistance? Theories and Practices of Transgression in the Caribbean and Its Diasporas,” held in January 2015 under the auspices of the Society for Caribbean Research (Socare) and the Center for InterAmerican Studies (CIAS) at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) at Bielefeld University, Germany. During the three-day conference, we discussed various forms of resistance and examined the almost instantaneous association of the Caribbean with rebellion, violence, and domination. The conference thus sought to question a general tendency to culturalize resistance as a concept at the expense of its historical becoming, its (geo-)political implications, and the meanings of citizenship, which often results in neglecting the acting (resisting) subjects in the Caribbean and the Americas. Continuing the discussions we had during the conference, this collection puts forward the claim for the necessity of theorization and contextualization of resistance to further an understanding of how practices of transgression are conceptualized and realized by actors within and across local, (trans-)regional, (trans-)national, and global contexts. The conference would not have been possible without the support and funding of various institutions. We thus express our gratitude to the Society for Caribbean Research (Socare) for providing such an inspiring platform for research and exchange, to the Center for InterAmerican Studies (CIAS) and the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), the BMBF-project “The Americas as Space of Entanglements,” the International Postgraduate Forum Bielefeld (IPF), and the Westfälisch-Lippische Universitätsgesellschaft (WLUG). We also thank all the persons who have been supportive of this project from the very beginning to the completion of this volume. We would like to thank our wonderful colleagues Diana Fulger and Johannes Bohle, who were indispensable during the organization and coordination of the conference. We are indebted to Anja Bandau, president of Socare, for her encouragement and to Wilfried Raussert and Olaf Kaltmeier, series editors of InterAmerican Research: Contact, Communication, Conflict, for the publishing opportunity and their interest in our book. We are truly appreciative of the support and critical eye of the reviewers who provided us with valuable feedback. We are grateful to Nadine Ellinger and Anke

Acknowledgements xv Marie Bock as well as Alice Weiss for their assistance throughout the editing process, especially in proofreading and carefully checking references. Our special thanks go to all the contributors who enthusiastically shared their thoughts and results of ongoing and completed research projects with us.

Introduction Narratives, politics, and aesthetics of resistance across the Caribbean and its diasporas Wiebke Beushausen, Miriam Brandel, Joseph Farquharson, Marius Littschwager, Annika McPherson, and Julia Roth

Practices of Resistance examines asymmetrical relations of power in the Greater Caribbean in historical and contemporary perspectives.1 The volume aims to question projections of resistance and resistant practices onto the Caribbean that perpetuate reductive notions of victimhood. Instead, taking into consideration the region’s long legacy of multiplicity, hybridity, transculturality, and subversion of oppressive structures, the volume’s contributions consider the Caribbean also as an empowering and empowered space that draws on a wide variety of experiences of migration, transnational exchange, and transculturation.

Geopolitical contexts of Caribbean coloniality Situated at the center of the Western hemisphere, the Caribbean has played a crucial geopolitical role in the Western pursuit of economic dominance, which from the beginning also met with resistance to exploitation and colonial rule. However, Eurocentric historical and social research and theorization frequently treat the Caribbean mostly as a peripheral region (Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean). In the context of global politics, this can be illustrated by classifications of the region such as “ultra-peripheral” or “overseas” (Vogt). Similarly, recent studies on transnationalism (Thomas) often consider transregional exchange processes to be a relatively new development in the context of accelerated globalization during the 20th century. Western-dominated media and discourse also tend to cover and present Caribbean countries and islands either in terms of a consumable tourism paradise or only as backward ‘failed states’ affected by natural disasters, poverty, and corruption, thus depicting the inhabitants of the region mainly as victims devoid of agency, while the historical becoming of the underlying power structures of such representations is seldom addressed. Yet, as Immanuel Wallerstein (15) has pointed out: [t]he Caribbean has been a part of the modern world-system from its outset. The Iberian conquest of large parts of the Americas began in the Caribbean,

2 Wiebke Beushausen et al. and the incorporation of these land areas and their population was a crucial element in the construction of the capitalist world-economy as an historical system. Hence, the contributions to this volume consider the Caribbean as a geopolitically crucial region marked by colonial and postcolonial asymmetries of power and as a space of opposition and agency. The volume thus ties in with approaches aimed at the historicization of global interdependencies and the related re-orientation of regional and area studies. Based on the premise that exchange processes cannot be grasped within tight national and disciplinary boundaries, contributions focus on perspectives of the Caribbean as a space of entanglements with a long history of political and cultural practices of resistance to colonization, heteronomy, invisibilization, and exploitation. The volume follows questions of possible conceptualizations and categorizations as well as different approaches that offer a complex view of practices of critique and resistance within and from the Caribbean. ‘Resistance’ here is understood as a relational term and drawing on a phenomenological notion (e.g. Fanon, Peau noire and Les damnés; Foucault; Gilroy; Glissant, “Creolization”). Accordingly, to resist means to resist against something or someone within the conditions of a power differential or power dynamic. This volume is interested in resistance to those power constellations in the historical and contemporary Caribbean that are marked by what Frantz Fanon has described as the colonial condition (Bhabha vii) in the sense of the continuous legacies of racialized hierarchies, lingering forms of colonial oppression, and socio-political inequalities. As the location of the first contact of European conquerors with the space previously unknown to them, the Caribbean provided access to what was perceived as a ‘New World’ full of riches and resources. This contact became central to the unfolding narrative of European expansion across the entire double continent. Mary Louise Pratt has thus referred to the Americas as a region of “contact zones” in the sense of “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of power” (33). The islands of the Caribbean offered an easily accessible point of entrance to the Americas. Given their size and population numbers at the time, many islands were relatively easy to conquer. Hispaniola (later Saint Domingue, today Dominican Republic and Haiti) was the first space to be colonized, and from there the process of colonization, accompanied by enslavement and oppression across the Caribbean and the Americas, began. Based on this history and in its concomitant narratives, the Caribbean has since been characterized not only by various forms of enforced migration, colonial plantation economies, transregionalism, and global entanglements on the social, political, and economic level, but also by cultural contacts, “creolization” (Glissant) or “transculturation” (Ortiz) as expressed in music, the arts, literature, or religious practices. Marked by differential power structures, Sidney Mintz describes the Caribbean as “Europe’s first colonial backyard” (27), while Ana Esther Ceceña in the title of her study refers to the Caribbean as the

Introduction 3 “threshold of global geopolitics” and considers the region as trend-setting for the future of the entire Americas. Throughout the history of the violent transatlantic and intercontinental slave trade and accompanying or subsequent forms of indenture, debt bondage, bargain work, and labor exploitation, the histories of Europe, Africa, the Indian Ocean, and the Americas have intersected in the Caribbean. These entangled histories are marked by various European colonial powers’ systems of dominance, exemption from punishment, and exertion of violence, as well as—particularly since the 19th century—the hegemony of the USA in many parts of the Caribbean. Manuela Boatca˘ (“Global Inequalities”) points out that transregional “flows” of people, goods, and capital had already been establishing transnational relations between inequality regimes of Europe and the Caribbean colonies since the 16th century. The colonization of Caribbean spaces in this view was not the result of capitalism, but vice versa. The conquest and exploitation of the colonies and their natural and human resources, plantation economies, and the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans provided the condition of possibility for capitalist expansion. According to Boatca˘ , this history requires a theorization of the continuum between power structures that tie colonialism to (post)coloniality. Walter Mignolo describes the relationship between coloniality and modernity—understood as persistent structural constellations of power, not as completed historical periods or processes—as dialectically and inseparably entangled processes. The Caribbean thus played a constitutive role in the accumulation of European and US-American wealth and prosperity and thereby can be regarded as constitutive for European ‘modernity.’ Theorizations of the Caribbean in this context cover a broad disciplinary and political spectrum; they are as diverse as the societies they conceptualize. Wellknown theories include the plantation society (George Beckford), transculturation (Fernando Ortiz), creole society (Kamau Brathwaite), Créolité (Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant), Édouard Glissant’s notions of Antillanité (Caribbeanness) and his poétique de la relation (cross-cultural poetics), or the meta-archipelago (Antonio Benítez-Rojo). Derek Walcott, Wilson Harris, or George Lamming are also frequently quoted. Many other Caribbean critics and writers, most prominently Sylvia Wynter, have contributed to the field of Caribbean theory, literary philosophy (e.g. Négritude as conceptualized by Aimé Césaire and Léon Damas), or broader pan-African theorizations of underdevelopment (Walter Rodney) and neo-colonialism. Until today, the political, socio-economic, cultural, and epistemic marginalization of the formerly colonized regions continues to contribute to the wealth of the countries of the so-called ‘Global North’ as well as to the hegemony of Euro-/ US-centric knowledge and cultural productions. The region persistently provides a geo-strategic, economic, and military nodal point for US foreign policies, a context in which the military base in Guantánamo, Cuba, has also acquired a symbolic significance. Moreover, the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico are the source of oil reserves in close proximity to the USA—reserves which, as Ceceña emphasizes, are almost as large as those of Iran, the second largest oil-exporting

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nation in the world (26). In addition, numerous Caribbean states serve as tax havens for Western capital. Based on their long history of colonial subjugation and exploitation, most societies of the Caribbean continue to be structurally dependent on foreign investment, tourism, development aid, and remittances; factors that contribute to the maintenance of asymmetries and inequalities. This persistence of global inequalities can be illustrated through the phenomenon of North–South tourism (Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean; Cole and Morgan), including sex and romance tourism from the ‘Global North,’ studies of which show how colonial stereotypes related to gender, racialization, and ethnicity are being reactivated in the course of the increasing mobility of citizens of privileged regions (e.g. Wade, O’Connell Davidson, “The Sex Tourist”; O’Connell Davidson and Sanchez Taylor, “Fantasy Islands”; Kempadoo, Tourism and Sex Work). The circumstances relating to who can be a tourist, who can travel where, and by whom they are being ‘served’ are highly marked by colonial asymmetries and deeply rooted in an uneven world order. Such ongoing inequalities also become obvious with regard to citizenship regimes (Schachar, Birthright Lottery; Sheller, Citizenship) and relate to what Aaron Kamugisha calls the “coloniality of citizenship,” i.e. “the complex amalgam of elite domination, neoliberalism and the legacy of colonial authoritarianism, which continue to frustrate and deny the aspirations of many Caribbean people” (21). In the Caribbean, citizenship or the access to an EU or US visa represent a decisive factor for the access to mobility and resources as well as, in many cases, the potential for upward social mobility (Boatca˘ and Roth). For many countries of the Caribbean, remittances from the diaspora have come to provide one of the most important economic factors besides tourism. In the receiving countries, however, Caribbean migrants, regardless of their origin and education, frequently find themselves within the lower social strata in the wake of politics of ethnicization and racialization (Grosfoguel et al.; Bashi Treitler, Survival of the Knitted and Ethnic Project), while migrant networks aim to undermine hegemonic politics and create access to work as well as social connectedness and recognition (Bashi Treitler, Survival of the Knitted). Across all of these fields of contention, resistant and subversive agency plays a crucial but frequently overlooked role.

The Caribbean as a space of resistance and agency Against the backdrop of conquest and subjugation, the Caribbean has always also been a space of resistance. The first struggles of the populations of the Americas against enslavement and the hegemony of the colonial powers took place in the Caribbean basin. In the Cuban city of Baracoa, where Christopher Columbus first set foot in 1512, the Taíno leader Hatuey led an uprising against Diego Velázquez and his troops, but was defeated. Hatuey refused to be baptized and was burned by the conquerors. A badge captioning him as “[t]he first rebel of the Americas” adorns his statue facing the church auf Baracoa in Cuba, and Cuban beer and cigar brands as well as a baseball stadium carry his name. During slavery, self-liberated communities living in the mountains formed all over the Caribbean. In Jamaica,

Introduction 5 the Maroon Wars (1731–1739 and 1795–1796), the Baptist War of 1831, and the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865 are well-known examples of resistance, but many other forms can be found across the entire region (see e.g. Rodriguez).2 The Haitian Revolution of 1791 is commonly referred to as the region’s first successful revolution and it was influential for the entire double continent. As Augustín LaoMontes points out, after the Haitian Revolution, “blackness” became a referent through which the peoples of the African diaspora could define themselves regardless of national boundaries or ethnic differences (“Decolonial Moves;” see also “De-Calibanizing Caribbean Rationalities” and “Afro-Latin@ Difference”). Based on shared historical and cultural affinities, the African diaspora sought recognition as a constitutive community for concepts of Caribbean identity and its contributions to modernity. In the words of Tanya Saunders, “[m]ost importantly, the diaspora speaks back and demands acknowledgement of its influence on the evolution of Western modernity” (24). The fact that many of these significant incidents are largely marginalized in European narratives and archives points to the asymmetrical circulation of knowledge that is closely tied to colonial power hierarchies (see e.g. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past). Anti-colonial resistance and independence movements also shaped the region’s history throughout the 20th century, with most Caribbean countries finally gaining formal independence during the second half of the century. In the midst of the Cold War, the Cuban Revolution of 1959 greatly impacted the entire region and has served as a myth of resistance against US imperialism. To date, however, several islands continue to be dependent territories. In Puerto Rico, harsh debates about the island’s current status as ‘unincorporated United States territory’ and claims for both statehood and independence mark local politics, while several of the region’s parliamentary democratic constitutional monarchies, including Barbados and Jamaica, currently debate becoming republics. Persistent highly unequal power structures as well as migration, mobility, and interrelations with diverse diasporas in an increasingly globalizing world continue to shape the discourse of resistance in the Caribbean. On the state- or supranational level, the pan-Caribbean community CARICOM, founded in 1973, constitutes an organization of 15 Caribbean states and five associate members whose main objectives include the region’s economic integration and political co-operation. Since 2013, the CARICOM Reparations Commission as well as the National Committees on Reparations across the Caribbean have worked to “establish the moral, ethical and legal case for the payment of reparations by the former colonial European countries, to the nations and people of the Caribbean Community, for native genocide, the transatlantic slave trade and a racialized system of chattel slavery.”3 These claims for “reparatory diplomacy and action” relate to the region’s conditions in the areas of public health, education, cultural institutions and cultural deprivation, psychological trauma, as well as limited access to scientific and technological enhancements.4 Such claims for reparations relate directly to the legacy of colonialism and constitute a highly relevant current form of resistance to continuous economic, cultural, and epistemic inequalities.

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Resistant interventions and practices also feature prominently across Caribbean artistic-aesthetic, socio-political, and theoretical contexts. In music and dance, written texts and oral histories, linguistic and religious practices, pamphlets, essays, journalistic and academic writing, articulations of post- and/or decolonial discontent, and forms of protest express discursive and epistemic rebellion against histories and experiences of oppression, dispossession, and exploitation. Historically, enslaved Africans practiced their resistance through forms of religious syncretism as well as oral histories, dances, and songs. Genres such as the ‘slave narrative,’ the Testimonio, or more recent so-called ‘neo-slave narratives,’ have introduced voices, subject positions, and patterns of narration and aesthetics that question Eurocentric canons (see e.g. Roth). Monika Walter thus describes testimonial practices as “cimarronajes estéticos” (aesthetic marronage), evoking the long legacy of resistance against enslavement and oppression.5 Thinkers like José Martí from Cuba, Puerto Rican Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire from Martinique, Haitian Michel-Rolph Trouillot, or, more recently, Jamaican cultural critic Stuart Hall, Cuban-born Sylvia Wynter, and Paul Gilroy of Guyanese and English descent, have been rendering colonial geopolitics and knowledge politics problematic. Postcolonial scholars in particular critique the asymmetrical and unequal relations between the Caribbean and the ‘Global North.’ They frequently draw on or point to the importance of intellectual and artistic movements such as Négritude, Antillanité, and Créolité in the French-speaking Caribbean, Negrismo and Afro-Cubanismo in Cuba and other Spanish-speaking contexts, and the Harlem Renaissance in the United States, which had many links to Caribbean artists and critics. These movements provided decisive renegotiations of Caribbean identities and counter-discourses to Western representations by combining protest with the celebration of Black lives, Caribbean cultures, and ancestral heritages. Similarly, Indo-Caribbean interventions have emphasized the importance and transformative possibilities of Dougla poetics (Puri 221) and have influenced broader notions e.g. of the poetics of ‘Coolitude’ in and beyond the Caribbean context (Thorabully). On the institutional level, the Cuban Casa de las Américas has provided one of the most important spaces for publications, literary prizes, and exhibitions as a counterbalance to the US-dominated culture industry (see Saldívar). Like afrodescendent feminists all over the Americas (e.g. The Combahee River Collective in the USA or the Manifiesto das Mulheres Negras in Brasil), AfroCaribbean feminists such as the group Afrocubanas (see Rubiera Castillo and Martiatu Terry) and Indo-Caribbean feminist interventions by Patricia Mohammed and Rosanne Kanhai theorize experiences of multi-dimensional oppression, while Verene Shepherd (“Women” and Engendering) and Yolanda Ricardo reveal the long history of agency and resistance women in the Caribbean. Caribbean feminists, in the path-breaking volume Daughters of Caliban: Caribbean Women in the Twentieth Century, theorize the tensions between violent processes of creolization such as enslavement and gendered violence, and conceptualize ways to undermine such violence. As Consuelo López-Springfield insists in her introduction to the

Introduction 7 volume, the Caribbean—home of the “daughters of Caliban”—is “a site of permeable boundaries and multiple identities, offering continuous redefinition of the self and of one’s relationship to society [based on] a history of colonial oppression and a regional culture of resistance” (xi–xii). Rhoda Reddock’s overview of Anglophone Caribbean feminist research and theory and her own contributions show the continuous vibrancy of the crucial field of feminist intervention and gender research, in which e.g. Edna Acosta-Belén has traced Latin American and Caribbean dynamics of global and local exchange. Culture provides a decisive sphere in which political mobilization and organized political actions occur, as Saunders emphasizes. However, she points out that in spaces and societies such as in the Caribbean, deliberative processes can differ from political processes occurring in “Western-European conceptualizations of ‘civil society’ or the ‘bourgeois public sphere’ ” in that people of African and indigenous descent frequently also “use dance music, poetry and other cultural forms of expression and orality that are often classified as ‘art’ as key aspects of social/political deliberative processes” (Saunders 17). These practices “often structure political debate, inform larger communities of social, political, and economic issues, propel political organizing, theorize about things ranging from cosmology to political economy, and help to set political agendas” (Saunders 18). Many musical forms provide particularly illustrative examples of circulations and mutual influences between different places and spaces in the Caribbean and across its diasporas. Music easily transcends physical borders and numerous musical genres originating in or decisively influenced by the Caribbean provide frames for critical agency. Roberto Zurbano (“Rap Cubano”) thus highlights that “Cuban rap is an act of racial resistance that rejects the Eurocentric standards still dominant in contemporary Cuban culture. It is located within a Caribbean framework and rearticulates many of its popular expressions, including Afro-Caribbean religions” (Zurbano, “Rap Cubano” 157). In popular culture and across different aesthetic practices, hip hop groups like Las Krudas Cubensi, based in the US-American Cuban diaspora, situate intersectional feminist anti-racist and anti-colonial discourses within wider publics. To this day, the distribution of noncommercial forms of hip hop often depends on subcultural practices that resist, circumvent, and subvert capitalist distribution channels. Numerous Caribbean authors, artists, filmmakers, activists, bloggers, and scholars dedicate their work to render problematic and resist persistent colonial, racist, and sexist structures. These actors view current inequalities as embedded in a history of colonization and transnational entanglements, and protest and rebel against stereotypical ascriptions and representations. On the linguistic level, creole languages, Kamau Brathwaite’s influential concept of the nation language, nonstandard dialects, and anti-language varieties such as slang, represent crucial aspects of identity and a demarcation in response to standard language ideologies generally associated with the European languages imposed by former colonizers. In the realm of literature, Caribbean authors located in the region and across its diasporas, as well as critics and theorists, continue to broach the issue of the

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intertwining of colonial legacies and postcolonial experiences. All these forms of resistance share a critique of the locally and simultaneously globally entangled political, economic, and ideological orders that have brought about the asymmetries they address.

Approaching resistance: narratives, politics, aesthetics Against the backdrop of these historical contexts and ongoing inequalities, the contributions of this volume focus on historical and current political, cultural, and epistemic practices of resistance. They observe a wide array of political, aestheticartistic, and theoretical forms of critique and resistance in and from the Caribbean and contribute to what curator and critic Alanna Lockward has termed “decolonial aesthetics/aesthesis” (“Decolonial Aesthetics”). In a relational as well as heterogeneous, broad, disciplinarily un-bounded or even ‘un-disciplined’ understanding, resistance requires a prior condition of power relations against which it is directed. In the Caribbean context, this condition is marked by colonial legacies and hierarchies and by their concomitant economic, racist, and exclusionary citizenship regimes. Resistant practices thus usually target hegemony and domination. Often, such practices have constituted acts of survival, healing, and transformation. They are situated in their respective contexts of diverse societies defined by manifold cultural, religious, and artistic practices and theoretical conceptualizations. This volume seeks to contribute to the ongoing discussion of conceptual challenges, problems, and ambivalences related to past and present Caribbean practices of resistance. It traces patterns of organization and artistic-aesthetic expression as well as radical forms of political activism. It juxtaposes contributions from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, including anthropological, linguistic, literary and cultural studies, as well as activist perspectives that address different aspects of resistance in different ways. Rather than being based on a singular, narrow conceptualization of resistance, the contributions in this volume thus offer a wide range of aspects and approaches to resistance across their respective examples. In these contributions, the Caribbean does not constitute a fixed geographical, geopolitical, or culturally definable entity, but—in and through overlapping geographical, historical, political, and cultural definitions—rather emerges as and represents a multifaceted, multi-topical transcultural and transnational critical position. Some of the questions this volume addresses are: What characterizes Caribbean practices of resistance? What are current objectives, contexts, and means of resistance in and from the Greater Caribbean? Which definitions and notions of resistance have become prevalent regarding different historical and contemporary practices? Within and across the topical clusters Narratives of/as resistance: Languages, poetics, and politics in Caribbean literatures and resistance in/as activism: From theory to practice and back, entangled or contrasting norms and values of different actors are brought to the fore to discuss questions of sociopolitical and cultural continuities and changes in practices of resistance in and

Introduction 9 from the Caribbean. Contributions elaborate how these questions are negotiated in various areas of political and cultural discourse and across a wide array of artistic, activist, and media practices, texts, and artifacts. These range from the use of folklore to challenge social norms in Danielle McClean’s children’s novel The Protector’s Pledge (Giselle Anatol) and the depiction of indigenous presences in Merle Collins’s novel The Colour of Forgetting (Geoffrey MacDonald) to translanguaging and the construction of Creole-speaking characters in French Caribbean literature (Paula Prescod). They discuss the image of the maroon in the works of Édouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant (Sarah Gröning), dialectic images of the resistant past in Haitian culture and literature (Patrick Eser), and resistant functions of lo real maravilloso in Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo (Marius Littschwager). In the context of activism and resistant practices, the volume addresses claims for reparations for the racialized system of chattel slavery (Claudia Rauhut) and testimonials by Black indigenous women from Costa Rica (Christina Schramm). Discussions of social media play a role in the resistance performances carried out during the 2010–2011 student protests in Puerto Rico (Alessandra Rosa), in new Caribbean feminist online activism (Andrea Baldwin and Marva Cossy), and in blogs by Cuban feminists (Sandra Abd’Allah-Álvarez Ramírez). Contributions furthermore reflect on debates on racism in post-Soviet Cuba (Roberto Zurbano Torres). In the context of religion, Ilja Labischinski’s chapter asks in how far conversion to Islam in Cuba constitutes an act of resistance. The volume concludes with a more general elaboration of notions of critique and resistance in the concepts of Michel Foucault, Homi K. Bhabha, and Walter Mignolo, who are all frequently cited in relation to conceptualizations of resistance in the Caribbean (Marita Rainsborough). Such cultural practices as well as activist and theoretical contributions are crucial in order to think and bring about more diverse and complex forms of conviviality both within and beyond the region and its many diasporas.

Narratives of/as resistance: languages, poetics, and politics in Caribbean literatures The first part of the collection considers Caribbean narratives in terms of textual practices of subversion; as cultural practices that challenge dominant practices of knowing by way of creating and/or foregrounding alternative ways of understanding or narrating history and society through both content and form. Ann González claims that “[i]nherent to the process of colonization and its so-called ‘civilizing’ and modernizing mission is the intrinsic and inevitable suppression of local epistemologies and ways of knowing, that is, alternative ways of understanding, explaining, and constructing the world” (4). As a counter-movement to this attempted silencing and erasure, Caribbean narratives continuously function as practices of resistance. In this regard, two frequently overlapping angles and approaches can be stressed. One approach is concerned with the ways in which resistance is—or can

10 Wiebke Beushausen et al. be—narrated, while the other views the narrative itself or the act of narration as a possible vehicle for or a practice of resistance. By addressing different forms of injustice and inequality, which are inextricably intertwined with colonial legacies and postcolonial experiences, authors and narrators speak, write, and strike back. These narratives may thus not only serve as important links to the past, as possible repositories of culture, but as projections of the future. They may be seen as textual spaces in which continuous (re)definitions of identity are played out and, in this way, function as narratives of resistance against colonial, sexist, racist, and other ascriptions. The contributions in this part deal with such narratives of/as resistance and establish an interdisciplinary discussion of the varied relationships between cultures, creativity, and resistance across different overlapping areas of inquiry. In “Using folklore to challenge contemporary social norms: Papa Bois, Mama D’Lo, and environmentalism in Caribbean literature,” Giselle Anatol examines how contemporary Caribbean authors incorporate folkloric elements into their works of fiction for purposes that reach beyond independence-era calls for Caribbean-centric (anti-European) culture. Considering Daniel McClean’s children’s novel The Protector’s Pledge as her primary text of analysis, Anatol investigates the text’s use of the folk figures Papa Bois and Mama D’Lo, whose “border-crossing nature” and “their ability to alter shape, symbolize the fluidity of cultures and beliefs” may be interpreted as necessary for what has been defined as the modern era. Throughout her contribution, she sheds light on but also critically questions the ways that McClean employs these characters to challenge racial and gender norms as well as to broaden an understanding of women’s roles in society. Further, Anatol identifies the two characters Mama D’Lo and Papa Bois as promoters of a strong environmental message, advocating respect for nature. Her chapter deals with and argues for the power of the important, yet largely overlooked genre of Caribbean children’s literature. Accordingly, she stresses the possible value of such literature and the confidence-building impact it may have on young readers of color who seldom find protagonists with whom they can identify. Furthermore, she underlines the significance of the novel’s focus on Trinidadian folklore, culture, and beliefs; a focus which, as Anatol highlights, not only challenges Eurocentric norms but also helps young readers to gain access to and appreciate local systems of knowledge. Last but not least, Anatol hints at the strong potential of online/digital publishing for writers of the Global South, a development in the industry that may effectively challenge mainstream publishing houses and expand the texts’ readership. Geoffrey MacDonald’s contribution “Shadows pass the surface: Decolonial (re)configurations of indigenous presence in Merle Collins’s The Colour of Forgetting” highlights the capacity of fictional literature to become a vehicle of resistance to cultural erasure. MacDonald is concerned with the construction of indigeneity in Collins’s largely overlooked novel and suggests that the “indigenous framework” in The Colour of Forgetting undermines colonial epistemologies as well as heteropatriarchal, nationalist narratives. He builds on

Introduction 11 theories of decoloniality and draws from Carol Boyce Davies’s concept of uprising textualities to define indigeneity as “a standpoint that accounts for indigenous presences, knowledges, perspectives, and concerns.” In particular through the character Carib, the seer and keeper of indigenous memory, Merle Collins represents pre-colonial knowledge, thus correcting historical misrepresentations of indigenous cultures. MacDonald’s reading further reveals the novel’s underlying criticism of the persisting (neo)colonial economic and gender systems in Grenada and its ‘unfortunate’ effects on family structures and the collective—for which the family Malheureuse is seen as emblematic. He focuses on the struggle over land ownership and colonial laws of inheritance which are staged in the novel. The loss of the land, perceived by the characters not only as material but also as cultural death, profits patriarchal rule and neo-imperial structures, to which Carib serves as counter-force. Both MacDonald’s reading and the novel itself engage in a form of literary activism and resistance that foregrounds marginalized indigenous perspectives to unsettle persisting colonial paradigms and oppression that remain anchored in White supremacy. As a literary movement, In Praise of Creoleness, a manifesto co-authored by Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant, germinated as an extension of Aimé Césaire’s Négritude and Édouard Glissant’s Antillanité. Paula Prescod’s contribution on “Acts of translanguaging and marooning as forms of resistance in French Caribbean literature” discusses creole identity and manifestations of literary bilingualism across these authors’ respective conceptualizations of Caribbean identity. She points out how Glissant’s novel Tout-monde overcomes the clichés that Creole is a marginalized variety, that it is not written and that it cannot mingle with the multitude of languages spoken by the characters he brings together in the novel. Prescod examines what drives the linguistic choices of Confiant and Glissant in their novels Ravines du devant-jour and Tout-monde respectively. Their linguistic choices are assessed against the backdrop of Césaire’s call to “put on the maroon act” in response to the constraints besetting literary creation among French Caribbean artists, an act she refers to as literary marooning. The concept of literary marooning as a way of resisting the imposed, conventional forms of literary practices handed down and enforced by Franco-French writers is weighed against the literary stance taken by Confiant and Glissant. The contribution examines the relationship these French Caribbean writers establish with Creole, a language of resistance, either through the architecture of their characters or through narrative discourse. Prescod argues that defying established representations of language allows Confiant to distance some of his characters from French, the dominant language variety, and to portray others within the conventional distribution of linguistic systems, while in Tout-monde, Glissant rejects the isolation of Creole, weaving it into his poetics of resistance through métissage, hybridism, and alterity. Bringing characters together into the tourbillon and thus twisting and overturning established representations of language, she posits that Glissant practices discursive resistance while Confiant resorts to a more perceptible, textualized form of resistance.

12 Wiebke Beushausen et al. According to Glissant, the maroon as a symbolic figure is the only legitimate hero of anti-colonial resistance in Caribbean history, as Sarah Gröning points out in “From anti-colonial to anti-modernist resistance.” Gröning traces the retrospective idealization of the maroon in literature and criticism as an example of systematic opposition to colonization and slavery. She considers the maroon as a heroic figure that is deeply rooted in the collective memory of postcolonial societies as expressive of an urgent need to maintain points of reference and identity other than colonial historiography. In her comparative analysis of Glissant’s Mahogany (1987), Chamoiseau’s L’Esclave vieil homme et le molosse (1997), and Confiant’s Nègre marron (2006), she shows how the historical maroon is progressively dehistoricized, mystified, and instrumentalized to symbolically support the expression of anti-modernist resistance. Gröning argues that all three texts establish a close link between the maroon of the past and its modern alteration into what Chamoiseau calls a “Warrior of the Imaginary.” While the historical maroon remains a reference point for these novels, they do not merely translate the historical figure into a modern idol. The relationship between the colonial past and the globalized present is far more complex in that modern societies do not only need a symbolic figure of anti-colonial resistance, but holistic cultural concepts based on that particular figure’s symbolic power, which in turn are designed through both literary and real “Warriors of the Imaginary.” Also located in the sphere of (postcolonial) cultural (socio-) politics, Patrick Eser’s contribution “Cultures of resistance: Dialectical images of the Haitian Revolution in Haitian culture and literature” discusses the diverse, often contradictory, and ever-changing images of Haiti and the Haitian Revolution in culture and society. He argues that the different references to the contradictory and violent past of Haiti from both external and internal viewpoints are a constitutive factor of Haitian culture and identity. Eser starts from the premise that “[t]he most salient historical event of Haitian history can be traced back to the revolution of enslaved people in 1791, a process of political resistance and emancipation, which, in 1804, led to independence and the constitution of the Haitian state” and stresses that the event continues to be an important historical point of reference which is highly charged with symbolic value. In his contribution, he looks at different imagologies of Haiti and provides a concise overview of the diverse cultural and political meanings that have been and continue to be attached to the Haitian Revolution on the international level, in the inner-Haitian debate on the subject, and in fictional, artistic discourses. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s concept of the ‘dialectical image,’ Eser compares and contrasts these different “registers of knowledge” and perspectives on the Haitian Revolution with recent debates and discourses in and of Haiti through an investigation of the importance of the cultural legacy of the Haitian Revolution and its contemporary usage in Haitian society and culture. He explores the historiographical writings of MichelRolph Trouillot, the essayistic writing of Yanick Lahens, and Lyonel Trouillot’s fictional writing, and critically looks at the ways in which these intellectuals’ “critical interventions represent different forms of reestablishing the political and revolutionary past of Haiti.” These interventions, Eser argues, can be viewed as

Introduction 13 articulations of “counter-hegemonic” perspectives—directed, for example, at oppressive Western historical discourses and hierarchical and corrupt political structures within Haiti—and may be interpreted as cultural acts of resistance. The complex and powerful images and narratives of the Haitian Revolution also play an important role in Marius Littschwager’s contribution, “Postcolonial poetics: El reino de este mundo and the resistance of lo real marvilloso,” which departs from the basic question about whom and/or what resistance is directed against in narrative(s) and what precisely constitutes the resistance in a practice. In his reading of Alejo Carpentier’s 1949 novel, Littschwager links the theoretical and poetical practice of resistance to the Caribbean context and Cuban author Alejo Carpentier. He claims that in conjunction, El reino de este mundo and its famous prologue De lo real maravilloso do not only re-narrate the history of the Haitian Revolution from a Cuban standpoint. Instead, both texts create a narrative of postcolonial political and cultural opposition; a narrative which claims to reconsider the Caribbean as a space of poetical resistance to European colonization and postcolonial dependencies. In this contribution, Littschwager reads the prologue as a manifesto that prepares the crónica de lo real maravilloso represented by El reino de este mundo, thus entangling a critique of official historical and colonial discourses about the Haitian Revolution with mythologies and a mythography which had been previously excluded. However, according to Littschwager, the concept of lo real maravilloso not only performs a poetological resistance but also provokes certain positions of resistance in the postcolonial debates in and about Latin America by suggesting a quasi-ontological category for the Americas. Furthermore, he states that while the novel proposes a contrapuntal narrative of its historical narration, one that places Haiti at a central position for the historical experience of Latin America, it also requires a contrapuntal reading (Edward Said). Littschwager thus argues for an ‘entangled narrator’ who constantly doubts and vacillates between various possible narrative levels. With this kind of narrator, Littschwager claims, Carpentier recognizes forms of emancipation claimed by the Haitian Revolution that rest on other forms of knowledge, for example practiced by enslaved Africans, and an artistic resistance that creates a memory capable of other, formerly excluded perspectives. The contributions in the first part of the volume reveal numerous and powerful ways in which Caribbean narratives may function as practices of resistance, both as narratives of or about resistance and as narratives as resistance. As the contributions by Anatol, MacDonald, Prescod, Gröning, Eser, and Littschwager show, Caribbean narratives (and literatures) are not and cannot be separable from life. They are at once capturers and producers of histories and social transformations, with a reach that extends far beyond the Caribbean. As Sylvia Wynter has claimed in regard to the Caribbean situation, “[t]o write at all was and is . . . a revolutionary act. Any criticism that does not start from this very real recognition is invalid” (31). It is this claim for Caribbean narratives as inherently political— given their particular fusion of culture, creativity, and resistance—that make them such an important and interesting area of inquiry as well as an influential driving force for different forms of Caribbean activism.

14 Wiebke Beushausen et al.

Resistance in/as activism: from theory to practice and back Far too often scholarly work on resistance focuses predominantly on theoretical concepts at the expense of a thorough investigation of activism and practices of transgression at the political, creative, or grassroots levels. However, if we are to understand the histories and cultures of resistance and their impact on contemporary societies, we must, according to Foucault, “be present at the birth of ideas and the explosion of their force, and not in the books that state them, but in the events in which they manifest their force, in the struggles that are waged for or against ideas” (484–85). From different angles, the contributions clustered around the topic of activism thus highlight how forms of protest are conceptualized and realized by actors within local, (trans-)regional, (trans-)national, and global contexts. They explore the multifaceted activist culture in the Caribbean from the perspectives of social anthropology, literary studies, social movement studies, and Internet activism. The authors are dedicated to individual and collective endeavors of resistance as well as notions and practices of empowerment. What becomes apparent is the extent to which recognition and collaboration are crucial to achieve transformation and to contest hegemonic forces. Furthermore, the contributions in this part seek to unsettle the division between elitist, ‘ivory tower’ discourses and activism by juxtaposing and bringing into dialogue academic and activist voices. The part Resistance in/as Activism thus offers a glimpse into the dynamic and manifold ways through which resistance is put to practice and may in turn influence the production of theory. The intersection of activist voices and actions and academic research, and the deliberate overlap of theory and practice, provides a more comprehensive picture of resistance. Analyses and practices of transgression are both political acts. The move from theory to practice and back in this part of the collection is also a plea to continue to be critical with regard to the methodologies at hand and to engage with alternative ways of ‘doing theory.’ Activist work—be it in the realms of cyberfeminism or collective political movements such as advocacy for reparations, student protests, or individual endeavors of resistance in creative writing and everyday life—foregrounds the urgency of social justice and equality. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes in Silencing the Past: “The ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots” (xix). While theoretical interventions make visible and help us to understand or grasp the mechanisms and workings of power, the challenge to excavate its roots is taken up by activism and its pressures towards transformation. “Caribbean activism for slavery reparations: An overview” by Claudia Rauhut addresses the essential field of reparational justice. The text provides an overview of Caribbean activists’ claims for reparations for the long-term damages caused by colonialism and enslavement and the related discourses, institutions, and actors. Rauhut’s focus is on the Anglophone Caribbean states and their negotiations with Great Britain, which she connects to other transnational networks such as Articulación Regional Afrodescendiente de América Latina y el Caribe (ARAAC),

Introduction 15 while also highlighting the unprecedented global support for the activists. She emphasizes Jamaica’s pivotal role in the ongoing discussion, which was re-opened by CARICOM in 2014 but has a much longer history, influenced in the twentieth century, for instance, by radical thinkers such as C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, and Walter Rodney, or the Rastafari and Black Power movements. Rauhut draws from interviews she conducted with key figures like Sir Hilary Beckles, Rupert Lewis, and Verene Shepherd to stress the “global relevance, possibility, and legitimacy of reparations” as well as Europe’s “historical debt.” Reparations, as the author strongly advocates, go beyond financial compensation and also include the recognition of the history and revaluation of African-Caribbean culture and practices. Rauhut concludes by establishing four major areas in which reparations claims are crucial, namely to rewrite the history and educational material for the teaching of slavery as entangled with European experiences and existence; to decenter and decolonize knowledge production; to conceive development ‘aid’ as an obligation, not charity; and to conceive of the struggle for reparatory justice as a globally entangled matter. In “Debated existences, claimed histories: Black Indigenous women’s diasporic lives in Costa Rica,” Christina Schramm reflects on the complexity of ethnic identity as well as on both structural and everyday forms of racism and its intersection with gender in the Central American country. Drawing from the narrative interviews she conducted during her field research, Schramm examines the social interrelations of Black, Indigenous, and Black Indigenous women in what she refers to as the construction of “interracial subjectivities.” She thereby highlights the extent to which Indigeneity and Blackness continue to be marginalized in relation to the dominant discourse of Whiteness and Europeanness on which Costa Rican hegemonic national and cultural identities are built. The interviewees narrate their lived experiences of cultural othering along with the discrepancy between self-perception and ascriptions by others in the social construction of racialized identities. The author exemplifies the diverse forms of (individual) activism and strategies of self-empowerment through, for instance, communal solidarity, cultural translation, mobility, material security, or emotional independence to reclaim their embodied selves. Schramm furthermore reveals the extent to which the colonial stratification of African and Indigenous populations (not just) in Costa Rica is reproduced in occidental epistemology. She thus advocates the need to decolonize knowledge production and methodology. One such tool may be found in the “ethno-psychoanalytical triangulation” that is sensitive to power asymmetries and the unspoken and which respects the integrity of those ‘being’ researched. The article concludes that “the African diaspora in Central America has been politically and intellectually reduced to a supposed absence,” which Schramm’s research counteracts in acknowledging its presence and relevance not only for Caribbean studies. In “Una Universidad Tomada,” Alessandra Rosa explores the resistance performances in the students’ strike at the Río Piedras Campus, Puerto Rico, in 2010–2011. The strike took place as a reaction to the increase in tuition fees, layoffs, and massive cuts in governmental funding. The protesting students

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demanded affordable higher education as a public good, not a privilege, as Rosa contends. In her contribution, the author distinguishes between offline spaces of resistance, e.g. protest camps or physical barriers, as well as online spaces, such as the Internet, social media, and text messaging, which combined constituted a highly effective form of resistance while also fostering the student activists’ collective identity. The organization of the strike through new media technology attracted an unanticipated large number of participants, which enabled the protesting collective to take over the campus within a short period of time. Rosa furthermore adopts the term “resistance performance,” loosely based on its application in social movement studies, to refer to a self-conscious act of dissent, for an intended or unintended audience aware of the existing power relations. In the case presented here, street art, theater acts, and the maintenance of a Facebook page, a radio station, and a YouTube channel were successful performances to create a positive public image and gain widespread support for the cause, but also, as Rosa points out, to disclose state enforcement and police violence. The interrelation of virtual and physical spaces, the article shows, along with a functioning internal infrastructure, communication networks, and horizontal decision-making processes, are crucial components to build local and transnational networks in order to accomplish social and political changes. The Puerto Rican students’ call to ‘fight but not surrender’ is thus exemplary for a non-violent act of resistance. The following two contributions are also concerned with the use of social media, different forms of Internet activism, and practices of resistance against intersecting inequalities. Andrea N. Baldwin and Marva Cossy, in “Troubling our intersections: A Caribbean feminist methodology as resistance approach,” propose the use of social media as a methodology and valid form of anti-colonial, anti-racist (or: “intersectional”) feminist resistance. From an activist perspective, the two authors point out the crucial impact of localized, regional knowledge production and methodology, especially as this field continues to be marked by persistent colonial asymmetries with regard to access, representation, and acknowledgement. In hegemonic perceptions and self-narrations, the locus of valid feminist theorizing remains in the so-called Global North from where dominant narratives have seemingly “travelled” to other destinations in the socalled Global South (or have to be “brought there”).6 Baldwin and Cossy further challenge academic feminists to be more inclusive of non-academic, activist voices. They argue that the use of social media in research together with an interactive engagement in online communities will help to overcome the binary of “working on” feminist topics and instead stimulate collaboration in the form of “working with” local and grassroots feminists. They conclude by underlining the emancipatory potential of feminist social media practices from the Caribbean, such as their own blog Feminist Aliens,7 “to trouble the intersections of feminist epistemology, in the Caribbean and beyond, and, consequently, inform future research that might inform policy and affect community interaction and change.” Sandra Abd’Allah-Álvarez Ramírez, who operates the blog Negra cubana tenía que ser,8 adds an important voice to the anti-racist movement in Cuba and

Introduction 17 the fight for equal rights of African Cuban women. In her article “Practices of resistance and cyberfeminism in Cuba,” she too emphasizes the important role of the Internet and blogosphere for feminist practice and women’s emancipation. Cuba provides a particular case for that matter, since Internet access is still limited, expensive, and strongly controlled by the state. In addition, the Cuban one-partysystem and the government hegemony over media, publications, and public discourse along with the US embargo on Cuba for a long time strongly limited the emergence of a multi-facetted public sphere. Abd’Allah-Álvarez Ramírez argues that the regulation of the Internet and censorship slowed down the development of a political blogosphere; accompanied by the fact that blogging itself was regarded as counter-revolutionary, but also by lack of knowledge in operating and responding to blogs. The blogosphere has now become an important platform for an emerging (“intersectional”) feminism to voice experiences of sexist homophobic and racist discrimination and represent diverse subject positions and silenced histories. As Abd’Allah-Álvarez Ramírez’s presentation of diverse blogs such as Afrocubanas or Asamblea femininista illustrates, Cuban feminist bloggers have established an alternative yet crucial and influential site for addressing intersectional inequalities and their current articulations in a diversifying Cuban society. The article thus proves the existence of a lively digital culture of resistance in Cuba. Roberto Zurbano Torres’s contribution “Racism vs. socialism in Cuba: A misplaced conflict (notes on/against internal colonialism)” renders problematic the fact that Cuba has for a long time adopted a version of socialism which has been incapable to address the specific needs and inequalities that mark the island, particularly racism. Arguing that the adaption of this model to the Cuban context has produced a “double historical discourse” and, ultimately, a “colonial mentality” which prevails in many Cuban organizations, Zurbano argues for a need for decolonization. He outlines the important impact that Cuban arts, literature, and music as well as religious practices have had on and for the establishment of an anti-racist and decolonial discourse. Information technologies, creating new spaces for debate and for the articulation of citizen demands, play a crucial role in this discourse. In his text, Zurbano pursues a politics of referencing theoretical approaches and terms generated in Latin America and the Caribbean in order to acknowledge the frequently marginalized knowledge of the region and thus work towards decolonizing ongoing epistemic asymmetries. “Let us be Moors” is what Cuban national hero José Martí wrote in support of the Berber uprising against Spanish rule in northern Morocco at a time when the battles of the European empires’ Asian and African territories were in full swing. Ilja Labischinski takes his cue from this catchphrase to discuss conversion to Islam in Cuba. Based on field studies and interviews with converts and in dialogue with theories of religious conversion, his contribution places these conversions as responses to Western racism and imperialism. While most studies focus on recent developments and contexts, this contribution traces the ties between the Caribbean and Islam back to the 15th century and argues that this entangled history plays a key role in many narratives of conversion. Combining the Cuban history of

18 Wiebke Beushausen et al. Spanish colonization with the reclaiming of this long history and legacy, interviewees phrase their conversion to Islam not as taking up a new religion, but as a return to religious and cultural roots. Similarly, Cuban Muslims use their religion to address discrimination and racism in Cuban society. By telling their history as histories of translocal entanglements, Labischinski argues, they challenge and resist how both Western and Cuban history are told. Placing themselves and their ancestors as agents of transatlantic history, Cuban Muslims thus also demand recognition in contemporary Cuba. Marita Rainsborough’s “Thinking resistance” compares the conceptualizations of critique and resistance in the theoretical frameworks of Michel Foucault, Homi K. Bhabha, and Walter Mignolo, whose theorizations are frequently brought into discussions of resistance in the Caribbean. Rainsborough outlines the limits of Foucault’s theory of state racism in relation to the special requirements of an analysis of colonial/postcolonial situations. Her contribution traces Bhabha’s and Mignolo’s references and indebtedness to Foucault’s basic epistemic assumptions while emphasizing their observations on what Mignolo calls the geopolitics of knowledge. She argues that, with his call for a decolonial cosmopolitanism, Mignolo goes far beyond Foucault, as does Bhabha with his (only partially developed) concept of dialogical-critical cosmopolitanism. She argues that Foucault’s pragmatic political approach, driven by criticism and resistance, fails to present any concrete political concepts to change the world in a global context. Although Bhabha’s postcolonial concept differs from Foucault in its cultural understanding, Rainsborough’s contribution highlights their compatible notions of counter-power or resistance. The contribution demonstrates that Bhabha’s concern is to consider the coexistence of different cultures in postcolonial contexts based on contemporary requirements of getting on with each other, while Foucault focuses on the social enabling of different forms of living in the widest sense by means of criticism and resistance. Together with the previous considerations of resistance in—frequently overlapping—narrative, literary, social, political, and activist contexts, these theoretical discussions add to the multi-layered discourse of resistance in and on the Caribbean and its diasporas. The broad spectrum of topics, actors, discourses, practices, and locations surveyed in Practices of Resistance highlights the Caribbean’s crucial role as a space of resistance to colonial hierarchies and persistent inequalities. From the importance of the Haitian Revolution for world history to literary and aesthetic marooning, from claims for reparatory justice to cyberfeminism and the subversion of hegemonic publishing practices, the contributions demonstrate that the Caribbean has never been ‘peripheral’ nor a ‘passive,’ ‘weak,’ or ‘failed’ region. To the contrary: As the manifold aspects discussed in the volume show, the Caribbean basin as a space of dissidence, opposition, empowerment, and agency has been and continues to be central to manifold transnational and entangled processes. The Caribbean demonstrates— and forces us to confront—that globalization and transnationalization have shaped global history for centuries and are in turn shaped by unequal relations of power. Being exposed to and deeply marked by migrations and cross-cultural negotiations,

Introduction 19 the Caribbean has developed a broad array of tools, concepts, practices, and methodologies for conceptualizing, addressing, problematizing, celebrating, and coping with plural, diverse, and transnational social contexts and power differentials. In that regard, Caribbean narratives, politics, aesthetics, and theorizations such as the ones presented here may help to shed light on and confront many of the challenges that societies around the globe are currently facing.

Notes 1

2

3 4

5

6 7 8

The Greater Caribbean includes the island states of the Greater and Lesser Antilles and the Bahamas; Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana on the Latin American mainland, as well as the coastal areas of Columbia, Venezuela, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, and Costa Rica. Such a regional focus takes note of the ethnic, cultural, and political diversity of these nation states while at the same time acknowledging their historical, economic, and geographical similarities and the shared heritage of colonial domination. Uprisings of enslaved populations took place on many other islands of the Caribbean, e.g. in St. Kitts in 1639, in Suriname in the 1760s, in Guyana in 1763 and 1823, in Montserrat in 1768, in Belize in 1773 and 1820, in Curaçao in 1795, and in Barbados in 1816. http://caricomreparations.org/about-us/. Accessed April 20, 2017. http://caricom.org/communications/view/caricom-reparations-commission-identifiessix-key-areas-to-be-the-focus-of-diplomacy-and-action. See also http://caricom.org/ media-center/communications/communiques/communique-issued-at-the-conclusionof-the-first-regional-conference-on-rep. Accessed April 20, 2017. Likewise, Roberto Zurbano refers to the Hip Hop movement in Cuba, which created a public space for addressing inequalities such as racism and sexism and challenged the government’s all-encompassing revolutionary narrative as “cimarronaje cultural” (cultural maroonage)—a phrase rapper Wanda Kruda had introduced in the early 2000s (Zurbano, “Rap Cubano” 157). Also, numerous Cuban bloggers contribute to a vivid discourse on racial and gendered inequalities despite the limited access to the internet (see Abd’Allah-Álvarez Ramírez in this volume). A clear-cut binary division between center and periphery in terms of the production of ‘relevant’ theory seems to be omnipresent, defining in the words of Sylvia Wynter who and where are the “theory-givers” and the “theory-takers” (“Afterword” 359). Their blog has been moved to https://feministaliens.wordpress.com/. Accessed June 28, 2017. See https://negracubanateniaqueser.com/. Accessed June 28, 2017.

Works cited Acosta-Belén, Edna. “Between the Dynamics of the Global and the Local: Feminist and Gender Research in Latin America and the Caribbean.” Global Gender Research: Transnational Perspectives, edited by Christine E. Bose and Minjeong Kim, Routledge, 2009, pp. 305–16. Bashi Treitler, Vilna. Survival of the Knitted: Immigrant Social Networks in a Stratified World. Stanford UP, 2007. ——. The Ethnic Project: Transforming Racial Fiction into Ethnic Factions. Stanford UP, 2013. Beckford, George L. “Plantation Society: Toward a General Theory of Caribbean Society.” Savacou: A Journal of the Caribbean Artist’s Movement, vol. 5, 1976, pp. 7–21.

20 Wiebke Beushausen et al. Benítez-Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. 1992. Duke UP, 1997. Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant. Éloge de la Créolité. Éditions Gallimard, 1989. Bhabha, Homi K. “Foreword: Remembering Fanon – Self, Psyche and the Colonial Condition.” Black Skin, White Masks, by edited by Frantz Fanon. Pluto P, 1986, pp. vii– xxvi. Boatca˘, Manuela. “Global Inequalities, Transnational Processes and Transregional Entanglements.” desiguALdades.net Working Paper Series 11. desiguALdades.net Research Network on Interdependent Inequalities in Latin America, 2011. www.iai.spkberlin.de/fileadmin/dokumentenbibliothek/desigualdades/workingpapers/WP_11_Boatca _Online.pdf. Accessed November 29, 2016. ——., and Julia Roth. “Unequal and Gendered: Notes on the Coloniality of Citizenship Rights.” Dynamics of Inequalities in a Global Perspective, edited by Manuela Boatca˘ and Vilna Bashi Treitler, Current Sociology, vol. 64, no. 2, 2016, pp.191–212. Brathwaite, Kamau. The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820. Clarendon, 1971. ——. History of the Voice: The Development of National Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry. New Beacon Books, 1984. Butler, Martin, Paul Mecheril, and Lea Brenningmeyer, editors. Resistance: Subjects, Representations, Contexts. Transcript, 2017. Ceceña, Ana Esther. El Gran Caribe: Umbral de la geopolítica mundial. Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2010. Cole, Stroma, and Nigel Morgan, editors. Tourism and Inequalities: Problems and Prospects. Cb Intl, 2010. Fanon, Frantz. Peau noire, masques blancs. Editions du Seuil, 1952. ——. Les damnés de la terre. François Maspero Éditeur S.A.R.L., 1961. Feminist Aliens. https://feministaliens.wordpress.com. Foucault, Michel. L’archéologie du savoir. Gallimard, 2008. ——. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78. Edited by Michel Senellart. Translated by Graham Burchell. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Harvard UP, 1993. Glissant, Édouard. “Creolization in the Making of the America.” Caribbean Quarterly, vol. 54, no. 1/2, 2008, pp. 81–9. ——. Poétique de la Relation. Gallimard, 1990. [Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. U of Michigan P, 1997.] ——. Le discours antillais. Gallimard, 1997. [Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Translated by J. Michael Dash. UP of Virginia, 1989.] González, Ann. Resistance and Survival. U of Arizona P, 2009. Grosfoguel, Ramón. “La descolonización del conocimiento: diálogo crítico entre la visión de Frantz Fanon y la sociología descolonial de Boaventura de Sousa Santos.” www.boaventuradesousasantos.pt/media/RAMON%20GROSFOGUEL%20SOBRE%20 BOAVENTURA%20Y%20FANON.pdf. Accessed November 28, 2016. ——., Margarita Cervantes-Rodríguez, and Eric Mielants, “Introduction: Caribbean Migrations to Western Europe and the United States.” Caribbean Migration to Western Europe and the United States: Essays on Incorporation, Identity and Citizenship, edited by Ramón Grosfoguel et al. Temple UP, 2009, pp. 1–17.

Introduction 21 James, C.L.R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. 1938. Penguin, 2001. Kamugisha, Aaron. “The Coloniality of Citizenship in the Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean.” Race & Class, vol. 49, no. 2, 2007, pp. 20–40. Kempadoo, Kamala, editor. Sun, Sex, and Gold: Tourism and Sex Work in the Caribbean. Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. ——. Sexing the Caribbean: Gender, Race, and Sexual Labor. Routledge, 2004. Lao-Montes, Agustín. “De-Calibanizing Caribbean Rationalities.” C.L.R. James Journal, vol 10, no. 1, 2004, pp. 154–66. ——. “Afro-Latin@ Difference and the Politics of Decolonization.” Latin@s in the WorldSystem: Decolonization Struggles in the 21st Century U.S. Empire, edited by Ramón Grosfoguel, Nelson Maldonado-Torres and José David Saldívar. Paradigm Publishers, 2005, pp. 75–88. ——. “Decolonial Moves: Trans-locating African Diaspora Spaces.” Cultural Studies, vol. 21, no. 2–3, 2007, pp. 309–38. Lockward, Alanna. Apremio: Apuntes sobre el pensamiento y la creación contemporánea desde el Caribe. CENDEAC, 2006. ——. “Decolonial Aesthetics.” YouTube, uploaded by Art Labour Archives, February 21, 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VtaryNyEpY. López-Springfield, Consuelo, editor. Daughters of Caliban: Caribbean Women in the Twentieth Century. Indiana UP, 1997. Martí, José. “Nuestra América.” Escritos sobre América, discursos y crónicas norteamericanos. Capital intellectual, 2010, pp. 57–65. Mignolo, Walter. “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and De-Colonial Freedom.” Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 26, no. 7–8, pp. 2009, pp. 1–23. Mintz, Sidney. “The Localization of Anthropological Practice: From Area Studies to Transnationalism.” Critique of Anthropology, vol. 18, no. 2, 1998, pp. 117–33. O’Connell Davidson, Julia and Jacqueline Sanchez Taylor. “Fantasy Islands: Exploring the Demand for Sex Tourism.” Sun, Sex and Gold: Tourism and Sex Work in the Caribbean, edited by Kampala Kempadoo. Rowman & Littlefield, 1999, pp. 37–54. O’Connell Davidson, Julia. “The Sex Tourist, the Expatriate, His Ex-Wife and Her ‘Other’: The Politics of Loss, Difference and Desire.” Sexualities, vol. 4, no. 1, 2001, pp. 5–24. Ortiz, Fernando. Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. 1947. Duke UP, 1995. Puri, Shalini. The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post/Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Reddock, Rhoda. “Feminist Research and Theory: Contributions from the Anglophone Caribbean.” Global Gender Research: Transnational Perspectives, edited by Christine E. Bose and Minjeong Kim. Routledge, 2009, pp. 438–71. Ricardo, Yolanda. La restistencia en las Antillas tiene rostro de mujer (tramsgresiones, Emancipaciones). Publicaiones de la Academia de Ciencias de la República Dominicana, 2004. Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, 1972. Rodriguez, Junius P. Encyclopedia of Slave Resistance and Rebellion. Greenwood Press, 2007. Roth, Julia. “Diálogo decolonial, Slave Narratives y Eurocentrismo.” La Diáspora Africana: Un legado de resistencia y emancipación, edited by Martha Machado Caicedo, Nationaal instituut Nederlands slavernijverleden en efernis - NiNsee, Fundación Universtaria Clarentiana - FUCLA, Universidad del Valle, 2012, pp. 167–77.

22 Wiebke Beushausen et al. Rubiera Castillo, Daisy and Inés María Martiatu Terry, editors. Afrocubanas: historia, pensamiento y prácticas culturales. Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2011. Saldívar, José Davis. Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico. Duke UP, 2012. Saunders, Tanya L. Cuban Underground Hip Hop: Black Thoughts, Black Revolution, Black Modernity. U of Texas P, 2015. Schachar, Ayelet. The Birthright Lottery: Citizenship and Global Inequality. Harvard UP, 2009. Sheller, Mimi. Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies. Routledge, 2003. ——. Citizenship from Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom. Duke UP, 2012. Shepherd, Verene A. “Women and the Abolition Campaign in the African Atlantic.” The Journal of Caribbean History, vol. 42, no. 1, 2008, pp. 131–53. ——, editor. Engendering Caribbean History: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Ian Randle Publishers, 2011. Thomas, Deborah. Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica. Duke UP, 2011. Thorabully, Khal, with Marina Carter. Coolitude: An Anthology of the Indian Labour Dispora. Anthem P, 2002. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Beacon P, 1995. Vogt, Daniela. Die Einbindung der ultra-peripheren Regionen in die europäische Union von Rom (1959) bis Lissabon (2009). Nomos, 2011. Wade, Peter. Race and Sex in Latin America. Pluto P, 2009. Wallerstein, Immanuel. “The Caribbean and the World System.” Caribbean Dialogue, vol. 8, no. 3, 2002, pp. 15–30. Walter, Monika.”El cimarrón en una cimarronada: Nuevos motivos para rechazar un texto y de la forma como este se nos impone.” Revista de crítica latinoamericana, vol. 36, 1992, pp. 201–05. Wynter, Sylvia. “Afterword: Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: Un/Silencing the ‘Demonic Ground’ of Caliban’s Women.” Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, edited by Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido. Africa World P, 1990, pp. 355–72. ——. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, its Over-Representation: An Argument.” The New Centennial Review, vol. 3, no. 3, 2003, pp. 257–337. ——. “We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk About a Little Culture: Reflections on West Indian Writing and Criticism.” Jamaica Journal, vol. 2, no. 4, 1968, pp. 23–32. Zurbano, Roberto. “Cuba: doce dificultades para enfrentar al (neo) racismo o doce razones para abrir el (otro) debate.” Revista Universidad de la Habana, no. 273, 2012, pp. 266–77. ——. “El Rap Cubano: Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop the Movement!” Cuba in the Special Period: Culture and Ideology in the 1990s, edited by Ariana Hernandez Reguant, Series New Concepts in Latino American Cultures, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Part I

Narratives of/as resistance Languages, poetics, and politics in Caribbean literatures

1

Using folklore to challenge contemporary social norms Papa Bois, Mama D’Lo, and environmentalism in Caribbean literature Giselle Liza Anatol

In The Things That Fly in the Night: Female Vampires in Literature of the CircumCaribbean and African Diaspora (2015), I explore various incarnations of the skin-shedding, blood-drinking female folk figure known in the Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean as the ‘soucouyant,’ ‘loogaroo,’ ‘volant,’ and ‘Old Higue.’ Whereas she is considered demonic in most traditional folktales, I investigate the ways writers of the past thirty years tend to use her as a figure of resistance and female empowerment, especially by representing her penetrations of the skin or other, more literal, sexual acts to resist confining norms of middle-class ‘respectability.’ This essay continues that work of examining how contemporary authors incorporate folklore into their fiction for purposes beyond independenceera calls for Caribbean-centric (typically anti-European) culture. I consider as my primary text the children’s novel The Protector’s Pledge (2015) by Danielle McClean, which mentions the soucouyant, but primarily employs the folk figures of Papa Bois and Mama D’Lo to promote a strong environmental message. However, despite the author’s attempts to simultaneously equalize gender relations and broaden women’s roles in today’s society, she ends up presenting characters that conform to traditional standards of gendered behavior. In other words, her novel initially seems to be a model of resistance as it contests both the hubris of human beings when it comes to the non-human natural environment and an ideology that posits women as physically, socially, and intellectually inferior to men. However, a closer inspection reveals that this spirit of resistance falls away at several key points in the narrative—particularly when it seems to depict a hierarchical relationship between Papa Bois and Mama D’Lo. According to conventional accounts, Papa Bois (pronounced ‘bwah’)—‘Father of the Woods’—and Mama D’Lo (also spelled ‘l’eau’)—‘Mother of the Waters’— protect the non-human natural environment. They might be said to represent what scholar Robert Marzec calls “[t]he nomadic, resistant component” that comes forth in “enunciations of the land” to challenge the traditional imperialist script, which tries to contain and control all the territories it represents, whether through fences, maps, or fiction (136). Papa Bois primarily guards the “the Great Trees” and animals, sounding a cow’s horn when hunters approach (Besson 2), while

26 Giselle Liza Anatol Mama D’Lo’s role seems to be that of the punisher: in a collection of folklore from Trinidad & Tobago, Gérard Besson describes her actions against humans “who commit crimes against the forest, like burning down trees or indiscriminately putting animals to death or fouling the rivers” as highly punitive (15). Interestingly, this language of punishment is tied up with her gender and sexuality: mortals who harm the forest “could find themselves married to her for life, both this one and the one to follow” (Besson 15). The marriage is a curse, not a blessing, and the consequence is rendered as especially dire since she normally takes the form of a “hideous creature” with her lower body in the form of a giant anaconda. Although both folk figures defend the forest and its creatures, it seems that Papa Bois is more remote in his interactions with humans, almost playing the part of reserved judge, while Mama D’Lo is relegated to the role of warden: There are many stories of Papa Bois appearing to hunters, sometimes as a deer who would lead them into the deep forest and then suddenly resume his true shape, to issue a stern warning and then to vanish, leaving the hunters lost or perhaps compelling them to pay a fine of some sort, such as to marry “Mama Dlo.” (Besson 2) This arrangement reflects a gender hierarchy of relations within many Caribbean families, in which the father acts as the final arbiter; his very presence is a warning against breaking the rules, whereas the mother doles out the physical punishments of spankings or ‘licks.’ The very evocation of the father’s presence to curb children’s unruly behavior (“All-you wait ‘til your father gets home!”) perhaps speaks to the superior social power of men in patriarchal societies, as they can control others and maintain authority without engaging in a physical struggle; perhaps there is also a sense of the need for men to hold back because their greater physical strength could harm the child. I would argue that in many cases, this dynamic continues to reinforce notions of women’s inferiority: they are not viewed as any kind of ‘real’ physical threat and they must use violence to maintain their more tenuous grip on authority. In the preceding passage from Besson, the terms of the marriage are not described, but sexual relations with a feminized serpent are definitely evoked, suggesting a phallic battle instead of the female partner in a conventional, passive, ‘penetrated’ role. Like the figure of the soucouyant, whose body flies out of the domestic sphere and traditional sexual roles by penetrating her victims’ homes and then their bodies to suck their blood, Mama D’Lo represents chaos to the patriarchal order. She provides lessons about how to treat the non-human landscape, but also conveys strong messages about what type of woman is desirable. Correspondingly, while Papa Bois’s body is meant to be unsettling—sometimes because of its hybridity and at others because of its instability—it is not referenced as ugly. At times he is an amalgam of a man and a beast with cloven hooves, but he “appears in so many different forms and fashions . . . sometimes as a deer, or in old ragged clothes, sometimes hairy and though very old, extremely strong and

Social norms in Caribbean literature

27

muscular” (Codallo, qtd. in Besson 2). His physique is something to be admired for its vigor, or else, in cervine form, sought for its beauty. His trans-species appearance resonates with Homi Bhabha’s discussions of hybridity, intermediacy, and the “in-between”: What is at issue is the performative nature of differential identities: the regulation and negotiation of those spaces that are continually, contingently, “opening out,” remaking the boundaries, exposing the limits of any claim to a singular or autonomous sign of difference – be it class, gender or race. Such assignations of social differences – where difference is neither One nor the Other but something else besides, in-between – find their agency in a form of the “future” where the past is not originary, where the present is not simply transitory. It is, if I may stretch a point, an interstitial future, that emerges inbetween the claims of the past and the needs of the present. (Bhabha 219) While Mama D’Lo’s hybrid snake-human body carries the same signification in terms of “opening out,” the “interstitial” time that merges future, past, and present, and the agency and potential power of a border-crossing identity, hers is definitely rendered as grotesque in its blendedness. Conventional legends about these two figures typically reinforce, rather than confront, the discomfort and anxiety that arises when women’s bodies take on non-originary, non-singular manifestations that are imbued with a great deal of power. As a work of children’s literature, The Protector’s Pledge inherently addresses questions of power. Children’s literature is one of the few genres in which most of the texts are not written by the population they are for, revealing a fundamental tension between the desires of the author and the desires and perceived needs of the reader.1 However, contemporary writing for children has become much more child-centered, allowing youthful characters more agency than children often experience in lives where they are not given options about going to school, taking baths, bedtimes, and the foods they eat. The novel falls into the category of middlegrade fiction for children; it is not quite Young Adult (YA) literature in that its adventure-seeking protagonist, Jason Valentine (who goes by the initials “JV”), is only 12 years old, and the book continually strives to build the confidence of childreaders by allowing them to identify with a protagonist who succeeds in his goals and quests even though he, like them, appears relatively powerless in daily life. Children’s literature is an important field, although often unrecognized as such among many adult audiences, who identify it as frivolous entertainment. As I argued in Reading Harry Potter: Critical Essays (2003), books for children “can be soaked up ‘into the bloodstream’ of young readers (Cullinan 226). This vivid metaphor speaks to the ways children unconsciously absorb not only the plot of the tales, but also the values imbedded within” (Anatol, “Introduction” xiv). Although McClean’s book—especially as an independently published e-book— does not have anywhere near the readership of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, its potential to affect a larger number of readers through Internet distribution

28 Giselle Liza Anatol networks makes it worthy of analysis. Trinidadian poet André Bagoo proposes the following about the potential of online publishing, particularly for writers of the Global South: I wonder if the Internet, while often seen to be in animus with publishing, is not also an opportunity for post-colonial countries like ours, to publish our own stories in our own ways, using cyberspace’s breadth of tools and its reach. (Laughlin) Bagoo laments the lack of publishers in the region: “We need more publishers in the Caribbean. Persons living in this region still have to seek publishers in North America or the UK” (Gyasi). Besides resisting notions of irrelevant children, The Protector’s Pledge contests the dominance of White/European characters in fictional works for young people. This concept is especially critical for readers of color from the Global South, and/or from African diaspora (and other cultures’) communities in the Global North, who seldom see themselves in literature. It is also crucial for White readers from the Global North who do not see the Other as influential in their world. Pushing back against the idea that only White lives matter, The Protector’s Pledge provides a counter example to the myriad books published each year that do not feature any people of color, or only portray them in marginalized—or, at best, sidekick—roles. And as Black librarians, educators, and parents have been arguing in print for over half a century, “When books [of a certain culture] are neglected, adults and children [of all races] who need positive role models or awareness of a view other than the stereotypical one given by the media are deprived of a valuable insight into the true identity of a given group” (Rollock xii).2 In her novel, McClean provides snapshots of life in the fictional Caribbean village of Alcavere, located just on the outskirts of a dense tropical forest called Oscuros, thus contributing to her young readers’ education of what life is like for an adolescent boy in the rural Caribbean. The novel simultaneously teaches young readers about Trinidadian folklore, culture, and beliefs of the past, while also encouraging them to think about the world’s future through the representation of environmental concerns. It speaks to a “need” being articulated more and more often in ecocritical scholarship: “to bring postcolonial and ecological issues together as a means of challenging continuing imperialist modes of social and environmental dominance” (Huggan and Tiffin 2). The author places value on Caribbean experiences—and experiences of the Americas overall—in an attempt to subvert the European colonial education that indoctrinated members of Caribbean societies for decades. Instead of privileging life in Europe and the US, the author concentrates attention on the beauty, danger, and intellectual stimulation present in the region. Granny tells JV stories about his parents’ adventures outside their village community, and “[t]hese narratives became JV’s favourite bedtime stories . . . H]e was transported to extraordinary places like ruined pyramids of ancient civilizations, volcanic peaks, coral reefs,

Social norms in Caribbean literature 29 lush rain forests, and even a deep lake of liquid asphalt that, according to legend, had swallowed an entire Amerindian village” (McClean, loc. 669). While there are certainly more famous pyramids in Egypt and coral reefs in Australia, the reference to Trinidad’s Pitch Lake—the world’s largest natural asphalt deposit— grounds the narrative in the Americas. Stunning coral reefs exist in Tobago, Mayan pyramids in Mexico, and volcanoes proliferate throughout South America, in countries such as Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. Most importantly for my work here, though, is how the book conveys lessons about gender norms and social acceptability through the attitudes, beliefs, and stories shared by JV’s community and the larger society. JV has been raised by Granny, known as “Miss B” to the rest of the vicinity.3 She is an herbal healer to whom many people come for assistance with complaints such as headache, cramps, and snake bite. McClean introduces a conflict between traditional folkways and more contemporary practices when one of the villagers, Paulette De Couteau, rejects Granny’s offer of a concoction for her ailing husband: “Paulette looked kindly at her and shook her head slowly. ‘Thank you, Miss B, but we’ve never been ones for traditional medicine. No offense’ ” (McClean, loc. 330–38). Granny is not insulted, suggesting a harmonious balance between belief systems. However, the fact that McClean herself uses the term “superstitions” to refer to certain villagers’ viewpoints challenges the reader’s ability to remain neutral by insinuating misconceptions and false knowledge: “With its reputation as a ward against bewitchment, twef [a type of vine] was a common sight in villages such as Alcavere where there was still a healthy respect for superstitions” (loc. 125, emphasis added). In spite of this choice of wording, McClean regularly attempts to decolonize knowledge about folk beliefs throughout the novel. In many contemporary Western cultures, intuition is devalued in favor of logic. The binary is often gendered—as in references to ‘women’s intuition’ and the idea that men are ‘naturally’ better at math and science—as well as racialized, especially in early theories of European intellect and rationality versus African physicality. McClean rejects this Eurocentric privileging of reason by construing Granny’s and JV’s intuition as quite accurate. Speaking about Adelle De Couteau’s disappearance, Granny says, “I have a feeling in my bones that there’s something somebody’s not saying,” and JV recalls “a similar feeling” (McClean, loc. 689). Additionally, during an initial trip into Oscuros, JV ignores his intuition: “The hairs on the back of JV’s neck stood up . . . But unsettling as it was—and whatever its cause—he tried to shake it off” (loc. 1054). On his next trip into the interior, when “the skin on his forearms began to tingle and erupted in a dense layer of goose bumps” (loc. 1140), he tries to determine the identity and hiding place of the person he is sure is watching him. This ‘person’ turns out to be Papa Bois, but, ostensibly because JV is so rooted in the ideology of the present, progress, scientific proof and reason, he is unable to find what—or whom—he is looking for. The conflict between folk beliefs and modern-day practices is also evident when 7-year-old Pascal (who is missing his front teeth and so speaks with a lisp) asks JV about Granny: “Everyone callth her an obeah woman. People even think

30 Giselle Liza Anatol she’th ready for the madhouthe” (McClean, loc. 417). In local dialogues, folk medicine gets tied to obeah, and obeah is connected to satanic religious practice. Obeah, an African-based spirituality, has long been juxtaposed against ‘enlightened’ European Christianity and linked to evil and wickedness through colonial religion and law. The implications of this dualistic framework are dire. The notion of obeah as malevolent not only reinforces the dichotomy of pure good vs. unadulterated evil; it negates the idea of a continuum of time: the past and ‘old ways’ are cast against the present and future; tradition gets classified as primitive and savage and is pit against progress. Pascal’s hearsay also suggests that traditional practices occupy the realm of insanity as opposed to lucid thought and valid choices. JV attempts to remove the tarnish from his grandmother’s reputation: “No, my granny doesn’t deal in obeah, Pascal, and she isn’t mad. She just knows a lot about nature and stuff. She’s like a doctor . . . a doctor who makes her own medicine from plants” (McClean, loc. 425). While his explanation might be easily graspable for the 7-year-old character and for young readers, it preserves the demonization of obeah rather than taking the opportunity to empty it of the stereotypes that have surrounded it for centuries. And the conversation continues to deteriorate when Pascal inquires: “And what about her humpback? Witcheth have humpbackth!” Losing his temper, JV responds, “[W]ell, they also have warts on their noses, pointy hats, and black cats and ride around on brooms. Granny B is not a witch!” (loc. 425). Knowledge about the natural world is raised up out of the depths in McClean’s book, but the binary configuration of good and evil remains, as does the notion that identity can be read on a subject’s body, whether through curvature of the spine or through facial growths.4 JV does grow, however, and come to a greater understanding of the non-rational world through the course of the novel. In the beginning, he is clearly a disbeliever when it comes to the folktales and ‘superstitions’ shared by the residents of Alcavere: [H]e certainly didn’t believe all those stories about the forest being a haven for the soucouyant—an old crone who shed her skin at night, turned into a ball of fire, and drank human blood—or that it was home to the shape-shifting lagahoo who prowled during the dark hours, always ready to sink his fangs into his next victim. Nope! Those tall tales were for babies. (McClean, loc. 63) Early on, even when a stranger to the community, Mr. Phipps, tells JV that he knows many stories about spirits in the forests to the south of the island, the protagonist reacts with immediate scorn: “Oh great! Someone else who was trying to frighten him with superstitious nonsense. All the villagers ever seemed to talk about was spirits and supernatural creatures in the forest” (McClean, loc. 175). Phipps, who turns out to be an undercover government agent working to break up a band of poachers, can be assumed to be trying to keep JV out of the woods and away from dangerous criminals. He is not a true believer. But JV comes to believe

Social norms in Caribbean literature 31 when he sees Mama D’Lo and Papa Bois, the guardians of Oscuros and “fierce protectors of its flora and fauna” (loc. 182), with his own eyes. Mama D’Lo appears to him first: “Drops of water on her ebony shoulders sparkled like diamonds in the setting sun, and JV stood there, spellbound, for what seemed like an eternity” (McClean, loc. 503). The imagery corresponds to Besson’s commentary that sometimes Mama D’Lo transforms into a beautiful woman, “singing . . . on still afternoons, sitting at the water’s edge in the sunlight, lingering for a golden moment” (15–16). It also resonates with the illustrations and text in The Nutmeg Princess, a picture book published in 1992 by Grenadian-Canadian writer Richardo Keens-Douglas. Keens-Douglas’s work effectively challenges European-centered standards of beauty with an African-Caribbean princess who is the “most beautiful princess you have ever seen” (n.p.), and Annouchka Galouchko’s vibrant paintings reveal that the Grenadian princess has deep brown skin, in stark contrast to Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and other conventional European fairy-tale princesses. Besides her “big eyes” and “beautiful smile,” the text mentions “hundreds of tiny braids,” a hairstyle that reflects the cultures of the African diaspora, and the “dewdrop[s] . . . like . . . diamond[s]” suggest that she has a natural beauty, and is concurrently associated with the riches of the earth. The character and plot encourage the child reader to respect the non-human environment and reject the financial greed that afflicts the villagers of the story.5 Papa Bois appears later in McClean’s narrative, when JV sees a form that “seemed to detach itself from the wider backdrop of foliage and step forwards. It was the product of such a bizarre mix of traits that JV’s brain could not categorize it right away as plant or animal, beast or man” (McClean, loc. 1159). Not only does Papa Bois possess the head and torso of a human being and the legs and hooves of an animal, as mentioned above; he is depicted here, as elsewhere, with horns, often associated with the satanic in the European Christian tradition, but a neutral trait in the paganism of ancient Greece and Rome and other natureworshiping religions. His animal body seems to sprout foliage—Besson’s collection mentions “leaves growing out of his beard” (2). He is emblematic of blending and border-crossings: the human and non-human worlds, Judeo-Christian beliefs and polytheism, flora and fauna, the space between fantasy and reality. I am again drawn to Keens-Douglas’s The Nutmeg Princess for an example of the celebration of hybridity in the Caribbean cultural sphere: many of the illustrations in the picture book feature composite images that might perplex Western readers, but are inspired by the notion of visions, the surrealistic nature of dreams, and the spiritual inspiration of Vodun6 and the Catholic Church. Trees bear faces, and creatures that appear to be half human and half dog, or have one aspect that is human and another that is avian, stand amongst the villagers and occupy the human landscape. Art critics such as Sheldon Williams identify “Voodoo as the common denominator of all acts of creativity on the island [of Hispañola], with particular reference to the creative acts of painting and sculpture” (xi). This inextricable link between Vodun and artistic production, including the bringing forward of life, which readily penetrates the visual arts, can also be witnessed in

32 Giselle Liza Anatol images of individual fruit trees bearing multiple kinds of fruit (some of which do not even grow on trees).7 These visual blends suggest the presence of the otherworldly in ordinary experiences: nature spirits burst forth from flowers and trees, animals, birds, and people; the loa—Vodun deities—are present in our daily lives, visible to those who have faith or the correct visual perspective. In KeensDouglas’s The Nutmeg Princess, story and pictures together accomplish an inversion of standards of beauty as well as undermining the image of the powerful, unmarried woman as a Wicked ‘Witch’; they also successfully challenge Western notions of reality, logic, and the supremacy of Christianity. McClean, in an even more cogent way, brings the past and tradition into the immediate present, and makes non-Western beliefs relevant to the fictional characters in the book as well as to the novel’s readers. Mason, a teenager JV knows from the village who gets caught up in the illegal animal thieving, also witnesses Mama D’Lo’s existence during his time in the forest: [A] woman—a true beauty with ebony skin and long braided hair—seemed to gradually rise up from the water, gently swaying rhythmically in a hypnotizing dance . . . [S]he began to sing. Her voice was clear, the tone sweet, her lilt enchanting. (McClean, loc. 1497) McClean remains true to her folk sources, but she highlights Mama D’Lo’s beauty instead of concentrating on her monstrous incarnation as part-snake. What remains problematic to the spirit of resistance in the novel, however, is the way these traits confine women to roles as sex symbols, where their only power comes through their physical bodies. The situation is especially fraught for women of African descent, who have long been attributed with hypersexual natures. The next time JV sees Mama D’Lo, her physical beauty—one that is specifically linked to her physiognomy as a woman of African descent, and thus challenges the prevalent Eurocentric ideals—is again emphasized through references to her complexion and hair: “She was of regular height, and the deep hue of her skin seemed to glow. Her dark locks twisted down, their ends brushing the waist of a patterned dress of rippling green, brown, and gold scales that fell to the forest floor” (McClean, loc. 1241). Strikingly, she is also cast as approaching him flirtatiously: “With a coy smile, the beautiful woman glided up to JV” (loc. 1247). “Coy” can mean bashful, demure, and timid, but it also implies coquetry, and, as mentioned above, Mama D’Lo is known for collecting husbands. JV’s reaction of standing “rooted to the spot” and “absolutely dumbfounded” (loc. 1247) further testifies to Mama D’Lo’s mysterious sexual allure, as does Papa Bois’s subsequent warning to his young protégé: “And know this. [Mama D’Lo] has husbands enough in this life and the next, though she is always on the lookout for more” (loc. 1349). Papa Bois seems content with the single companion of Mama D’Lo, but her thirst for many men appears unquenchable. The history of intersecting

Social norms in Caribbean literature 33 race and gender stereotypes complicates the novel’s renderings of the female folk figure, making them ambiguous at best. Mama D’Lo’s shape-shifting abilities are revealed in The Protector’s Pledge when the poacher whom JV calls “Stocky” reports on a creature that “moved so fast. I saw piece of it one minute, and then—zip!—it was gone. But I’m telling you, if I find that snake, I’ll be set for life” (McClean, loc. 981). Because he keeps chasing after what he thinks is an enormous serpent, and persuades the rest of the group to assist him in capturing this valuable beast, much time and effort is wasted and the criminals are prevented from meeting their quota. One might argue that Mama D’Lo is credited with a different kind of power here: she keeps the hunters from harming animals without resorting to a sexualized female form, and her body is used to incite fear rather than to seduce. However, her strength is not physical, intellectual, or suggestive of overt agency; she still is a physical body that manipulates men by serving as the object of the male gaze, once again undercutting notions of female power. In the end, McClean’s Mama D’Lo transforms into her human guise to capture Stocky. The “hypnotizing dance” witnessed by Mason “had clearly captivated his associate” (McClean, loc. 1497), and Mama’s song lyrics are telling: Another husband, another dear, Let me take you away from here We shall be wed from now till then, For this life and the next again. (loc. 1504) She appears to be the gender inversion of Prince Charming in the tradition of “Cinderella,” “Snow White,” “Sleeping Beauty,” and numerous other European fairy tales: she is the one who carries helpless male lovers away. This action, however, is rendered perverse and by no means advantageous: Stocky disappears, becoming another one of Mama D’Lo’s ‘husbands,’ and for him, marriage means death (or, at least, madness and entrapment in the forest forever). What message is sent to readers when this powerful female figure wants nothing more out of her immortal existence than husband after husband? When JV asks Papa Bois for more information about Mama D’Lo, the Forest Father responds, “Though she may not look it, Mama D’Lo is as old as I and every bit as powerful. The form you see is not one that you can trust” (McClean, loc. 1349). His words intimate that it is “natural” for women to work on preserving their youthful appearance at all costs, while men are not required to dedicate time or energy to this activity. The lines press readers to accept society’s demands on women to value themselves first and foremost for their physical beauty. At the same time, the narrative forces readers to question women’s trustworthiness. When Papa Bois initially calls Mama D’Lo “[m]y companion and coprotector” (McClean, loc. 1241), he indicates equality between them: the conjunctive “and” alongside the lowercase “c” of “coprotector” denote a balance between the roles of life partner and ally, and that these roles are only two of the many aspects of

34 Giselle Liza Anatol her identity. However, when, later in the story he identifies himself and Mama as “the Protector and Coprotector” of “a dominion created solely by Mother Nature” (loc. 1300), Mama’s position is subtly diminished by the new capitalizations: the different punctuation, with the addition of “the” before “Protector and Coprotector,” show that there are not two equal guardians, but rather one central defender of the forest—the Protector—and a subordinate Coprotector. Interestingly, although McClean characterizes the female folk figure as dangerously sexual, she simultaneously maps conventional notions of motherhood onto her. Her name always evokes maternity, of course, but the author of The Protector’s Pledge also puts her in the position of caretaker to the youthful Adelle, Mason’s younger sister who was lured into Oscuros by the douens of Trinidadian folklore and went into a state of shock in her fear of being lost.8 Mama D’Lo identifies the girl as “but a young innocent. She herself has done nothing wrong. Her spirit is pure. I shall watch over her” (McClean, loc. 1321). Whereas Papa Bois is blinded by a desire to punish all humans, even though only a handful are exploiting the natural riches of the forest and brutalizing its plants and animals, Mama D’Lo is cast in the stereotypical gender role of nurturer and custodian of the young. Papa strikes out in anger, vowing that “[Adelle’s] mind shall not completely awake from its slumber until every last one of my charges [the animals captured by poachers] is free. Until such time she is yours to care for, as you so desire it” (loc. 1335). He is definitely a caretaker—he fights for the safety of the creatures of Oscuros—but his role is more that of a male protector and angry warrior, set in opposition to Mama D’Lo’s kindness towards a lost child. She assures JV: “No harm shall come to her while she is in my care . . . You have my promise” (loc. 1335), and replicates traditional gender roles even further when she makes her youthful female charge a custodian of newborn and injured animals during her time in the woods. Papa Bois and JV, in contrast, play active savior roles as they review plans for rescuing the trapped animals and then put these plans into action. It is interesting to consider JV’s grandmother in light of the argument I have made thus far. She is a single woman, and as far as the reader knows, she has never been married. She takes in the infant JV when she discovers him crying at the edge of the forest, and “he had become the single most important person to an old woman who had never had children of her own but who knew from the moment she first held him in her arms and felt his heart against hers that he was where he should be . . . that he was home” (McClean, loc. 801). This part of the storyline subverts the notion that all women need to marry to be happy and give birth to be fulfilled; it also challenges the idea that being a biological parent is the only way to develop strong bonds with a child. McClean presents a compelling representation of an alternative family structure here. At the same time, the story intimates that for women, the pull of motherhood is a forceful one, and the most fulfilling way to spend one’s life. In the end, McClean’s novel provides much-needed ecological lessons to Caribbean audiences and to readers from outside the region—many of whom visit as tourists but never think about their environmental footprints. Her use of the specific figures of Papa Bois and Mama D’Lo—both hybrid in their physical

Social norms in Caribbean literature

35

forms—disputes notions of human beings and ‘culture’ as distinct from and superior to the non-human natural world. One is reminded of the adult works of such prominent Caribbean writers as Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott. In his epic poem Omeros (1990), Walcott highlights humankind as integral to earth’s ecological systems rather than promoting a vision of Western ‘civilization’ as an anthropocentric, conquering force lying in diametrical opposition to—and thus alienated from—a sensitive web of relationships between living things. The first section of Omeros features vivid personifications of the natural world: the wind brings news; brooks are talkative and waterfalls garrulous; eels sign their names in the sand; the sun sparks the river’s memory. Images of human life, flora, fauna, and landscape all seem to blend together, and readers are immersed in a space that contests the separation of “speaking,” “rational,” “intellectual” human beings and silent, inert nature—in a time before the “Great Chain of Being,” with its “vast filigree of lower and higher forms, from zoophytes to Godhead, with humankind’s place higher than beasts and a little less than angels” (Manes 20). And even though Walcott’s character Achille and the other fishermen chop down and “murder” trees to make canoes as the morning sun trickles down like “blood splashed on the cedars” (5), and the cedars, in turn, must “endure the thorns in [their] flesh” (6), emphasis is placed upon the fact that the men’s eyes fill with tears and they must steel themselves with shots of rum before cutting the trees. Further, they must use the trees in order to survive, and have a commitment to using no more than they need. Their activity stands in stark contrast to the 30-mile, “voracious, insatiable nets” of foreign trawlers, “dredging the banks the way others had mined / the archipelago for silver. New silver / was the catch” (300). The greed of fishing corporations from the Global North, devastatingly matched by the avarice of St. Lucian politicians who allow the exploitation of the island’s citizens as well as the natural environment, hold echoes of the imperial past. In the same way that the landscapes of the Americas were pillaged for silver and other precious metals, and the African shore was plundered for people considered to be property rather than subjects, the contemporary island is ransacked by profit-seekers from far-off places. Walcott, very much like McClean, contests the imperial ideology that the earth is simply matter, created solely for the material use of human beings. This androcentric viewpoint, which ecofeminist Judith Plant argues is deficient of “any cultural and spiritual connection with the land,” keeps human beings separated from the land as well as from each other through the rhetoric of “the so-called democratic right of the individual—‘It’s my right as a free citizen to take a deer [or tree] from the forest’” (123). But perhaps an even closer connection lies between McClean’s middle-grade novel and the speculative fiction of Nalo Hopkinson, who addresses environmental devastation of the non-human natural world in The New Moon’s Arms (2007). In that book, beings resembling both Irish selkies and African Mami Wata water spirits are gravely affected by a U.S. saline plant located on one of the story’s fictional islands. The process of salt production pollutes the water they live in and dramatically decreases the red snapper population, a food source for them and the local human residents. One of the human characters remarks that although the

36 Giselle Liza Anatol plant has promised to dilute the bittern (a by-product of the salt manufacturing process) by “300% with water and pipe it way out to sea,” it is simply dumping the undiluted bittern into the waters closest to the factory (Hopkinson 250). McClean’s book refers to “[u]neasy villagers” who “watched as roadside gutters overflowed and as water crept ever closer to their front steps and doors, and then shook their heads in dismay when they glanced over at the scorched hillsides that had not only endured seven months of unrelenting heat but had also suffered further abuse because of indiscriminate burning” (loc. 824–31). This realistic situation is depicted alongside renditions of the supernatural Mama D’Lo and Papa Bois, who eventually punish Migraine for “captur[ing], corrall[ing], and mistreat[ing] the children of this forest” (loc. 1477) by causing him to lose his grip on reality. The environmental message is spelled out with realist as well as fantastical prose; McClean speaks the lesson in as many languages as possible to get the point across to her young readers. The demonization of Migraine, a local figure, as opposed to the more obvious White American or European colonizer, serves to undercut dualistic thinking about Caribbean ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders,’ and instead condemns people of all complexions, socio-economic ranks, and nationalities who might fall victim to what Robert Marzec calls “the seductive call of liberal transnational global capitalism” (173). And McClean clearly celebrates “the singular local,” as opposed to a Great White Savior who comes from abroad. JV, an adolescent local, is the one who possesses the power “to actively resist contemporary movements to globalize the space of the world, movements that have the effect of annulling distance and difference” (Marzec 141). In the same way that she does not mechanically institute a stark border between ‘Us’/islanders of African descent who care for the environment and ‘Them’/White foreigners who destroy it, McClean also presents moderation—a type of inbetweenness—as the solution to the question of animal protection. The character of Mason, whose reasons for participating in the poaching scheme are explained by the book’s conclusion, espouses a belief that, “in the grand scheme of things, a little off-season hunting wasn’t such a big deal” (McClean, loc. 1484). The story proposes that hunting for food—and perhaps even for sport—are perfectly acceptable, while major-scale killing and the capture of protected species and exotic animals are “a lot more sinister” (loc. 1484). The attitude corresponds to traditional legends of Papa Bois, which attribute a certain amount of tolerance to him: “[H]e does not usually object to a reasonable ‘bag,’ [but] he does take exception to killing for killing sake, and to the wanton destruction of the forested heartland of our Island” (Besson 2). McClean’s Papa Bois also urges for a sense of equilibrium: “There must be balance or ruination is sure to follow” (loc. 1194). Although this ideology does not fit current Animal Studies theory, which is focused on animal advocacy, or the body of environmental scholarship that urges for a clearer continuum (or even heightened sense of ‘family’) between humans and animals, it corresponds with postcolonial criticism and its resistance to such connections:

Social norms in Caribbean literature 37 [A]sserting a continuum between “human beings” and “animal others” is problematic. Zoomorphism on the part of the colonisers has been a powerful tool to degrade the colonised, and a sense of an expanded family of human and nonhuman animals seems to link with claims of “bestiality” of the colonised and with racist discourses. (Bartosch 189) Making Papa Bois dogmatic about his commemoration of non-human life would not only fail to acknowledge this ideological violence enacted upon bodies of color, but risks equating the physical oppression of humans with the oppression of animals. This potentially “disrespects human suffering . . . For postcolonial ecocriticism, this is a fundamental impasse” (Bartosch 189–90). McClean’s book thus participates in a “green” literature movement that is “in the process of contesting, negotiating and re-evaluating the natural environment and human ethical duties towards it” (Bartosch 11), but also invested in re-evaluating the duties that environmentalists and ecocritics have to people of color and to challenging the epistemologies carried forth from colonialism. In The Protector’s Pledge, the characters from the community’s legends appear to both children and adults, boys and girls, women and men, and have significant influence on contemporary life. They do not just belong to the realm of naïve children or ignorant villagers who share stories in front of primeval fires. The border-crossing nature of Papa Bois’s and Mama D’Lo’s bodies, and their ability to alter shape, symbolize the fluidity of cultures and beliefs that McClean posits as necessary for the modern era. One might also read these hybrid characters as emblematic of the way the novel itself traverses boundaries in mainstream children’s book publishing by challenging Eurocentric norms and primacy in the public sphere, and eluding the traps of the conventional market by turning to online publishing. We must look forward to the next installment of the series to determine whether a greater fluidity of roles for girls and boys, and men and women, is part of a greater plan.

Notes 1

2

Early incarnations of European ‘children’s literature’ reveal clear didactic purposes: spreading Christianity across Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire; improving the child reader’s spiritual core and relationship with God through the Bible and religious texts; teaching manners to the elite; educating the middle- and working classes about their ‘place’ in the world; developing children’s intellect; fostering nationalism and sense of good citizenship; and the list goes on. Entertainment and creative development had a role in the works of a few outliers (e.g. Comenius’s Orbis Pictus), but became primary concerns much later in this long history. For more on the conditioning and socializing elements of writing for children, see Perry Nodelman’s The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature (2008). Barbara Rollock, a coordinator of children’s services at the New York Public Library and longtime member of the American Library Association (ALA), made this statement in 1987; it still rings true thirty years later. Throughout her career, Rollock sought to promote books with positive images of Black children, a project prompted by

38 Giselle Liza Anatol

3 4

5 6 7 8

Dr. Nancy Larrick’s challenge to editors and presses in “The All-White World of Children’s Books,” a 1965 article published in the Saturday Review: to seek out a wider range of representation in children’s literature by publishing more African American and other non-White writers. The “B” stands for bosse, or ‘hunchback’: her right shoulder is lower than the left. This concept is reinforced when the antagonist, an escaped convict and ringleader of the poachers, is described. Tricky Dixon, also referred to as “Migraine,” is a “sinisterlooking man whose full black beard could not mask the hard, mean face beneath” (McClean, loc. 1031). Rather than merely replacing one standard of beauty for another that simply privileges a different, but equally narrow, set of physical features, the author notes that the Nutmeg Princess’s “beauty flows from inside her soul” (n.p.). Because Haitian Kreyol is a primarily oral language, spellings vary widely. ‘Voodoo’ is commonly identified as the US/Americanized form of the word (and understanding of the belief system); other spellings include vodun, vadou, etc. For comparable examples, see Salnave Philippe-Auguste’s “Decorative Fruit Tree” (Williams 57) and “Magic Tree” by Fernand Pierre (Williams 88). According to Trinidadian folklore, douens are the spirits of unbaptized children who reside in wooded areas. Typically, they are unclothed except for large straw hats that hide their faces. Their most striking feature, however, is that their feet are turned backwards; when victims who follow them into the forest try to find their way home, the confusing footprints ensure that they will remain lost forever.

Works cited Anatol, Giselle Liza. “Introduction.” Reading Harry Potter: Critical Essays, edited by Giselle Liza Anatol. Greenwood P, 2003. ——. The Things That Fly in the Night: Female Vampires in Literature of the CircumCaribbean and African Diaspora. Rutgers UP, 2015. Bartosch, Roman. EnvironMentality: Ecocriticism and the Event of Postcolonial Fiction. Rodopi, 2013. Besson, Gérard. Folklore and Legends of Trinidad & Tobago. Paria Publishing, 1989. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994. Cullinan, Bernice E., in collaboration with Mary K. Karrer and Arlene M. Pillar. Literature and the Child. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981. Gyasi, Geosi. “Interview with Trinidadian Poet, Andre Bagoo.” Geosi Reads: A World of Literary Pieces, April 25, 2015, geosireads.wordpress.com/2015/04/25/interview-withtrinidadian-poet-andre-bagoo/. Accessed September 13, 2015. Hopkinson, Nalo. The New Moon’s Arms. Warner Books, 2007. Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. Routledge, 2010. Keens-Douglas, Richardo. The Nutmeg Princess. Annick P, 1992. Laughlin, Nicholas. “Douen Islands and the Art of Collaboration.” The Caribbean Review of Books, November 4, 2013, caribbeanreviewofbooks.com/2013/11/04/douen-islandsand-the-art-of-collaboration/. Accessed September 13, 2015. Manes, Christopher. “Nature and Silence.” The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. U of Georgia P, 1996, pp. 15–29. Marzec, Robert P. An Ecological and Postcolonial Study of Literature: From Daniel Defoe to Salman Rushdie. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. McClean, Danielle Y. C. The Protector’s Pledge: Secrets of Oscuros, Book 1. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015. Kindle E-Book.

Social norms in Caribbean literature 39 Nodelman, Perry. The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature. The Johns Hopkins UP, 2008. Plant, Judith. “Learning to Live with Differences: The Challenge of Ecofeminist Community.” Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature, edited by Karen J. Warren. Indiana UP, 1997, pp. 120–39. Rollock, Barbara. Black Authors and Illustrators of Children’s Books: A Biographical Dictionary. 3rd ed. Garland, 1999. Walcott, Derek. Omeros. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990. Williams, Sheldon. Voodoo and the Art of Haiti. Morland Lee, 1969.

2

Shadows pass the surface Decolonial (re)configurations of indigenous presence in Merle Collins’s The Colour of Forgetting Geoffrey MacDonald

Introduction Early on in The Colour of Forgetting (1995), Carib, the seer and keeper of indigenous memory on the fictional island of Paz, strides into a busy motorway, an artery of business interests, built during the robust imperialism of the late 19th century, and brings traffic to a halt (7); this irruption into capitalist modernity is an instance that connects the novel to decoloniality.1 Through Carib, and various other elements, Collins’s text questions dominant notions of settler modernity and creole indigeneity by emphasizing history and memory that extends beyond European colonization and turns away from Eurocentric capitalist heteropatriarchy. While critiques of settler colonialism in the Caribbean are well-established, recent scholarship on Caribbean indigeneity is interrogating the colonial logics that inform contemporary states, national identities, and regional history. Indigeneity has been used in the Caribbean largely as a process of indigenizing or creolizing first settler European and subsequently diasporic African or Asian peoples in a way that reproduces the terra nullius ideology under which colonial invaders justified the conquest of inhabited lands (Jackson 41; 60–61).2 Representations of indigenous presences in the Americas (including the Caribbean) are expressions of identity that contest colonialist discourse, “where analyses of colonization intersect with peoples who define themselves in terms of relation to land, kinship communities, native languages, traditional knowledges, and ceremonial practices,” and oppositional discourses that “disrupt the logics of colonialism that underwrite liberal democracies” (Byrd and Rothberg 3). I apply the term decoloniality in this chapter to signify a disruption that variously informs contemporary social, political, cultural, and economic relations in the Americas, and which effectively reroutes colonial epistemologies—including Christian fundamentalism, capitalism, gender binaries, and racialization. That is to say, I consider decoloniality to be a standpoint that moves beyond the expurgating trajectory in which national independence comfortably follows the “civilizing” mission of erasing indigenous peoples from the Caribbean in favor of the settler formations that displaced them; decoloniality instead dislodges neo/colonial authority in an attempt to establish new paradigms of relation in the Caribbean. Decoloniality, then, can be a social and political

(Re)Configurations of indigenous presence 41 practice—exploring indigeneity, supporting sovereignty movements, tracing lineage—but also a cultural and, specifically, literary maneuver. Decolonial textual practice decenters multiple hegemonies by, among other tactics, embracing indigenous knowledges of colonization and its attendant practices, such as gendering and economic exploitation. Collins’s novel traces the history of a culturally creolized family (descended from African and European blood, mixed with South Asian in the latter generations) that is torn apart by colonial, capitalist, and patriarchal social forces alongside a metaphysical narrative that signifies a persistent indigenous presence on its fictional, settler Caribbean island. The text uses hetero- and autodiegetic narration to provide a polyvocal rendering of this family history, and to focalize on women’s voices and struggles transgenerationally. Collins specifically tries to demonstrate the spiritual implications of dispossession as European patriarchal inheritance laws are linked to land enclosure, environmental phenomena, and popular resistance. The Colour of Forgetting stands apart from much traditional Caribbean anti-colonial or national literature by using indigenous presences to challenge those economic and gender systems inherited from colonial masters. Decolonial theory has emerged largely from Latin America since the turn of the 21st century (though it is informally aligned with feminist critics who challenge master narratives and Eurocentric theory, like Barbara Christian, Carole Boyce Davies, Gloria Anzaldúa, Leanne Simpson, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty)3 and has been most useful in rethinking the relationships between postcolonialism and indigeneity in settler contexts; more specifically, decoloniality confronts the “hegemonic Eurocentric paradigms that have informed western philosophy and sciences in the ‘modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system’ for the last 500 years” by locating contemporary economic and gender practices within a specific and incongruous colonial power matrix where “race, gender, sexuality, spirituality, and epistemology are not additive elements . . . but an integral, entangled, and constitutive part” of that system (Grosfoguel 213; 217). Writing half a century earlier, Frantz Fanon indicated that decolonizing intellectuals will often turn to precolonial histories or traditions “to rehabilitate that nation and serve as a justification for the hope of a future national culture” (169). Collins’s novel does something slightly different: it presents a challenge to a regional consciousness that does not acknowledge the coloniality of gender systems or economic practices by reaching into the smothered history of indigenous peoples in order to shift dominant paradigms. Whereas Fanon saw this turn to precolonialism as a part of anti-colonial “disturbance,” Collins is more properly participating in the “fighting phase” of literary resistance, “awakening” the people in a decolonial way (Fanon 178–79). Decoloniality resists imperial thinking and colonial doing (Mignolo “Geopolitics” 274), and is central not only to the ideologies of Collins’s novel but also to her critique of Caribbean economic and gender systems. The Colour of Forgetting questions the Eurocentric elements of arrivant Caribbean nations by resituating the social identities and political hegemonies of the region in relation to an indigenous presence and epistemology that surrounds her fictional setting of Paz and the lives of her characters.

42 Geoffrey MacDonald Borrowing from Kamau Braithwaite, Jodi A. Byrd groups the citizens of North America into three general categories: indigenous peoples, settlers, and arrivants (xix). These categories are challenging in a Caribbean context: the arrivants— Byrd uses the term to “signify those people forced into the Americas through the violence of European and Anglo-American colonialism and imperialism” (xix)— are now settlers, yet they are not direct colonizers. These groupings are nevertheless useful for positioning social locations, even if they are problematic in practice. In particular, I wish to emphasize the transcultural nature of Caribbean societies, in which indigenous peoples, colonial settlers, and arrivant citizens are profoundly co-mingled. Slippages in these categories create understandably complex societies that cannot be easily celebrated as culturally hybrid or exaggerated as racially antagonistic. However, this configuration provides an important context for gendered and economic oppressions that dominate social critiques of the contemporary Caribbean, and which are largely attributable to the colonial influence in the region. By centralizing Carib in the novel’s narrative, and her connections to the precolonial past, Collins establishes Paz as arrivant, subverting a sense of Shona Jackson’s formulation of creole indigeneity (64), and reminds readers that the Eurocentric oppressions of contemporary Paz are linked to the colonization of the island, no matter the identity of those meting them out.

Critical indigenous theory and the Caribbean Byrd has effectively advocated for the application of indigenous critical theory to social justice struggles within a White settler context (xvii), while Elizabeth Povinelli suggests that an indigenous standpoint “sharply confronts” colonial power (15). These scholarly interventions have dismantled claims to benevolence and multiculturalism often touted by contemporary settler colonies, particularly in North America. Indigenous critical theory, according to Byrd, “asks that the settler, native, and arrivant each acknowledge their own positions within empire and then reconceptualise space and history to make visible what imperialism and its resultant settler colonialisms and diasporas have sought to obscure” (xxx). This is relatively straightforward in the context of White-dominated settler colonialism. But when applied to a Caribbean context, the stakes are somewhat different. In a region that retains a matrix of social, cultural, political, and economic formations that are both the legacy of colonization and a product of its slayers, imperial logics have much greater nuance. The destruction of the plantocracy and the achievement of independence in the Caribbean have interrupted colonialism in ways that have not happened in North America or the South Pacific. Caribbean political leaders are variously descended from Africans, Asians, Europeans, and indigenous Americans. The erasure of indigenous Caribbean populations—either through mythologies of extinction or what Melanie J. Newton has identified as the indigenization of Afro-Caribbean people (“Returns” 118)—supports the interests of those nation-states “led by European-trained elites, and driven by modernizing ideologies of development and progress” (Forte 60). For example, the oil reserves in Trinidad mitigated a

(Re)Configurations of indigenous presence 43 recession in the 1970s to the benefit of certain classes of the population due to a capitalist framework introduced by European mercantilism and industrialization that had dispossessed the original inhabitants of their oil-rich lands some centuries before (Rogoziński 335). Newton condemns what she considers “a closed dialogue between the [creole] Caribbean and the colonizing ‘West,’ ” wherein a “specifically ‘Anglophone Caribbean indigenism’ has severed the assumed link between aboriginality and indigeneity” (“Returns” 110; 118); which is to say that creole indigeneity enables arrivants or even settlers to occupy indigenous lands and spaces without acknowledging indigenous sovereignty. Newton rightly indicates that this socalled modern position leaves out a great deal of the story when it comes not only to the history of the region, but also the methods through which the Caribbean has been and continues to be structured, both locally and globally. Independence, or the period after colonial interests divested themselves of direct political control over the islands in and coastal areas of the Caribbean Sea, is therefore considered incomplete. Tracing indigenous presences poses direct challenges to fundamental tenets of many (dominant) societies in the Americas. Perhaps that threat is behind the entrenchment of a Caribbean discourse of “extinction,” which Maximilian C. Forte argues is a part of an “ideological narrative of Western progress, of traditions succumbing to modernity, of ‘weaker’ peoples giving way to ‘stronger’ ones, of sloth giving way to industry” (49). Seen in this way, narratives—both colonial and creole—that erase indigenous peoples continue an oppressive practice grounded in White supremacy. Settler colonies like Canada and the United States relied on narratives of extinction to justify their presence on unceded lands. From the story of North America as terra nullius to mythologies of defeat and vanquishment, erasure has been central to settler colonial discourse. As Anne McClintock describes it, “the myth of the virgin land” involves both “gender and racial dispossession,” where land “passively await[s] the thrusting male insemination of history, language, and reason” and simultaneously “effect[ing] territorial appropriation” where “colonized peoples cannot claim aboriginal rights and White male patrimony is violently assured as the sexual and military insemination of an interior void” (30). Similarly, Marina Warner identifies the sexual exploitation and conquest of indigenous women wherein the “triple exchange—of land, of body, of name—institutes a new order of power” as evidence that “the acquisition of women and the settlement of new territories are inextricably linked” (103). Thus, patriarchy is fundamental to the colonial project. Erasure of indigenous peoples conceals the brutality of conquest, its horrors, and its injustice. Erasure further enables hegemony by silencing oppositional or distinctive social, political, cultural, and economic structural formations. Advocating that White supremacist capitalist patriarchy is the “way of the world” is made easier when one knows nothing of other models in the world. The concept that land is designated for exploitation, that certain peoples are backward or worthless, and there is only one true and mighty God, are uncomplicated in a context of erasure. Male domination and compulsory heterosexuality make sense in a system that naturalizes those

44 Geoffrey MacDonald roles, grounded in a historical nebula filled with European, Christian, and capitalist traditions. While Forte centralizes “progress” as “by far the most dominant strand [of extinction narratives] . . . that suited elite political and economic interests” (46), a similar argument can be made for colonial patriarchy. In a Caribbean context, multiple layers of colonial discourse and cultural resistance inform a socio-political matrix that is both creolized and fractured. Antagonisms are far more nuanced than in the White settler colonies: government leaders are drawn from political opposition to colonization, yet occupy European institutional structures, such as the Westminster system in the Anglophone states; anti-racism and Black power were central to decolonization movements, yet lightskin privilege remains, as does horizontal racism; European religions still dominate the region, but are blended with various Asian and African traditions in diaspora; sexuality has become an explicit component of popular cultural expression, yet queer and trans people are largely vilified within that arena (Chin 79). Newton’s use of the word “genocide” to describe the history of invasion and settlement in the Caribbean is unequivocal; she is specific that “genocidal history . . . forms a key basis of modern statehood” (“Race Leapt” 5). She pointedly links this history— and the ongoing marginalization of Kalinago, Taíno, Arawak, and Garifuna peoples in the present day—to the formation of the neocolonial settler state and argues that “rectifying the consequences of genocide is a collective responsibility” to ensure that “certain people” do not “get away with murder” (21). This statement historicizes contemporary social relations within a larger context that demands further struggle. Decoloniality rejects capitalism and gender oppression in the postcolonial state by insisting on the coloniality of their genealogy. Therefore, decoloniality is ideal for critiquing what Timothy S. Chin has identified as “the heterogeneous and contradictory” nature of the Caribbean (80).

Gender, colonialism, and the Caribbean literary response Whether due to the resurgence of an imperial dynamic through the rise of international capitalism, enforced by exploitative structural adjustment programs demanded by the IMF or similar institutions of globalized economic control, or the oppression of women and queer people resulting from what M. Jacqui Alexander has identified as the “forge[d] . . . continuity between . . . the White European heterosexual inheritance—and [creole] heteropatriarchy” (66), it is apparent that the vestiges of colonial economic and gender systems are active in the post-independence Caribbean. Alexander’s observation is crucial to contextualizing contemporary oppression: where White supremacist ideologies encourage a discourse of racialized backwardness to naturalize globalized inequalities—denouncing the “barbaric practices” of the global south, particularly in relation to women or homophobia, in comparison with the “enlightened freedom” of Euro-dominated countries—Alexander situates the challenges facing Caribbean societies in a process of “recolonization” (66). However, in spite of significant victories such as the emancipation of Africans from slavery, Asians from indentureship, from an indigenous perspective, the Caribbean has never been fully

(Re)Configurations of indigenous presence 45 decolonized. Indeed, global forces of the North Atlantic have thwarted the goals of national struggle, but so too has the localized embrace of capitalism, gender inequality, and heterosexism. A decolonial analysis resists these structures by dislodging them from Caribbean identities, which are reconfigured as arrivant in relation to an indigenous history and population, and associating them with a settler colonial power matrix (Mignolo, “Geopolitics” 8). Though she has been criticized for her defense of a hyper-masculine nationalist position within Jamaican culture, Carolyn Cooper makes a vital, though largely overlooked, point in the introduction to Noises in the Blood: the “duplicitous gender ideology that pervades Jamaican society is ultimately derived, via Victorian England, from Judeo-Christian theology” (10). Gender relations, and patriarchy, are therefore one of the chief grounds upon which colonial discourse remains hegemonic in Jamaica and, arguably, numerous other places in the Caribbean. Resituating gender and sexuality within a framework that predates Europe—or at least shifts European ways to influential rather than foundational roles—allows one to confront patriarchy without disregarding important anti-colonial work on other fronts. This is not to suggest that precolonial societies were necessarily matriarchal or had idealized gender relations; rather, the specific gender binary and hierarchy which dominates neo- and settler colonial polities is derived from the colonial matrix of power. I do not attempt to reclaim a flawless past, but rather suggest that colonization be analyzed through the multifaceted prism, identified by McClintock, where racialization, economic exploitation, and patriarchy, are “the formative categories of imperial modernity[,] . . . [which] come into being in historical relation to each other and emerge only in dynamic, shifting, and intimate interdependence” (61). McClintock’s assertion that patriarchy inheres in colonial conquest emerges in Mignolo’s formulation of the coloniality of power: “the interlocking underlying system . . . [is] kept together by two pillars . . . patriarchy and racism (Mignolo, “Further” 35, emphasis in original). Decoloniality, then, in the Caribbean (or indeed post/neocolonial) context, demands fundamental transformation of all racialized and gendered colonial vestiges. Central to this vision is the notion that Caribbean states are settler territories, life upon which pre-existed, and was radically different from, the European presence. Recent scholarship has focused on the status of Caribbean indigenous peoples and how they have been elided by European, African, and Asian interests. In the hegemonic narrative, the original residents of the islands that now make up the Caribbean are considered a vanquished people; their presence is more spectral than active, denounced as another example of Europe’s horrific behavior (even while postcolonial states themselves do little to reconcile those settler colonial relationships), and closed off as a regional tragedy that concluded in absolute defeat and extermination. Yet, Caribbean cultural representations4 have been able to resist this narrative of absence by using the figure of the indigène in complex ways. In poetry, for example, Olive Senior makes explicit links between colonial conquest and capitalist exploitation in her poem “Meditation on Yellow” (1994) by situating the hardships of a cleaner at a resort in relation to the arrival of insatiable Europeans in the Caribbean. Recent fiction by diasporic authors, in

46 Geoffrey MacDonald particular, has centralized the presence of indigenous characters as they set out to confront social inequalities that preoccupy the post-independence period.5 In addition to The Colour of Forgetting, Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), Pauline Melville’s The Ventriloquist’s Tale (1997), MarieElena John’s Unburnable (2006), and Andrea Gunraj’s The Sudden Disappearance of Seetha (2010) construct protagonists that are indigenous and are texts that can be connected to a decolonial social and political critique. These novels challenge patriarchal practices foremost and do so through characters that either are expressly indigenous or are ambiguously racialized as or affiliated with indigenous peoples; they are decolonial because they challenge colonial and creole oppression and embody alternative systems in an indigenous presence or character. I focus here on Collins’s novel because its indigenous framework directly undermines the colonial paradigms that haunt its present-day Caribbean society. The Colour of Forgetting uses an indigenous presence to interrogate the colonial vestiges of the independent Caribbean state and society, and in particular the capitalist and patriarchal formations that remain in place. Thinking about indigenous peoples situates dominant structures within an extended framework that problematizes their hegemony; it allows for a substantially transformative discourse that identifies colonial practices in postcolonial spaces. As Collins’s novel demonstrates, shifting one’s gaze from a conquest-slavery-independence model to an indigenous-settler-creole one allows for the decentering of European values and structures and exposes the inequalities that have resulted from their supremacy.

Literary interventions and textual resistance: The Colour of Forgetting Literary culture is one realm that effectively shifts gazes and decentres dominant values, and raises difficult national and transnational questions about identity, society, and marginalization. The aesthetics of what Carole Boyce Davies so judiciously identified as “uprising textualities” are based in the problematic of disruption, often relying on challenging forms and figurative linguistics to reflect the complexity of a social issue (66). In this way, literary texts undermine hegemony by focusing on the marginal, enhancing the symbolic value of natural phenomena, and playing with the metaphysical. Texts that impel a contemporary indigenous presence into the regional imaginary of the Caribbean have thusly questioned dominant paradigms. The Colour of Forgetting decenters the “nativist” configuration, against which Newton argues so firmly, by linking a critique of capitalist and patriarchal hegemonies to an indigenous presence. Like Collins’s other works, it is textually grounded in the Caribbean. As its title implies, it is a novel about the power of memory to confront the injustice of settler regimes that reproduce colonial inequalities. The protagonist Carib—“who may or may not have been a descendant by blood” and whose racial ambiguity is referenced in the “possibl[e] . . . colour of her face” (Collins 4; 135)—insists on destabilizing European absolutes through

(Re)Configurations of indigenous presence 47 incantation, traditional healing, prophecy, storytelling, and incisive legal critique. The novel has received relatively little critical or popular attention—two reviews, a handful of scholarly articles—and is the only work by Collins currently out of print. The novel’s use of indigenous presences is indeed unusual for a Grenadian text: by far, the works that engage with questions of first peoples depict Dominica or Guyana, and indigenous communities in the popular imagination are confined to those territories, as well as St. Vincent, Trinidad, or Belize. Grenada is usually overlooked in discussions of contemporary aboriginal rights. When they are acknowledged at all, those Kalinago are referenced in relation to their “annihilation,” which culminated in a collective suicide when they pitched themselves off the cliffs at Le Morne de Sauteurs, now Sauteurs Point (Newton, “Race Leapt” 13), translated as Leapers Hill in English, the name used in Forgetting. The Grenadian narrative, therefore, is one of extinction, even if the location is considered a “floating symbol of colonial injustice” (Newton, “Race Leapt” 13). However, Collins’s novel intervenes in challenges facing Grenada and other contemporary states in the Caribbean by co-mingling injustices of past and present. Collins achieves this act of resistance through an emphasis on historical memory, land rights, and social injustice in the modern/neocolonial state. Susan Meltzer argues that the novel “positions itself at the point of rupture between the linear narratives of the new imperia and a mythopoetic historical consciousness that is based, at least in part, on the life-death-rebirth cycle of African spirituality” (85). The novel also gestures toward what Kimberley J. Palmer calls the “projects of memory” in indigenous Caribbean communities, where, for instance, the Garifuna of St. Vincent must “remember and reconstruct” cultural practices in the face of genocidal attacks (82). Memory is embodied in Carib, who represents indigenous and African modes of thought and consciousness, exemplified by her treatment of a village boy whose name is Thunder and who fears thunder: “The thunder he was hearing was the thunder inside him. Wasn’t his alone, but the spirits letting him hear it and it would only stop when he found a way of understanding the spirit that lived inside him. ‘You could only help,’ said Carib, ‘by telling him everything you know . . .’ ” (Collins 14). The subsequent narration of the novel’s middle third, which adopts a voice very similar to Carib’s and the boy’s grandmother Mamag—Meltzer calls it “a Creole-like grapholect . . . that seeks to mimic the sound of island speech” (88)—suggests that memory and oral histories are key to healing. Carib and Mamag’s orality, which signifies the connections between African storytelling traditions and a custom used by indigenous peoples across the Americas to preserve and transmit cultural practices, demonstrates decoloniality in the contemporary milieu. At another point in the text, Carib “sits there on the gravestone and what fills her head is the sound of screaming in the hot silence. After all this time, after all these years, they are still screaming. They down there under the cliff where they jump from, she thinking and muttering, and people forget them” (177). Carib impels indigenous peoples into the national consciousness of Paz, their refusal to be “forgotten”—and the desire of “the people” to forget them—links present-day hegemonies in the text to coloniality.

48

Geoffrey MacDonald

Chief among those hegemonies is the question of land. In all settler contexts, imperial conquest is achieved by erasing the land rights of the indigenous peoples. Even in the independent settlements of the Caribbean, the legacy of colonialism persists and land remains a contested space with resources benefiting multinational capital rather than local economies (Rogoziński 348). Collins symbolizes this contest in multiple ways. As Carib contemplates the landscape of Paz, she comes across a plant called Mortelle: “Mortelle, it never die. When people having confusion over boundary in land, once one could remember where mortelle plant as a boundary, no need to shout. Confusion done. Mortelle root never die” (180). Mortelle, paradoxically meaning death but also a truncation of the plant’s usual name, “Immortelle,” comes to represent an indigenous sensibility and practice that applies to contemporary land confusion. Like the indigenous population of Paz (and Grenada) Mortelle is both dead and eternal, signifying an ambiguity that Collins repeats throughout the text. The primary storyline Collins uses to critique the colonial influence on the modern state concerns a land confusion that consumes and sunders the Malheureuse family. As Sandra Campos suggests, “Collins raises issues related to the inheritance system and to a woman’s entitlement to land ownership, which became negatively affected by British colonialism in Caribbean societies” (116). After the mountainland setting of the novel is divided equally among the five children of Oldman Malheureuse, two men in the family, Son-Son and his foreign-educated nephew Dolphus, determine that the territory must be redistributed only among “lawful” children born in wedlock or their descendants. “The unlawful had no place. No rights” (Collins 25). Here the law, which insists upon Christian marriage in order for a child to be considered legal, virtually erases members of the family, vanquishing the resistors of Euro-Christian traditions and delivering their land to those in compliance with colonial hegemonies. Most of the family does not conform to this hegemonic structure, though in many cases the children of Oldman live with partners and raise their own children together. However, anyone born “outside” marriage is dispossessed of the family land. One grandchild, Ti-Moun, is even beaten when he refuses to leave his home. Here Collins uses narrative focus, plotting, and interiority to demonstrate the incongruousness of laws designed by colonial masters. The arrival of Son-Son and Dolphus to survey the land links neocolonial practice to European invasion. Cassandra, wife of Ti-Moun, Son-Son’s “illegitimate” nephew, reflects on their approach to the land in a way that emphasizes the neocolonial nature of their arrival: Afterwards, walking back in her mind over the unfolding of the day, Cassandra feel she could remember that she know something was wrong the moment she see Uncle Son-Son through the window with the stranger. It must have been the way they stand up down by the mango tree looking around and shaking their heads and talking, Uncle Son-Son lifting his hand and measuring the land with his finger, pointing right around. The stranger,

(Re)Configurations of indigenous presence 49 arms akimbo on the sides of his grey flannel jacket, turning right around, planting his feet and looking and nodding. (Collins 39, emphasis added) Son-Son and Dolphus, whose drive to own the property is in keeping with what Eric Cheyfitz has identified in the U.S. as the “dream of property-holding individualism” (63), are described as invader and informant. Dolphus is dressed in the foreign fabric of the colonizer and both are alienated from the land they are observing by their association with coloniality. Cassandra’s critical gaze undermines neocolonial exploitation and exposes the coloniality of her invaderidentified in-laws. The description of Dolphus as “stranger,” coupled with Cassandra’s intuitive mistrust of their visit, signals a decolonial stance. This moment, filled with colonial foreboding, embraces perspectival decoloniality by reinforcing an arrivant and indigenous positionality and vision in the text. Observations by Mamag, Son-Son’s sister and opponent, further demonstrate how Collins constructs the land confusion as an instance where contemporary injustice is linked to a gendered coloniality, with specific reference to displacement: “Land confusion, Carib used to say, is not easy confusion, you know, in this country here, land is like life and the way we inherit this piece, that piece, look at it, the blue crying red in between” (22). The imposition of Christianized legality upon the Malheureuse family, and the women in particular, continues the patriarchal practices used to colonize the Kalinago. The concerns, struggles, and needs of Mamag, Cassandra and other evicted family members are seen as locked in the same battle the indigenous inhabitants once faced: “Law is law. Son-Son, one of the lawful heirs to the Malheureuse property, says the law should be respected. And his sister Mamag must, he thinks, be taught some respect” (49). In perfect colonial logic, the law is enforced when it suits and benefits the dominant party, and the novel’s decoloniality is emphasized when the women (and some men) in the family rise up against the colonial implications of Christian heterosexism. Son-Son’s antagonism toward Mamag, and her subsequent calling him out publicly (by pointing out that the whole family is “outside” to their White slave master ancestor), delineates the patriarchal aspect of neocolonial oppression (50). In order to achieve justice, the “law” must be discarded in favor of a political economy that reflects the practices of the people, one that can be more fully realized through a decolonial perspective that blends and transforms the creole one. While the Malheureuse family conflict is largely hinged on White colonialBlack creole relations which Collins attempts to delink from the colonial power matrix, the novel does not ignore the presence of Asian-Caribbean arrivants or the multicultural tensions of contemporary Paz. Ned, husband of Cassandra’s daughter Willive and Thunder’s father, is, like most characters in the novel, racially ambiguous; however, Willive notes that Thunder has soft hair “from the Indian in you father” (100). In contrast to the persistent indigenous presence of Carib, and in accordance with the general periphery of Asian-Caribbean representations,

50 Geoffrey MacDonald Ned is muted: “It was as if he had locked himself inside of something called silence and thrown away the key” (106). Ned’s reluctance to speak echoes the hesitancy among arrivants to confront the ways in which Indo- and Afro-Caribbean identity continues, according to Jackson, to be “collectively woven with state power” (47), where horizontal racism ultimately benefits transnational capital just as it did White planters under colonial domination. Once Ned breaks his silence, he and Willive become joint opponents of government policy, signifying the possibilities of cross-cultural solidarity. In many ways, the novel glosses over Afro-Asian racialized antagonisms by emphasizing overall affiliation through the intersection of arrivant and indigenous interests in Paz as a pathway toward decoloniality. Narration emphasizes the novel’s decolonial ideologies. As the narrator shifts between standard and creolized English, from the past to the present, the reader is immediately introduced to a complex and destabilized environment where the wisdom of women, indigenous people, and children is given a focal role. These voices evoke an ancestral prophecy spoken by Carib: “Blood in the north, blood to come in the south, and the blue crying red in between” (3). This phrase is repeated throughout the text and operates on multiple levels to challenge dominant orthodoxies. Carib’s professed indigeneity extends beyond her name. Warner suggests that historically, indigenous women have been represented in a liminal space: “[w]omen, through their bodies, become the hyphen between the forest and the morne and the habitation/house/plantation, either by force or by choice” (105). Carib’s liminality elides the European, opposing a colonial narrative of erasure, in favor of indigenous and arrivant ambiguity. As she incants the words above for the first time—a chant which signifies trans-historical events such as slavery, conquest, and political struggle through reference to navigation, water, bloodshed, tears—the narrator situates Carib at Leapers Hill, above a sea described as “particularly angry sometimes, churned up with remembering” (Collins 4), a description which refuses the consignment of the Kalinago to annihilation and instead breaths physical and figurative life into them. The indigenous is therefore present as both spatially and temporally oppositional in this text, embodied and extant, and dislodged from the plantocracy. By embodying prophecy and spiritual awareness that goes beyond the European arrival in the Caribbean, and which is extended into the current political situation, Carib represents a new and continued role for indigenous peoples and practices in the contemporary Caribbean. In the final chapters of the book, Collins depicts a deadly firefight between the government police and various citizens at a gathering to discuss land reform, where “land confusion” is infused by patriarchal colonial law and the inequalities of globalized capitalism. This scene arguably represents the direct participatory “grassroots democracy” proposed by the New Jewel Movement after the Grenadian Revolution (Phillip 117), which much of Collins’s oeuvre grapples with, but it is also a broader indictment of the Eurocentrism of liberal “democracy,” where international corporate interests are satisfied against the will of masses of people. The narrator says of the gathering: “No village wanted to have a single representative in Paz City. Everybody wanted to be there”

(Re)Configurations of indigenous presence 51 (Collins 165). As Carib observes and comments on this gathering, readers can contrast a participatory democracy with, for example, the Westminster system of representation adopted in many Anglophone Caribbean countries. The dissatisfaction and marginalization faced by many citizens is challenged by the mobilization of the people in the novel, and the structures of participation align with indigenous political practices. By indicting a European political system, and overwhelming it with a decolonial uprising, Collins reveals how indigenous sensibilities interrogate colonial paradigms. Carib’s observations evoke not only the events in Grenada but also indigenous knowledge, while the gathering itself— as it is seized away from government control—echoes precolonial political structures in both Africa and the Americas, where community decisions are made at a gathering of the people and tribal leaders. In the Indigenous North American context, Keith Carlson discusses the traditional practices of a Stó:lõ Coast Salish community whose political authority rested in a gathering of extended family networks; while Dominic Fortescue documents the oppositional role of the community in Ghana, where political outcomes are determined through precolonial gatherings he identifies as “the Accra crowd” (349). In Collins’s narration, “[t]he intended conference of village representatives became one big, open market forum for debate and discussion among various people. They stood in the market talking and shouting, and targeting the political leaders for abuse” (165). Cooper’s assessment of the novel underscores the notion that this text offers a decolonial praxis of democracy, “particularly for those long-memoried peasant folk who never quite believe the grandiloquent rhetoric of politicians” (“Sense” 176). Collins constructs a setting that challenges dominant political authorities and grounds the voices of the people in a gathering that marginalizes capitalist formations and points specifically to ways of knowing and doing that predate European domination. A powerful metaphor Collins uses to represent a contemporary indigenous presence emerges in her treatment of an active underwater volcano called Kickem-Ginny that lives just off the coast of Paz and over which a ferry to the sister island of Eden passes. The narrator evokes the complications of a marginalized specter struggling to be felt in the present, with a little help from the wisdom of elders: Sometimes an old body might tense with the habit [of passing over Kick-emGinny]. But by and by everyone forgets where the spot is. Sometimes they pass right over, and a young body, with the taunting voice of a spirit she cannot control, would ask, that place in the water where they say the volcano does kick up, the place they call Kick-em-Ginny, where is it exactly? All-you sure it exist? The older heads smile, exchange glances. You better leave Kickem-Ginny alone. (205) The scene is set for Kick-em-Ginny to erupt and irrupt, which occurs as a ferry carrying Carib and other passengers is gripped by an unseen force. Using the

52 Geoffrey MacDonald volcanic imagery, Collins is able to visually associate land with history and memory, but also with a resistant insistence on an ancient presence. As the boat “lurches” over a portion of water, a woman warns the group to “brace youself,” and Carib shouts “Kick-em-Ginny!” (210). Carib once again links the environment with legend and memory, while the ambiguous and knowing responses of the local passengers speak to the absent presence of indigenous peoples in the Caribbean. As the skipper of the ferry tries to allay the fears of his passengers by remarking that “‘[v]olcano, spirit, same thing,’ ” he ironically points to the volcano’s spectral power: spirits in this text are never dead, particularly where Carib is concerned. Collins associates Kick-em-Ginny with memory—the chapter is entitled “KickEm-Ginny Remembering”—and deftly uses ambiguity to reflect questions of indigenous peoples in Caribbean space. “The sea is quiet. Blue but almost green. So blue you can’t look down and see anything below its surface. Nothing but the blue-green and the sun glinting golden silver back into your eyes” (209). There are multiple layers to this failure to see what lies beneath. On the one hand, Collins is analyzing a traditional inability to “see” the truths of life in the Caribbean by foreign tourists from colonial metropoles—blinded by sandy beaches and glittering seascapes—but, on the other, also constructing a trickster landscape that protects its existence in the face of historical eradication and genocide. The volcano doesn’t reveal itself, but is nevertheless felt in the lurch of the boat and Carib’s assertion that ash and lava remain alive, if unseen, beneath the surface of the water. The volcano therefore stands in for indigenous memory in a way that infiltrates the present without subscribing to dominant expectations about identity or reason. If the Malheureuse family conflict enacts the inequalities of a capitalist system inherited from colonial patriarchy, then Carib’s involvement in that narrative contests that system through indigenous interrogations of land “ownership.” Land rights and male expropriation are persistent conflicts in the novel, and Carib’s scenes in the text expand the reader’s context for the significance of land. I must go. Must walk. Make a circle round the land, you hear. Almost. Cut it in two with the walking. Walk through the heart. Heart hard there in the middle even though the breadfruit ripe and soft. Forgotten and drownded. Look at that, eh! They moaning. They crying. Here and over there. Everywhere. (178) Land is rendered, as McClintock describes, with breadfruit acting as a gendered metaphor, evoking a feminized body, tender and hardened, colonized and resistant. After the incident on the ferry boat by Kick-em-Ginny, an anonymous speaker cautions that “[i]s the amount of evil that about. Is a lot, a lot of blood that shed in this Paz here over the years, you know. Not only today. From before slavery times to today” (213). The subtle use of “before slavery times” is an important gesture: the ever-present outrage of the spirits thus links invasion and conquest to contemporary inequalities.6

(Re)Configurations of indigenous presence 53

Conclusion: memory in the present, vision for the future Collins has constructed a story wherein the setting and the characters are, to use Grace Nichols’s phrasing, long-memoried; contemporary social struggles are situated within an inheritance of colonial patriarchy. Her novel acknowledges the complexities and ambiguities of multicultural Caribbean societies, drawing together inequalities based on historical injustice—conquest, slavery, indentureship—and pulling them into a single matrix. By (re)creating an island where African and Indian creolization and American indigeneity churn in a cauldron of neo/colonial economic and gender oppression, and where the European way is rendered alien, Collins contributes to a new way of thinking about social justice in the Caribbean, one that is grounded in seeing a more comprehensive set of relations among indigenous peoples, settlers, and arrivants in order to mend a situation where political independence has been undermined by the retention of colonial gender and economic systems. Jackson looks to the acknowledgement of indigenous presences in the Caribbean as key to the practice of ongoing decolonization: “If the first significant intellectual leap in understanding . . . has been to transform the negative connotations of Creole as loss to Creole as cultural retention for Blacks and also Indians, the next leap must be in understanding how creolization processes literally and figuratively clear the ground upon which they place new, indigenous subjects” (74). One cannot stop at understanding the erasures of creolization, but must shift the paradigm to decolonize the tensions among arrivants, settlers, and indigenous peoples and seek ways how they can be combined to resist imperialism, capitalism, and patriarchy.

Notes 1

2

3

I use decolonial rather than postcolonial primarily because I agree with terminological critiques of “post,” which situate it within Euro-modern concepts of progress and development; postcolonialism further suggests that coloniality has ended, which hegemonizes neocolonial and settler colonial relations still in place. As Walter Mignolo argues, “[c]oloniality is still with us: there is no ‘post’ from decolonial perspectives” (“Further” 21). Cf. Carole Boyce Davies, “From Post-Colonialism to Uprising Textualities,” or Emma LaRocque, “Insider Notes: Reframing the Narrative,” When the Other Is Me: Native Resistance Discourse 1850-1990 (U of Manitoba P, 2010). I moreover, and perhaps more importantly, appreciate decoloniality’s emphasis on departing from colonial paradigms while simultaneously identifying race and gender as equally inherent to dominating structures (Mignolo, “Further” 35). As most scholarship on the Caribbean acknowledges, cultural or racial designations are problematic. Jackson includes African- and Asian-descended people in the term “creole” in order to distinguish them from indigenous populations and in spite of the fact that Indo-Caribbean peoples typically refer to themselves as Indian and distinct from creole, which is a largely African and European hybridity (46–47). Following Jackson and Byrd, I use the following formulation with the strenuous caveat that no grouping of peoples is without fluid boundaries: settler (European), creole/arrivant (African and Asian), indigenous (American: Taíno, Carib, Arawak, Garifuna, Kalinago). See my discussion of Byrd below. Mignolo has acknowledged this connection in his “Further Thoughts.”

54 Geoffrey MacDonald 4 5

6

Though my focus here is on literature, cultural expression ought not to be limited to these forms; indeed, oral, cinematic, performative, musical, and visual arts are equally significant to decolonial aesthetics. Perhaps the diasporic positionality (and feminist sensibilities) of certain writers allows them to reconsider creole indigeneity, which is, as Jackson points out, so integral to a nationalist consciousness that insists creolization was built on the backs of Afro and Indo Caribbean labour (47). The novel is largely silent in attempting to re/construct a precolonial past, which may be a symptom of the figurative narration, the fictionalized setting, or a lack of historical information on Kalinago peoples; this indeterminacy might also be considered as a political gesture to avoid yet another outsider’s perspective on indigenous culture. Collins’s use of Carib’s presence may therefore be deliberately ambiguous.

Works cited Alexander, M. Jacqui. “Erotic Autonomy as a Politics of Decolonization: An Anatomy of Feminist and State Practice in the Bahamas Tourist Economy.” Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, edited by Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty. Routledge, 1997, pp. 63–100. Boyce Davies, Carole. “‘From Post-Coloniality’ to Uprising Textualities.” Black Women, Writing, and Identity: Migrations of the Subject. Routledge, 1994, pp. 80–112. Byrd, Jodi A. Introduction. Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism, by Byrd. U of Minnesota P, 2011. Byrd, Jodi A. and Michael Rothberg. “Between Subalternity and Indigeneity: Critical Categories for Postcolonial Studies.” Interventions, vol. 31, no. 1, 2011, pp. 1–12. Campos, Sandra. “Community and Continuity: Reading Merle Collins’s The Colour of Forgetting.” MaComère: Journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers, vol. 5, 2002, pp. 114–21. Carlson, Keith. “Familial Cohesion and Colonial Atomization: Governance and Authority in a Coast Salish Community.” Native Studies Review, vol. 19, no. 2, 2010, pp. 1–42. Cheyfitz, Eric. “‘What Is an Indian?’ Identity Politics in United States Federal Indian Law and American Indian Literatures.” Ariel, vol. 35, no. 1–2, 2004, pp. 59–80, ariel.ucalgary.ca/ariel/index.php/ariel/article/view/3889/3826. Accessed October 17, 2016. Chin, Timothy S. “‘Bullers’ and ‘Battymen’: Contesting Homophobia in Black Popular Culture and Contemporary Caribbean Literature.” Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles, edited by Thomas Glave, 1997, Duke UP, 2008, pp. 78–96. Collins, Merle. The Colour of Forgetting. Random House, 1995. Cooper, Carolyn. “Introduction: Oral/Sexual Discourse in Jamaican Popular Culture.” Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender, and the ‘Vulgar’ Body of Jamaican Popular Culture, by Cooper. Duke UP, 1995. ——. “ ‘Sense Make Befoh Book’: Grenadian Popular Culture and the Rhetoric of Revolution in Merle Collins’s Angel and The Colour of Forgetting.” Arms Akimbo: Africana Women in Contemporary Literature, edited by Janice Lee Liddell and Yakini Belinda Kemp. UP of Florida, 1999, pp. 176–88. Fanon, Frantz. “On National Culture.” The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington, 1963, Penguin Classics, 2001, pp. 166–90. Forte, Maximilian C. “Extinction: Ideologies against Indigeneity in the Caribbean.” Southern Quarterly, vol. 43, no. 4, 2006, pp. 46–69.

(Re)Configurations of indigenous presence 55 Fortescue, Dominic. “The Accra Crowd, the Asafo, and the Opposition to the Municipal Corporations Ordinance, 1924-26.” Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, vol. 24, no. 3, 1990, pp. 348–75. Tandfonline, doi:10.1080/00083968.1990.10803866. Grosfoguel, Ramón. “The Epistemic Decolonial Turn: Beyond Political-Economy Paradigms.” Cultural Studies, vol. 21, no. 2–3, 2007, pp. 211–23. Tandfonline, doi:10.1080/ 09502380601162514. Gunraj, Andrea. The Sudden Disappearance of Seetha. Vintage, 2010. Jackson, Shona N. Creole Indigeneity: Between Myth and Nation in the Caribbean. U of Minnesota P, 2012. John, Marie-Elena. Unburnable. Reprint ed., Amistad, 2007. Kincaid, Jamaica. The Autobiography of My Mother. Farrar Straus Giroux, 1996. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. Routledge, 1995. Meltzer, Susan. “Decolonizing the Mind: Recent Grenadian Fiction.” Small Axe, vol. 11, no. 1 pp. 83–94. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/216421. Melville, Pauline. The Ventriloquist’s Tale. New ed., 1997, Bloomsbury P, 1998. Mignolo, Walter D. “Geopolitics of Sensing and Knowing: On (De)Coloniality, Border Thinking and Epistemic Disobedience.” Postcolonial Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, 2011, pp. 273–83. Tandfonline, doi: 10.1080/13688790.2011.613105. ——. “Further Thoughts on (De)Coloniality.” Postcoloniality-Decoloniality-Black Critique: Joints and Fissures, edited by Sabine Broeck and Carsten Junker. Campus Verlag, 2014, pp. 21–52. Newton, Melanie J. “Returns to a Native Land: Indigeneity and Decolonization in the Anglophone Caribbean.” Small Axe, vol. 17, no. 2, 2013, pp. 108–22. Project MUSE, doi:muse.jhu.edu/article/514073. ——. “‘The Race Leapt at Sauteurs’: Genocide, Narrative, and Indigenous Exile from the Caribbean Archipelago.” Caribbean Quarterly, vol. 60, no. 2, 2014, pp. 5–28. Palmer, Kimberley J. “Performing Resistance: Memory and the Mobilization of AfroIndigenous Identity for Social Change in St. Vincent.” Caribbean Quarterly: A Journal of Caribbean Culture, vol. 60, no. 2, 2014, pp. 76–87. Tandfonline, doi:10.1080/ 00086495.2014.11671890. Phillip, Nicole Laurine. Women in Grenadian History: 1783–1983. U of the West Indies P, 2010. Povinelli, Elizabeth A. “The Governance of the Prior.” Interventions, vol. 13, no. 1, 2011, pp. 13–30. Tandfonline, doi:10.1080/1369801X.2011.545575. Rogoziński, Jan. A Brief History of the Caribbean: From the Arawak and the Carib to the Present. Rev. ed. Plume P, 2000. Senior, Olive. “Meditation on Yellow.” Gardening in the Tropics. Insomniac P, 2005. Warner, Marina. “Siren/Hyphen; Or, the Maid Beguiled.” New Left Review, vol. 1, no. 223, 1997, pp. 101–13, newleftreview.org/I/223/marina-warner-siren-hyphen-or-the-maidbeguiled. Accessed March 25, 2016.

3

Acts of translanguaging and marooning as forms of resistance in French Caribbean literature Paula Prescod

Introduction The literary movement Créolité (Creoleness) started with the publication of Éloge de la créolité (In Praise of Creoleness), co-authored by Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant in 1989.1 Créolité germinated as an extension of Césaire’s Négritude and Glissant’s Antillanité (Caribbeanness).2 Bernabé described the Creoleness movement as being in the same line of descent as Négritude and Caribbeanness (35). In their manifesto In Praise of Creoleness the triumvirate advocates the recognition of Creole identity as one that rejects purism. They further call for a return to Creole, lost in the “deep ravine between a written expression pretending to be universalo-modern and traditional Creole orality enclosing a great part of our being” (Bernabé et al. 96). They see French Caribbean writers as being confined in a stage of “preliterature,” a state of exteriority which makes them culturally dependent on French values in their writing practices. Building on Césaire’s Négritude, considered by the trio to be ante-Creole (rather than anti-Creole), “a baptism, the primal act of . . . restored dignity,” they see Césaire’s movement as similar to that of Europeanness, exterior to the Caribbean reality albeit on a different level, since it imposed on Caribbean writers in its own way “its keys, its codes, its numbers:” “Négritude imposed itself then as a stubborn will of resistance trying quite plainly to embed our identity in a denied, repudiated, and renounced culture” (Bernabé et al. 80). Négritude imposes an exteriority of aspirations “to mother Africa, mythical Africa, impossible Africa” and the exteriority of self-assertion “we are Africans” (Bernabé et al. 82). Creoleness, therefore, allows the authors to rethink their relationship with Négritude and Europeanness, which they refer to as “incumbent monsters” (80). Creoleness, “the best chance for their repressed authenticity” (106), allows the Caribbean writer to perceive the human grandeur of the djobeurs. To grasp the depth of life in Morne Pichevin. To understand the vegetable markets. To elucidate the functioning of the tale tellers. To accept again without any judgment our “dorlis,” our “zombis,” our “chouval-twa-pat,” “soukliyan.” To adopt the

Translanguaging and marooning 57 language of our towns, of our cities. To explore our American Indian, Indian, Chinese, and Levantine origins, and find their poundings in our heartbeats. To enter in our “pitts,” in our games of “grennde,” and in all this old blacks’ business viewed a priori as vulgar. (101, italics in original) In no uncertain terms, Confiant has heeded this call in his works. Through his narrative discourse and his characters, Confiant participates in the very manifestation of the literary bilingualism he advocates and, in so doing, avoids diglossic pain which, according to the manifesto, generally results from refusing one’s bilingualism (Bernabé et al. 87). Not surprisingly, therefore, Creole flourishes in Confiant’s Ravines du devant-jour. On the other hand, Glissant’s Caribbeanness is perceived by the militants of the Creoleness movement as a geopolitical concept, “the only process of Americanization of Europeans, Africans, and Asians in the Caribbean Archipelago” (Bernabé et al. 93). Needless to say, their appreciation of Glissant’s Caribbeanness appears to be particularly selective for they maintain that it does not englobe Créolisation or Creoleness for that matter, and that it “says nothing of the human situation” of the territories concerned (Bernabé et al. 94). I shall return to the transformation of the Caribbeanness vision, made by Glissant himself, into the Tout-monde philosophy, below. Glissant’s concept of Caribbeanness does in fact embrace that of multiple roots and plural identities, captured under the idea of the quest for Caribbean identities, which subsumes an identité-relation—the need to understand that one’s identity is built with the Other—or an identitérhizome3 where different types of roots co-exist and come together without stifling each other but rather intermingling with, and reinforcing, one another (Glissant, Poetics 22). In fact, Glissant himself stresses: “it is neither by force nor by concept that we shall protect these cultures, but by the representation of the total-world, that is by the experienced necessity of this fact: that all cultures need all other cultures” (loose translation (ltr),4 Glissant, Introduction 133). Glissant’s writings are driven by the philosophy of the imaginaire des langues and language representation: “We can no longer write a language in a monolingual fashion. We must take into consideration des imaginaires des langues” (ltr, Glissant, Introduction 84). To him, the very way in which we speak our own language, in an unreceptive or in an open manner . . . is not a matter of science, of knowledge about languages, it is a question of imaginaire des langues. (ltr, Glissant in Gauvin 19) In this contribution, I examine what drives the linguistic choices made by Confiant and Glissant in their 1993 novels Ravines du devant-jour and Tout-monde respectively. In the first section, I explore whether their linguistic choices can be seen as reflecting Césaire’s (Réponse) call to “put on the maroon act” (an enactment I refer to as translanguage marooning) in response to the constraints besetting

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literary creation among French Caribbean writers. The concept of translanguage marooning is viewed as a way of resisting the imposed, conventional forms of language practices that force users to view languages as set systems whose boundaries must be respected. Needless to say, these boundaries forbid multilingual language users to strategically select features from a repertoire that includes multiple registers of the same language or multiple languages. I posit that both writers participate in this kind of marooning by incorporating creole features in the discourse as they build their multilingual characters or in their own narrative discourse as multilingual writers. As such, they employ Creole in defiance of established representations of language. Confiant’s characters resist and defy dominant negative attitudes toward Creole, which allows the writer to distance some of his characters from French, the dominant language variety, and to portray others within the conventional distribution of linguistic systems. The issue of the imaginaire des langues is addressed head-on in Tout-monde, where Glissant rejects the isolation of Creole, weaving it into his poetics of resistance through métissage, or hybridism, and alterity, and bringing characters together into the tourbillon—a concept dear to Glissant—twisting and overturning established representations about language. I suggest that Glissant practices discursive resistance: his narrative constantly undermines French, but at the same time, it expresses mistrust of the simple seductiveness of Creole (Bernabé 29). By contrast, Confiant resorts to a more perceptible, character-based resistance, putting Creole and French into the mouth of every character despite their expressed aversion to Creole.

Acts of translanguaging and marooning The dual hypothesis of translanguage marooning introduced in this study requires some justification. I will first put the concept of marooning into perspective before clarifying how it can be associated with that of translanguaging. The figure of the maroon is emblematic in cultural and historical landscapes of Caribbean societies. The maroon (a slave who flees the plantation and finds refuge in the mountains) symbolizes defiance of the plantation system, freedom, and independence. In escaping the plantation and fleeing into the depths of the land, the maroon demonstrates autonomy and refuses allegiance and submission to the slave master. It is not surprising that Caribbean writers like Glissant, Confiant, and Chamoiseau, among others, have often portrayed the maroon as an emblematic figure. I give in to the temptation to draw a parallel between putting on the maroon act during plantation slavery and Aimé Césaire’s invitation to René Depestre, which I outline briefly below. In the mid-1950s, Aragon attempts to promote the idea of a national and sovereign poetry project within the Marxist perspective. The call is met with approval by some and with skepticism by others, including Césaire. In the June 1955 edition of Lettres Françaises, the young Haitian poet René Depestre publishes a letter in which he clearly expresses his allegiance to the literary theory Aragon advocates. A debate sparks off, revolving around adhering or not to Aragon’s

Translanguaging and marooning 59 theory of national poetry which proscribes free verse and radical innovations, denouncing them as “formal individualism.” The ensuing quarrel between Depestre and Césaire exposes Depestre’s admiration for, and willingness to follow, Aragon’s recommendations that call for a return to more traditional prosody (Clifford 180). Depestre asserts: “with work, with meditation, I shall succeed in the months to come, in raising the level of my poetry following Aragon’s ideas” (ltr, Depestre 36–38). Aimé Césaire responds to Depestre by way of a poem entitled “Le verbe marronner, Réponse à René Depestre,” where he invites Depestre to put on the maroon act: let us turn maroon on them Depestre let us turn maroon on them like we once turned maroon on our whip-wielding masters (ltr, Césaire, Réponse, italics in original) Césaire sees Depestre’s support and allegiance to Aragon’s theory as being paradoxical, especially in Depestre’s capacity as a young Haitian poet: Depestre, while at the same time trying hard to embark upon the path of “national poetry,” of a national Caribbean poetry, chooses to imprison his inspiration in ready-made forms which typically fall within the cosmopolitan nature of international rhetoric. (ltr, Césaire in Douaire-Banny, emphasis in original) Césaire points out that while Depestre admits that for the Haitian poet “[i]t would be a mistake, a denial of nationality, to ignore the African component,” he still thinks it is necessary to “penetrate the essence of one’s work to discern, in the cultural heritage which comes to us from Africa, what can be harmoniously incorporated into the heritage of French prosody” (ltr, Césaire in Douaire-Banny). Césaire would like the Caribbean writer to create new narrative possibilities (Murdoch 202). Thus, in inviting Depestre to turn maroon (marronner), Césaire is calling for a rejection of constraints that plague literary creation, challenging Depestre, as it were, to take liberty in his use of French and to impose Africanness as much in his literary works as in the reflections and actions of the communist party (Douaire-Banny). It is important to stress that Césaire’s call to turn maroon did not insinuate that Caribbean Francophone writers should use Creole in their works. As a matter of fact, Césaire is noted to have stated in an interview on Swiss television TSR in 1963 that Creole was a “small regional language that had extremely limited scope [and thus] choosing Creole would mean cutting oneself off from the rest of the world” (ltr, TSR).5 This brings me to the concept of translanguaging, a term coined by the Welsh educator Cen Williams and developed by García, who defines it as “the act performed by bilinguals of accessing different linguistic features or various modes of what are described as autonomous languages, in order to maximize communicative potential” (140). According to García, it goes beyond code-switching and extends “hybrid language use” as outlined by Gutiérrez et al. (qtd. in García

60 Paula Prescod 140). Translanguaging is a normal practice among multilinguals. To assess language practices as translanguaging is to consider all the features of the language user’s repertoire as a whole and not as one made up of different languages. This approach therefore recognizes no boundaries between codes, to the extent that users delve into their repertoire driven by what they know of their audience, their familiarity with the exchange setting, and based on their desired pragmatic aims. During an exchange, this is what allows users to select and assemble features, including those that are traditionally regarded as separate codes (García; Hornberger and Link; Otheguy, García, and Reid). Unlike code-switching which, according to Otheguy, García, and Reid, accounts for multilingual practices as the manipulation of separate language systems (282), “translanguaging is the deployment of a speaker’s full linguistic repertoire without regard for watchful adherence to the socially and politically defined boundaries of named (and usually national and state) languages” (281). Since the aforementioned studies were carried out in the field of applied linguistics, translanguaging has come to be associated almost exclusively with applied linguistics and particularly with language education. In multilingual communities, the languages that children bring into the classroom (insomuch as they differ from the dominant language) are often termed ‘heritage languages,’ whereas the mainstream language is viewed as the norm, carrying with it symbolic, cultural, and economic capital (Bourdieu). The translanguaging approach offers language trainers in these multilingual settings tools to help learners achieve higher proficiencies in the codes they come into contact with for academic and other purposes. Williams and his colleagues found that their young Welsh learners of English variably manipulated and intermingled features which made them, as educators, come to the realization that language boundaries are blurred and abstract in the minds and practices of multilingual individuals. For instance, it was found that in multilingual classroom settings, learners may be exposed to one language in written or aural form while they may produce (written and oral materials) in another (Williams; García 45). The concept of translanguaging has been further extended to the field of pragmatics by Wei. In a study of the language practices of three Chinese university students in Britain, the author highlights the creative, appropriate, and informed use (Wei prefers the term criticality) the students make of diverse linguistic resources to fashion their own lives. According to Wei, this is possible because the translanguaging space created by multilingual individuals is one “where different identities, values and practices . . . combine together to generate new identities, values and practices,” one in which they decide to follow or flout the conventions regarding language use, among other aspects (1223). I am particularly interested in the extent to which Caribbean writers engage in acts of translanguaging and marooning, resisting the imposed, conventional forms of writing practices handed down and enforced by Franco-French writers. I show that the intermingled use of French and Creole is a way for Confiant and Glissant to engage in the blurring of established boundaries. I shall first outline some linguistic features which the reader encounters in both works and which illustrate

Translanguaging and marooning 61 acts of translanguaging before examining the architecture of characters to determine to what degree these acts defy Franco-French conventions.

Acts of translanguaging in Confiant’s and Glissant’s works Creole flourishes in Confiant’s autobiographic Ravines du devant-jour. In this novel, the major character and narrator is a young boy between 5 and 8 years of age (Ravines 200), who bears the same first name as the novelist, Raphaël (50; 80) or Faël (155), and whose parents are civil servants (241). Like the author, the narrator is a chabin. The term is used to refer to “a breed of negro who has the amazing ability (which he abuses) to blush with anger or shame, due to a quantity of white blood dating back to slavery” (ltr, 255); a chabin that the author defines as “the name given to a variety of sheep with red wool bred in Normandy” (ltr, 246); i.e. a chabin who is portrayed as having dual language background, Creole and French. Like the Creole, neither European, nor African nor Asian, the chabin is Other, ethnically mixed, the product of Créolisation à la Glissant. While Confiant, the author, accepts his “unexplored being” (Bernabé et al. 86), Glissant embraces hybridism (métissage of languages and cultures) and alterity (“each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other,” Glissant, Poetics 11). These themes are central in Glissant’s philosophy and in his novel Tout-monde. Interestingly enough, in Tout-monde, Mathieu Béluse, a Creolophone, is in praise of Creoleness when he proclaims “Creole languages are even more creole than the others” (ltr, 58). In fact, Glissant’s philosophy of Créolisation is omnipresent in Tout-monde:6 another unnamed character decrees “Italian is a creole . . . all languages are creoles” (ltr, 58). On many occasions throughout the novel, Glissant overcomes the clichés that Creole is a marginalized variety, that it is not written and that it cannot mingle with the multitude of languages spoken by the characters he brings together in Tout-monde. Even more interesting is Glissant’s choice of title: Tout-monde is a calque from the Creole expression tout moun ‘everyone,’ ‘Total-world,’ ‘Whole-world.’ A lot can be said about the way both Confiant and Glissant incorporate features that are not recognized as French into their novels, be it via narration or direct speech. Non-French features commonly incorporated into the novels include calques, borrowings, and neologisms from Creole. I shall refer to these as creole features inasmuch as the reader does not recognize them as being totally French or totally Creole. Instead they illustrate the mutual influence both languages have on each other in these works. In the following I outline some of the creolisms that are present in Confiant’s Ravines, and Glissant’s Tout-monde with varying degrees of frequency. Both writers use nouns phrases of the type noun-noun modification in the examples listed under (1). When compared to their French equivalents, it would appear that a preposition (à, au, à la, etc., de, du, de la, etc., pour, contre, etc.) is omitted in each case. The symbol ≈ indicates what I interpret the example to mean in English.

62 Paula Prescod (1) a.

b.

c.

d.

le gâteau-patate (Confiant, Ravines 140) the cake potato ≈ ‘a cake made from sweet potatoes’ (compare Fr. le gâteau au riz, ‘rice cake’) le Blanc-France (Confiant, Ravines 128) the White France ≈ ‘A White individual born in France’ (compare Fr. Blanc de France, ‘French White’) la farine coco (Glissant, Tout-monde 460) the flour coconut ≈ ‘a sort of coconut cake’ (compare Fr. farine de blé ‘wheat flour’) les feuilles -maltête (Glissant, Tout-monde 264) the leaves hurt+head ≈ ‘leaves used to prevent headache’ (compare Fr. sirop contre la toux ‘cough sirop’)

In both works, we also find some innovative compound word formations either via complex combinations of a noun (the first element in each example) with adjective + noun (example 2a), adjective + adjective (example 2b), noun + adjective (examples 2c, d), or noun + noun (example 2e) collocations. Example (3) illustrates an adjective + adjective collocation. (2) a.

b.

c.

d.

e.

(3)

policiers-petits-bâtons (Confiant, Ravines 217) police officers-small-staff ≈ ‘police officers who regulate traffic’ style négligent-coulé du parler français (Glissant, Tout-monde 476) style careless-run of the speech French ≈ ‘careless run-of-the-mill way of speaking French négresse-tête-sec (Confiant, Ravines 39) Black woman-head-dry ≈ ‘Black woman with very short hair’ agrégée torchon-mouillé (Glissant, Tout-monde 252) specialist floorcloth-wet ≈ ‘cleaning lady’ Radio-bois-patate (Confiant, Ravines 187) radio-wood-potato ≈ ‘bush telegraph’ tout ça était passé dépassé (Glissant, Tout-monde 468) all that was past outdated ≈ ‘that was all in the very distant past’

We find a number of deverbal nouns formed by the juxtaposition of verbs in Confiant’s Ravine (example 4). No example of this type of verb+verb juxtaposition stood out in Glissant’s Tout-monde, but we do find instances of adverbial

Translanguaging and marooning 63 (example 5a), verbal (examples 5b, c) or adjectival (example 5d) reduplication to mark intensity or iterativity in both works. (4) a.

b.

(5) a.

b.

c.

d.

le tourner-virer (Confiant, Ravines 193) the turn-veer ≈ ‘the roundabout turn’ les courir-aller-venirs (204) the run-go-comes ≈ ‘the hasty comings and goings’ tout au fond au fond (Glissant, Tout-monde 264) quite at the bottom at the bottom ≈ ‘at the very bottom’ les chars défilent-défilent-défilent (Confiant, Ravines 229) the parade floats parade-parade-parade ≈ ‘the parade floats pass before your eyes incessantly’ le tourbillon des arrivants poussait poussait (Glissant, Tout-monde 450) the whirlwind of arrivals was shoving was shoving ≈ ‘the whirlwind of arrivals was constantly shoving’ une longue, longue pratique (Glissant, Tout-monde 474) a long long experience ≈ ‘a very long experience’

Lexical borrowing, Creole calques and instances of lexical innovation are illustrated in example (6), whereas the examples listed under (7) show how the writers incorporate phonological features from Creole into their works. (6) Creole calques, lexical borrowing and innovation: a. monsieur est femmeté (Confiant, Ravines 230) < Creole i fanmté ‘accompanied by a woman’ ‘the man is accompanied by a woman’ b. ils devenaient doucinement français (Glissant, Tout-monde 443) < Creole douciner ‘to caress’ ‘they were slowly becoming French’ c. les bêtes-longues (Glissant, Tout-monde 479) < Creole bèt long ‘snake’ ‘snakes’ (7) a. b.

Word-final consonant cluster reduction Catéchisse < catéchiste (Confiant, Ravines 84) Prosthesis - /z/ is added to a word beginning with a vowel sound: i. z’ami < ami; (Confiant, Ravines 161) ii. écrevisses-zabitans < écrevisses locales ‘habitants’ (Confiant, Ravines 37) iii. soupe-zabitan < soupe du terroir ‘habitants’ (Confiant, Ravines 48)

64 Paula Prescod c.

Vowel elision (i) coupled with assimilation (ii), or change in vowel quality (iii, iv): i. Matnik < Martinique (Glissant, Tout-monde 451) ii. Manzel < mademoiselle (Glissant, Tout-monde 234) iii. mussieu < monsieur (Glissant, Tout-monde 252) iv. pitite < petite (Glissant, Tout-monde 230)

Creolizing French words in spelling and syntax and frenchifying Creole features via the same processes can be seen as a means by which the writers deviate7 from the conventional writing practices that establish impenetrable borders around language systems. By engaging in translanguaging and marooning via the processes outlined, these writers can be said to be freeing not only themselves but also French and Creole from their established forms. The intermingling of language systems allows the monolingual French-reader to cultivate an entirely new rapport with the language, while it enables the reader who is familiar with French and Creole to participate in a unique flexible linguistic and cultural experience.

The construction of Creole-speaking characters Confiant’s Ravines du devant-jour Raphaël Confiant started publishing his works in Creole in 1979 with a collection of short stories entitled Jik dèyè do bondyé. These were published in Grif an Tè, a daily newspaper which was printed in Creole exclusively. In 1987, soon after the publication of the Creole novel Marisosé by Presses Universitaires Créoles, Confiant began writing essentially in French, securing himself a wider readership. His first French novel, Le Nègre et l’Amiral, was published by Grasset. The move from Creole to French brought with it a move from Caribbean militant publishers to prestigious publishing houses in France, and the writer has since been awarded prestigious literary prizes like the Prix Antigone de la ville de Montpellier, France, in 1988 for Le Nègre et l’Amiral; the Prix Casa de Las Americas, Cuba, in 1993 for Ravines du devant-jour; Prix RFO, France, in 1997 for Le Meurtre du SamediGloria and Prix de l’Agence Française de Développement, France, in 2010 for L’Hôtel du bon plaisir. Although it would appear that Confiant has made a move towards the international French-reader away from the Creole-reader, he has undeniably kept the Creolereader in mind in his lexico-semantic choices. As we have seen from the examples provided above, the move away from Creole is but material since he maintains emotional proximity with Creole and the Creole-reader. Besides, the question is whether Confiant is writing for the Creole-reader with the French-reader in mind or for the French-reader with the Creole-reader in mind. Confiant himself provides an answer to the question of his targeted readership when he writes: Creole is a fantastic repository for expressions from Old French but also for locutions from Normandy, Poitevin and Picardy . . . it helps me to give the

Translanguaging and marooning 65 Caribbean reader the impression that she is reading Creole. No compliment touches me more than when a reader reports that she had the strange feeling of having read Creole while reading my books in French. I provide double pleasure: to the Franco-French because they find a deep, forgotten layer of their own language; to Creole-speakers because they get the feeling or the illusion they are reading their own vernacular. (ltr, Questions 179–80) Confiant’s solution is a hybrid style that takes the Other into consideration. This allows him the liberty to resort to uniquely created neologisms based on the double possibilities this hybridity affords him and to do likewise in lexico-semantic and syntactic choices. The linguistic choices made by the writer are the reflection of his own linguistic being, which the triumvirate (Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant) proclaims in the 1989 manifesto In praise of Creoleness: “Neither Europeans, nor Africans, nor Asians, we proclaim ourselves Creoles” (Bernabé et al. 75). By giving voice to Creole, Confiant, as an architect of fictional characters and as a narrator, participates in the very manifestation of the literary bilingualism he advocates, using a wide range of the linguistic features at his disposal and, in so doing, escapes diglossic pain which, according to the 1989 manifesto, generally results from refusing one’s bilingual richness (Bernabé et al. 87). The narrator’s maternal grandmother, Man Yise, “has a high old time only in Creole” (ltr, Confiant, Ravines 15); “pretends to read a Bible passage aloud” (ltr, 16); announces the decease of Papa Loulou to her grandchildren in French (27); has a French stock of insults which she uses when referring to Indians (47); uses French with her friend, Ida (48); speaks French to Charles-Marie de Médrac, the Blanc-pays, i.e. the béké or French born in the colony (49); but in the same conversation she uses Creole and the béké follows suit. In the space of a couple of words, she then glides back into French to invoke the marmaille or the group of children to heed the béké’s warnings not to play at Ravine Courbaril for fear of being bitten by snakes. They then converse in French (Confiant, Ravines 50). This does not fit the traditional conception of diglossia with bilingualism à la Fergusson, but rather constitutes a simple case of translanguaging. Diglossia supposes that the speaker adheres to a strict functional separation within the domains of language usage. Translanguaging, on the other hand, views the flexibility of language practices as the result of strategic selection from an individual’s repertoire to engage in meaningful exchanges (García; Otheguy, García, and Reid; Wei). Once the béké has left, Mam Yise scolds the children in Creole. In Creole, she talks about the strike which is disrupting her business (Confiant, Ravines 57), and, finally, she responds in French to the narrator’s fateful question: “Grandma, why is it that in your books, people from the same country all have the same complexion? . . . The Romans are all pink whereas in our country, everyone has a different complexion . . . Neither Chantou, Miguel nor Monique has the same skin color, eh?” (ltr, 245). According to the narrator “she gropes for her words, she, who is usually so voluble, such a smooth-talker in the language of Whites” (ltr, 246). In

66 Paula Prescod Ravines du devant-jour, Creole is not reserved to the nègre, the mulâtre, nor the chabin. In Fort-de-France, the Syrian, Levantine, Italian, and Jewish merchants “inadvertently let Creole sentences escape” (ltr, 199). The Earl of Anjou and his brother, two Blancs-France or French born in France, speak in a language that leaves the narrator speechless, as it is “very familiar, very Creole and yet very different” (ltr, 131–32). At Virginie’s wedding, de Cassagnac, a Martinican-born White, who Maître Honorien thinks behaves as if he were born in France (125) even forgets French at one point in the festivity and speaks Creole (133). The use of Creole seems to put the Blanc-Pays on an equal footing with the narrator as well as with the other Creole-speaking characters. The reader is thus constantly reminded of the abstract and blurred nature of the boundary that we imagine between Creole and French. Confiant’s espousal of the view that his multilingual self offers him multiple possibilities which enriches his creativity as a writer: “Once our interior vision is applied, once our Creoleness is placed at the center of our creativity, we will be able to re-examine our existence, to perceive in it the mechanisms of alienation, and, above all, to grasp its beauty” (Bernabé et al. 99). Frenchifying Creole and creolizing French are Confiant’s way of enriching and reinvesting Creole, of reinforcing “its oral density with the contemporary power of writing” (Bernabé et al. 104–5). Glissant’s Tout-monde In Tout-monde, Glissant takes a literary stance that allows for him to merge into one linguistic world various idioms and the people who speak them. In keeping with the approach adopted here—to view this merging as an act of translanguaging—it is essential to consider this shock of languages not just as one that opposes French and Creole, dominant and dominated languages. In fact, although Creole may represent a detour (Britton 28), a language of secrecy and cunning— a language of resistance—it is not enough to counter the inequality and the social and cultural oppression that brought about its genesis: “Creole was not, in some idyllic past, and is not yet our national language” (Glissant, Caribbean 167 qtd. in Britton 30). The lengthy translation which follows gives us a very good idea of how, according to Glissant, Créolisation should be fathomed: What people retain from Creolization is creolism, that is: introducing Creole words into the French language, using Creole words to create new French words. I think that is the exotic side of the issue . . . For me, creolization is not creolism: it is for instance creating a language which weaves poetics, possibly opposing poetics, of Creole languages and French languages . . . The processes of reiteration, reduplication, repetition, creating suspense, circularity . . . Creolisms, particularisms, regionalisms, these are ways to satisfy languages of dominant cultures on the scale of linguistic authority. And people are very satisfied. Because we do not address the essential issue of poetics, that is, the issue of the non-hierarchical use of different poetics in different languages. Nobody wants to talk about it because it challenges the pretentious belief that

Translanguaging and marooning 67 some languages are superior to others. Creolism or regionalism does not open this debate: rather, it confirms the supremacy of some languages over others. We believe that there are noble languages and languages that produce only regionalisms or particularisms. Now this is not true. In the modern context, all languages are regional and, at the same time, all languages have their poetics. (ltr, Glissant qtd. in Gauvin 18–20) Putting the philosophy of Créolisation to work, Glissant allows languages to cohabit in Tout-monde, but more importantly, the writer voices his philosophy of Créolisation through his characters’ ideologies rather than via their choice of idiom. It is noteworthy that when Glissant’s characters speak a language other than French, no translation is offered (Tout-monde 62). Only once is a non-French text made to stand out via the use of italics: peyi-a douce (251). Even the cleaning lady’s mussieu is incorporated into the main text: “qu’est-ce que vous pouvez faire pour moi, mussieu?” (252). In at least one instance, Creole is so well merged into a French sentence that the reader may not even realize it is not French: “et pour paraphraser un slogan mal connu chez nous, asé lité an nou magouyé, il faut bien verser du côté de ce milliard de bienheureux”8 (494). This merging and mingling, and the choice to use neither italics nor translations for Creole—unlike in Confiant’s work—might be viewed as a way of overcoming the cliché that Creole is a marginal variety. Glissant rejects the isolation of Creole and puts to work his poetics of resistance, via hybridism or métissage and alterity, but most importantly through Créolisation. Consequently, the reader hardly recognizes where one language ends and where the other starts, since the slide is furtive, yet so defiant. As a result, Glissant’s characters speak many languages. This is not surprising because the philosophy behind Glissant’s writings is that of the Tout-monde; that everyone influences everyone; that mondialisation has brought peoples of different cultural, linguistic, ethnic backgrounds into accelerated interaction with each other, creating, as it were, a chaos-world, a tourbillon (Tout-monde 316): “The airplane has mixed languages, there you are in the presence of all the languages of the world” (ltr, 316). Everyone is affected by this chaos-world, except Old Laroche, the colonist, and the first Longoué, the maroon (Glissant, Tout-monde 120): “Each one willingly imprisoned in his language, impenetrable to the other, and they had refused the compromise of the Creole words which this Langoué had so quickly learnt and they persisted in their specificity and they both understood each other perfectly” (ltr, 120). More than that, “There are a lot . . . who have . . . gone beyond the limits and the borders, they mix language, they displace languages, they schlep, they fall into the folly of the world” (ltr, 481–82). And those who do not speak a desired language live in an imaginaire de langues. For instance, Anestor Klokoto, married to a Zairean, son of a Belgian father and a Zairean mother, has not learned any Zairean languages, which makes him “sick and tired of not speaking the language of his fellow citizens fluently” (ltr, 465). The character tourbillonné, i.e.

68 Paula Prescod intermingled, into Anestor Masson imagines that his own children “would embroider a variety of French decorated with the suburb and join associations in defense of Creole” (ltr, 469). The Anglophone and the two Hispanics, who had not had time to learn Creole, resort to mingling languages with pleasure (575). Even Stepan, who is not a Creole in the historical sense of the word, can be said to be Creole in the Glissantian sense, since he glides into a hybrid variety through Créolisation: “it’s pidgin! Stepan joked: it’s Stepan-pidgin” (ltr, Glissant, Tout-monde 438) and “Stepan to write good French when necessary! To write not difficult when I have to! Stepan decided not one language good for speaking! Not one language is worth. To hide language! Stepan efficient to hide language” (ltr, 420). But his relation-rhizome with the world does not cease to impact on him: “Stepan was saying: ‘The language which is most agreed upon is the secret language.’ Immediately, another witty person shouted: ‘Look at that, you talk like everybody now?’ ” (ltr, 420–21). The point made by Stepan about being puissant, ‘powerful’ to hide languages behind his own idiosyncrasies, can be seen as best illustrating the imaginaire des langues, which the following section addresses in more detail.

Language representation and the imaginaire des langues Creole-French dualism In Glissant’s work, characters are constructed in such a way as to be free with language. This does not mean, however, that individual representations of languages are hidden behind what the Tout-monde philosophy advocates: the idea that there is a relation-rhizome existing between people who are thrown into contact with each other. Glissant’s concept of Tout-monde embraces that of multiple roots or plural identities, captured under the idea of the quest for Caribbean identities, which subsume an identité-relation—the need to understand that one’s identity is built with the Other—and an identité-rhizome—where different types of roots co-exist and come together without stifling each other, but rather intermingling with and reinforcing one another (Poetics 22). As Glissant so eloquently epitomizes: Thought of the Other is the moral generosity disposing me to accept the principle of alterity, to conceive the world as not simple and straightforward, with only one truth–mine. But thought of the Other can dwell within me making me alter course, without ‘prizing me open,’ without changing me within myself. (Glissant, Poetics 154–55) Moreover, “I can change while sharing with the Other without losing or altering myself” (ltr, Glissant and Obrist 10). Nonetheless, even within this chaotic encounter between languages and people in Glissant’s work, we do not seem to find the sentiment of linguistic insecurity which sometimes comes to the forefront

Translanguaging and marooning 69 in Confiant’s narrative. The feeling that a language is inadequate or inappropriate for a particular exchange or situation reduces the narrator Raphaël to silence. This happens for instance while Raphaël is visiting his father’s relatives in the Martinican capital. His aunt Rachel speaks to him in “such an embroidered variety of French that you dare not open your mouth, afraid you will eat your words, and you cannot speak Creole either, afraid that you will come across as a hopeless country bookie. So you remain silent” (ltr, Confiant, Ravines 194). It is not surprising that Faël feels diminished in such a context, since he is made to think that everything French is beautiful: “In France, everything is beautiful . . . and most of all, people there speak well. Not like us with our countrysidenegro patois” (ltr, Confiant, Ravines 53). Derogatory comments about language, which reinforce the language representations and negative attitudes of people around him, are also present in the value judgments expressed by the school teacher Mamzelle Hortense, who speaks “français d’En France” or French made in France (66). As far as Sonson, Faël’s classmate, is concerned, Mamzelle Hortense thinks of herself as a “grand-grecque,” but she ignores that one should say “repasser ses leçons” rather than “réviser ses leçons,” while in the eyes of the narrator, Sonson himself speaks Creole eloquently and “invents words when his vocabulary is lacking” (ltr, 67). Hortense speaks a variety that is “so different in its intonation and its phrasing from the one [he is] used to” (ltr, Confiant, Ravines 77) that the narrator does not, or chooses not to, understand. In fact, the narrator “hates the Franco-French variety she forces [him] to speak and [he takes] a dislike to the lively variety of French used in [his] family” (ltr, 79). This linguistic conflict between the teacher and the 5-year-old narrator is symbolic. It underscores the conflict, if not of generations, certainly of language representations: not only is Creole unwelcome at school, it is also inappropriate for individuals of a particular complexion. Indeed, the school mamzelle declares: “Raphaël, Creole is a patois for savage Negroes and shoddy Coolies.” In her opinion “[r]espectable people who use it lower themselves and such a lovely boy like you with fair skin should not soil your mouth with such uncouth words” (ltr, 80). Ironically, Hortense is described as “a lady of France, although she is as black as mortal sin” (ltr, Confiant, Ravines 81). Here we see that the narrator’s own imaginaire comes into play. Given his school mamzelle’s animosity towards Creole, he does not expect her to understand it: “we would not have suspected that she could understand our Creole” (ltr, 81), let alone speak it. The socially formatted school mamzelle “seems to have forgotten the sacred idiom” (ltr, 83) when, on tasting the pleasures of life with the narrator’s uncle, she blurts out her desires in Creole. The children’s image of her had already become largely discredited when they realized she had understood an insult one pupil hurled at another in Creole (82). However tempting it is, a diglossic vision of Confiant’s work and of the context in which Caribbean writers operate in general, where one language is seen as dominating others in its ambit, is probably unwarranted. For one thing, there is no clear-cut line or separate, tiered system dividing the different lects of Martinique

70

Paula Prescod

(Prudent 34).9 Nor does the dichotomous vision of dominant versus dominated idiom embrace the dynamic relationship languages in contact entertain with each other. This dynamic relationship is as palpable in Confiant’s work as it is in Glissant’s, albeit in a subtler manifestation. Neither in Confiant’s nor in Glissant’s narrative do we see a distinct functional separation of the domains of usage of Creole and French, but a more or less subtle intermingling either in form or in their philosophy of the languages. As Confiant’s narrative unfolds, what may from the onset have been perceived as diglossia soon reveals itself in a different light, as we realize that absolutely any character is inclined to use Creole or French. There are characters like Man Cia Hermancia, the quimboiseuse, or sorceress, who “[d]uring the day, cajoles her baby speaking the Franco-French embroidered variety; during the night she diverts the course of destiny in Creole in exchange for clinking and stumbling coins” (ltr, Confiant, Ravines 39). The nègre-marron or nègre-mondongue greets people charmingly in français-banane (115). When he attempts to speak in la langue dorée, the golden language, the accoureur du taxi-pays, or the taxi-man, thinks he is up to something, whereas the narrator thinks it is because the nègre-marron sees it as inappropriate to speak Creole when he is well-attired. When Emérante, the narrator’s aunt, migrates to Grand-Anse and lives in the vicinity of an “imposing mulatto,” she forbids him to use “the language of canecutters” (ltr, Confiant, Ravines 164–65), yet she steadfastly soliloquizes in the scorned language, an attitude that does not reflect her relationship with Creole since, like most of the characters, she is indwelled by it. Djigidji, the fruit peddler who works for Man Jenny, Raphaël’s paternal Chinese grandmother, is portrayed as a habitual Creole-speaker (211). After frantically searching for her beloved among the masqueraders during mardi gras, Hortense finds him in the company of a blue-eyed chabine with whom he is speaking French: “not a banana variety of French but real French, a French variety from France, full of embroidery and color” (ltr, 231). Djigidji is disguised in elegant attire, shaved, and wearing a pair of shoes—transformed, as it were, into a gentleman. His apparel is in sharp contrast to his worn, torn clothes and unkempt appearance as described when he is first introduced to the reader (210). On his way to Fort-de-France to visit his paternal relatives, the narrator sings praises to Creole when he remarks that there are passengers aboard the taxi-pays who “partake in unending conversations in a Creole variety whose richness is incomparable with those of today” (ltr, Confiant, Ravines 192). The dualism of language representation resides here: on the one hand, the narrator announces the negative attitudes towards Creole. On the other hand, he shares his unmistakable admiration for it with the reader. Creole-French hybridism Whereas Confiant underscores the linguistic alienation engendered by colonization and the need to manage the sociolinguistic conflict brought about by thrusting peoples of different sociolinguistic, socioeconomic and ethnolinguistic

Translanguaging and marooning 71 backgrounds into contact, Glissant, by incorporating the concept or ideal of Créolisation, appears to be in search of the opposite process, that of bringing characters together into a tourbillon,10 a chaotic world, a Tout-monde where characters are connected in such a way that neither the beginning nor the end of this relation-rhizome connection is perceivable, let alone predictable. Consequently, the conventional distribution of linguistic systems is evident in Confiant’s work, whereas these established representations are twisted and twirled or overturned in Glissant’s Tout-monde: You can hear the world’s languages as they meet on the wave or the mountain, all these languages crashing into each other like the crests of furious waves, and everyone applauds as you set out to jump from one language into the other, which makes unexpected drifts. (ltr, Glissant, Tout-monde 20) It took us time to agree that the debate about the languages we use, the way in which we use them, the rights we exercise to put them in relation with other languages . . . is as intense to unravel as the air is to breath. (ltr, Glissant, Tout-monde 316) Glissant glides his concept of imaginaire des langues into the novel via Anestor Klokoto when he addresses the intermingled Anestor Masson: poor moron . . . how will you make all these people accept to stand up in defense of or to save a Creole or a Quechua language or an Irish language, if you do not begin by changing all their ideas about languages? If they do not finally agree that all languages are equally important for our private and public lives, for what you call our imaginaire in your intellectual languages? (ltr, Glissant, Tout-monde 469–70) Mathieu Béluse, one of the recurring characters throughout Glissant’s novels (La Lézarde, Le quatrième siècle, La case du commandeur, and Mahagony) and one whom “the creole had always rushed into the brisk attack, the brutal spur of words . . . [Mathieu,] for whom the French language was a field for sowing the same double and triple meanings” (ltr, Glissant, Tout-monde 45) yells in “his approximate Italian” (ltr, 42). When Mathieu speaks Creole among his fellow seamen (57) the narrator comments: “the most basic ambiguities of creole languages are soothing to grasp” (ltr, 58). But Mathieu’s mates warn him not to boast about his Creole because Italian is creole and that, furthermore, all languages are creoles (58), i.e. unpredictable (145). Mathieu retorts that while that may be so, “Creoles are even more creole than other languages, more creole than you can imagine . . . too shrewd for you” (ltr, 58). In the company of their daughter, the Martinican narrator and Anne, the Laotian “roll out Creole as well, the little one is learning Creole and French at the same time” (ltr, 350).

72 Paula Prescod The Indien caraïbe whom Mathieu Béluse finds in his search for his long-lost companions Artémise and Marie-Annie “spoke a variety of Creole ornamented with South Americanisms, with emphasis that could not be identified as Brazilian or Columbian for that matter” (ltr, Glissant, Tout-monde 515–16). The German soldier, General Mülher, speaks in Creole, “a language which none of them had ever heard about, which none of them, even if they had been told about it, could know what it could represent or express, and the majority of whom (of these subordinates, therefore) would immediately have decided that it was the language of the métèque or of the semi-humanoid animal” (ltr, 451–52). Nonetheless, this soldier is said to have been happy to “practice or dabble in Creole in German style” (ltr, 453). The béké, Laroche, in his exchange with another béké, Senglis, sees himself and other békés consumed in “the uses that continuously transform us . . . even to this creole gibberish that you attempt to speak . . . you keep blackening yourselves time and time again” (ltr, 83–84). Glissant’s remarks about opposing representations of languages concern our relationship with creoles: “we must do away with this way of thinking . . . that the Creole language is a trace which delved into French words” (ltr, 280); but most importantly with languages in general. This small selection demonstrates Glissant’s prowess at swirling events and characters into the maelstrom of concepts and into the Tout-monde.

Conclusion Driven by different ideologies, both Confiant and Glissant intermingle Creole and French in different ways and such is their enactment of what I refer to as translanguage marooning. Glissant does not leave it up to his characters to perform translanguaging on their own: Tout-monde contains no more than five complete sentences in Creole. By intermingling languages Glissant brings them together in a chaos-world, a whirlwind, the Whole-world. His rejection of the partitioning entailed in Éloge—“[n]either Europeans, nor Africans, nor Asians, we proclaim ourselves Creoles” (Bernabé et al. 75)—is evident through the philosophy of Créolisation which he propagates. In so doing, he practices discourse-based resistance, constantly undermining French, surreptitiously gliding Creole into his narrative but, at the same time, mistrusting the simple seductiveness of Creole, to borrow a formula used by Bernabé (29). Confiant resorts to a more noticeable, character-based resistance as he makes a more obvious and reiterated use of Creole via italics and bracketed French translations. He also succeeds in making his characters mingle Creole and French, although they may express aversion to either variety. Confiant’s work reflects the maroon spirit of “an appetite for resistance for the fun of resisting” underscored in Glissant’s remark about Gani, the maroon in Tout-monde (ltr, Glissant, Tout-monde 213). Both writers’ willingness to explore the freedom and flexibility the contact between languages affords them also symbolizes their exploration of the depths of language, like the maroon figure’s move towards the depths of the land.

Translanguaging and marooning 73

Notes 1 The English translation followed in the journal Callaloo: A Journal of African American and African Arts and Letters (vol. 13, 1990) and the bilingual edition was published in 1993 by Gallimard. I shall refer to the latter edition as Bernabé et al. 2 In keeping with the terminological convention established in the English translation of Éloges, I use the French term Négritude, whereas Creoleness and Caribbeanness are preferred to Créolité and Antillanité respectively. 3 Glissant borrows and builds on Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical theory of the rhizome (developed in Mille plateaux (Deleuze and Guattari) as one that binds relations in non-hierarchical ways. Glissant reinterprets the notion in his 1996 Introduction à une Poétique du divers developing the metaphor of the identity-rhizome to illustrate the plurality and interdependence of what he refers to as composite cultures. In composite cultures, rhizomic roots open up to each other unlike in atavistic cultures which are associated with single roots (Glissant, Poétique 63). 4 I offer my own loose English translations (ltr) of the majority of quotations, bearing in mind readers who may not be familiar with French and Creole. 5 It is nonetheless worth mentioning that Césaire’s classic work La Tragédie du roi Christophe (Césaire La Tragédie) is cited by the author in an interview with François Beloux for Magazine Littéraire as an example of his own desire to “give French the Creole color” (ltr, Beloux), particularly via Madame Christophe’s songs. 6 On Créolisation, Glissant states: “what happened in the Caribbean, which can be summarized with the term creolization, gives us a more or less complete idea of the process of Relation: not only a meeting, a shock, a cultural métissage, but a heretofore unseen dimension that allows one to be here and elsewhere, rooted and open, lost in the mountains and free upon the sea, in harmony and exiled” (La Caraïbe 12, qtd. in Cailler 144). Glissant further defines it as “hybridism [métissage] with an added value: unpredictability” (ltr, Introduction 17). See also: “By creolization, I am referring to the meeting, the interference, the shock, the harmony and disharmony between cultures, in the totality produced in the world-earth. My proposal is that today the whole world is becoming an archipelago and is creolizing” (ltr, Glissant, Traité 194). 7 Glissant makes explicit reference to the practice of deviation (détour) in Poétiques de la relation and in Le Discours Antillais. See also Britton’s analyses of the way Glissant uses the device (Britton 28). 8 “and to paraphrase a slogan that is not well known back home, asé lité an nou magouyé, it is necessary to pay well from the side of the billion fortunate people.” 9 ‘Lects’ is used as a cover term for varieties, registers, dialects, sociolects, etc. 10 “These language drifts filled us with an earthly and oceanic contentment. Everything spilled into everything” (ltr, Glissant, Tout-monde 576). In Tout-monde, names become merged, unpredictable, intermingled: Agustin, Antonio and l’ami Irving (575) become Agustin Antonio Irving (577). The author often uses the terms tourbillon and maelström.

Works cited Aragon, Louis. Journal d’une poésie nationale. Les Écrivains réunis-Henneuse, 1954. Beloux, François. “Un poète politique: Aimé Césaire.” Le Magazine Littéraire, vol. 34, 1969. Bernabé, Jean. “De la négritude à la créolité: éléments pour une approche comparée.” Études françaises, vol. 28, no. 2–3, 1992, pp. 23–38. Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant. Éloge de la créolité/In Praise of Creoleness, translated by Mohamed B. Taleb Khyar, 1989. Gallimard, Édition bilingue, 1993.

74 Paula Prescod Bourdieu, Pierre. Ce que parler veut dire. Fayard, 1982. Britton, Celia. Edouard Glissant, and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Resistance. U of Virginia P, 1999. Cailler, Bernadette. “Totality and Infinity, Alterity, and Relation: From Levinas to Glissant.” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy - Revue de la philosophie française et de langue française, vol. 19, no. 1, 2011, pp. 135–51. Césaire, Aimé. “Sur la poésie nationale.” Présence africaine, no. 4, 1955, pp. 39–41. ——. “Réponse à Depestre, poète haïtien (Éléments d’un art poétique).” Présence africaine, no. 1–2, 1995, pp. 113–15. ——. La Tragédie du roi Christophe. Présence africaine, 1963. Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art. Harvard UP, 2002. Confiant, Raphaël. Ravines du devant-jour. Gallimard, 1993. ——. “Questions pratiques d’écriture créole.” Écrire la «parole de nuit». La nouvelle littérature antillaise, edited by Ralph Ludwig. Gallimard, 1994, pp. 171–80. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. Mille plateaux. Édition du Minuit, 1980. Depestre, René. “Lettre au poète Charles Dobzynski.” Lettres Françaises, 573, juin 16–23, 1955, partially reprinted in Présence africaine, no. 4, 1955, pp. 36–38. Douaire-Banny, Anne. “Sans rimes, toute une saison, loin des mares. Enjeux d’un débat sur la poésie nationale.” March 20, 2011, pierre.campion2.free.fr/douaire_depestre& cesaire.htm. Accessed October 18, 2016. Ferguson, Charles. “Diglossia.” Word, vol. 15, 1959, pp. 325–40. García, Ofelia. “Education, Multilingualism and Translanguaging in the 21st Century.” Social Justice through Multilingual Education, edited by Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, Robert Phillipson, Ajit Mohanty, and Minati Panda. Multilingual Matters, 2009, pp. 140–58. Gauvin, Lise. “L’imaginaire des langues, Entretien avec Édouard Glissant.” Études françaises, vol. 28, no. 2–3, 1992, pp. 11–22. Glissant, Édouard. Le quatrième siècle. Édition le Seuil, 1964. ——. Le discours antillais. Gallimard, 1981. ——. “La Caraïbe, les Amériques et la poétique de la relation.” CELACEF Bulletin, vol. 3, no. 1–2, 1989, pp. 2–14. ——. The Caribbean Discourse, translated by J. Michael Dash. UP of Virginia, 1989. ——. Tout-monde. Éditions Gallimard. Collection Folio, 1993. ——. Introduction à une Poétique du Divers. Gallimard, 1996. ——. Poetics of Relation, translated by Betsy Wing. The U of Michigan P, 1997. ——. Traité du Tout-monde: Poétique IV. Gallimard, 1997. ——., and Hans Ulrich Obrist. “Conversations (extraits choisis): Utopie de la ville et du musée: L’espace et le temps.” Institut de Tout-Monde, 2013, www.tout-monde.com/ ~txt6r52.txt/sites/utopie.pdf. Accessed October 18, 2016. Hornberger, Nancy and Holly Link. “Translanguaging and Transnational Literacies in Multilingual Classrooms: A Biliteracy Lens.” International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, vol. 15, no. 3, 2012, pp. 261–78. Murdoch, Adlai H. Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel. UPF, 2001. Prudent, Lambert Félix. “Diglossie et interlecte.” Langages, no. 61, 1981, pp. 13–38. TSR. “Magazine littéraire Préfaces.” RTSarchives, September 11, 1963, www.rts.ch/ archives/tv/divers/archives/3462021-voix-de-la-negritude.html. Accessed October 18, 2016.

Translanguaging and marooning 75 Wei, Li. “Moment Analysis and Translanguaging Space: Discursive Construction of Identities by Multilingual Chinese Youth in Britain.” Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 43, no. 5, 2011, pp. 1222–35. Williams, Cen. “Arfarniad o Ddulliau Dysgu ac Addysgu yng Nghyd-destun Addysg Uwchradd Ddwyieithog [An Evaluation of Teaching and Learning Methods in the Context of Bilingual Secondary Education].” Doctoral thesis, U of Wales (Bangor), 1994.

4

From anti-colonial to anti-modernist resistance Historiopoetic transformations of the maroon in selected works of Édouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant Sarah Gröning

Introduction According to the Martinican writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant, the maroon as a symbolic figure is the only legitimate hero of anti-colonial resistance in Caribbean history (Discours antillais 180): whereas the colonizers’ historical and juridical discourses ceaselessly denounced him as a lawless bandit, his legacy as an ideal of opposition against the colonial superior (180) persists until today. In contemporary French-Caribbean criticism, the ambivalent image of the maroon summarizes the omnipresent contradiction between alienation and acculturation of postcolonial Caribbean societies on the one hand, and their heterogeneity and transculturality on the other.1 The present contribution aims to reveal that contemporary French-Caribbean literature takes up this ambivalence by offering both a retrospective and a prospective idealization of the maroon, but additionally, and more importantly, by historiopoetically2 transforming the emblematic figure of the colonial past into a self-aware ‘warrior of the imaginary’3 of the post/colonial present. With a concise analysis of Édouard Glissant’s novel Mahagony (1987), Patrick Chamoiseau’s tale L’Esclave vieil homme et le molosse (1997), and Raphaël Confiant’s tale Nègre marron (2006), it will be argued that the historical maroon is progressively dehistoricized, demystified, and ideologically exploited in order to symbolically support the expression of post/colonial thought and anti-modernist resistance.4 Despite the fact that marronage is a historical phenomenon linked to the era of slavery in the Caribbean and American colonies, the image of the maroon is highly adaptable to the political and social contexts of the 20th and 21st centuries. This shows in a very marked way that the historical dimension of anti-colonial resistance has a huge impact on Glissant, Chamoiseau, and Confiant’s conceptions of resistance and hegemony.

Transformations of the maroon 77

The maroon in colonial history and contemporary metahistoriographic criticism Although European colonialism in the Americas and slavery as practiced during the Atlantic trade in enslaved Africans are nowadays recognized as highly complex phenomena, socio-cultural and literary discourses from the 19th to the 21st century are largely marked by pithy binary oppositions such as freedom versus oppression and servility versus resistance.5 The maroon as a historical and symbolic figure is by far the most frequently cited embodiment of these dichotomies, as the maroon overtly transgresses the boundaries between oppression and freedom as well as servility and resistance by the act of running away from the plantation and hiding in the dense tropical forests. In contrast to the first descriptions of the (Amerindian and later Black African) maroon of the 16th and 17th centuries, where he was compared to domestic animals that returned to the wild,6 the significance of marronage and the maroon changed dramatically in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. In the writings of the French abolition activist Victor Schœlcher, the omnipresence and impact of marronage in the English, Spanish, and French colonies of the Americas become clearer. According to him, marronage must be regarded as a necessary reaction to the crimes and atrocities of slavery (Schœlcher 102). Schœlcher further explains that resistance in the context of slavery can take different forms. He introduced a classification of maroons according to their motivation of escape: the first type of maroon would resolutely oppose enslavement and annihilation by directly confronting the colonizers in revolts and leading attempts of escape of larger groups. The second type has abandoned themselves to slavery and would only maroon spontaneously to flee from a minor punishment or out of weariness. According to Schœlcher, these slaves were most likely to return to the plantation after some time in the woods. The last type would run away out of desperation. These maroons do not find the courage to revolt, do not accept slavery as their given destiny, nor kill themselves in order to put an end to their suffering (Schœlcher 110–11). It is quite remarkable that post-abolitionist socio-cultural and literary movements in the Americas in the 20th and 21st centuries rigidify a simplistic binary of freedom versus servility as implied in Schœlcher’s first two types. In doing so, they do not only reproduce the colonial other’s view but additionally narrow the historical phenomenon further down, instead of paying more attention to the complexity of motives and circumstances that cause marronage.7 According to Jack Corzani, French-Caribbean metahistoriographic discourses about marronnage start with the Négritude movement of the 1930s–1950s. Négritude authors were the first French-Caribbean intellectuals to develop a mystified image of the maroon (Corzani 136–37). For authors such as Aimé Césaire, the maroon represented a powerful image of resistance against the persisting European dominance and devalorization of Black African societies and cultures. In Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1947), the maroon is depicted as being at the mercy of the plantation owner and slave master and

78 Sarah Gröning accepting slavery: “J’accepte . . . j’accepte . . . entièrement, sans réserve . . . le jarret coupé à mon audace marronne // et la fleur de lys qui flue du fer rouge sur le gras de mon épaule” (Césaire, Cahier 52) [I accept . . . I accept . . . totally, without reservation . . . and the hamstring of my runaway audacity // and the fleur de lys flowing from red iron into the fat of my shoulder (Césaire, Notebook 40)]. But in the same poem, the slave rebellion of Haiti that began in a maroon community is glorified as the place “où la négritude se mit debout pour la première fois et dit qu’elle croyait à son humanité” (Césaire, Cahier 24) [where negritude rose for the first time (Césaire, Notebook 15)]. Although Césaire’s poem, representative of Négritude thoughts, shows a transformation of the image of slavery and marronage from mute acceptance to passionate rebellion, there seems to be no space for post/colonial strategies of violent resistance and uncontested acceptance.8 From the 1960s onward, the Négritude movement was gradually superseded by the so-called Antillanité—or Americanité—whose most famous representative is Édouard Glissant. Although Glissant is by far the most important thinker of French-Antillean post/coloniality, his depiction of the maroon is in line with Négritude discourses. He recognizes the maroon’s bad reputation as “bandit vulgaire” (Glissant, Discours antillais 180) [lawless bandit], which hints back to Schœlcher’s second type of maroon, but also describes the maroon as a role model for opposition to an oppressing social and political system, which makes him the “seul vrai héros populaire des Antilles” (180) [the only true hero of the Antilles, my translation], which refers to Schœlcher’s first type of marronage. Even in later theoretical and philosophical works such as Poétique de la Relation (1990) and Traité du Tout-Monde (1997), as well as in his novels, Glissant seems to be consistent in his opinion about marronage (Roberts 144). The most prominent example is, of course, the contrasting of the families Longoué and Béluse in La Lézarde (1959) and Le quatrième siècle (1964): whereas the first represent heroism and self-determined resistance against colonial oppression, the second would be identified as servile and assimilatory.9 However, some outstanding protagonists of Glissant’s novels go beyond this dichotomy and explore the possibilities of understanding marronage differently, namely as a transhistorical phenomenon of questioning the colonial and postcolonial forms of social order and cultural expression.10 The representatives of the Créolité movement, Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant, continue the legacy of a twofold image of the maroon. In Éloge de la Créolité (1989), for example, the maroons are described as “bandés dans leurs refus” (Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant, Éloge 37) [allied in their disobedience, In Praise 896], which take on the image of active resistance. The maroon is furthermore depicted as “héritier du cri” (Chamoiseau and Confiant 43) [heir of the cry, my translation], the “cri” expressing a strong refusal of captivity and imprisonment as well as a courageous protest against established structures of power (39). However, the maroon is for the authors of the Créolité movement not a deserving hero for French-Antillean societies, as he vanished from the actual colonial socio-political context, almost like a coward not

Transformations of the maroon 79 daring to be involved in rebellious and violent quarrels (41, 43–44). In contrast to the withdrawal of the maroon, the remaining slaves on the plantations have developed secret codes of survival and compromise as well as various forms of resistance and sabotage (Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant 37), one of which is the storytelling as performed by the conteur. However, the opposition of the maroon and the conteur is not axiomatizable. Chamoiseau, in his literary texts, more and more links these two forms of resistance against slavery, notably in the figures of the ‘marqueur de paroles’ and the ‘guerrier de l’imaginaire,’ thus transforming marronage from an act of physical resistance into a method of spiritual escape from oppression and dehumanization.11

Depiction and transformation of the historical maroon in Mahagony, L’Esclave Vieil Homme et le Molosse and Nègre marron In contrast to the rather clear repetition of the antagonism between heroic resistance and servile assimilation which marks Glissant’s, Chamoiseau’s, and Confiant’s theoretical discourses on marronage and the maroon, the image of the maroon that these authors establish in their respective literary texts, Mahagony (1987), L’Esclave vieil homme et le molosse (1997), and Nègre marron (2006), is far more complex and diverse. The following analysis will therefore concentrate on the protagonists of the respective novels—Gani, Maho, and Mani in Mahagony;12 the old slave in L’Esclave vieil homme et le molosse; and Salomon, Samuel, Samson, Siméon, and Simao in Nègre marron13—and their motivation for marronage, as well as on narrative structures and discursive relations that support ambivalent and transhistorical representations of the maroon. It will be shown to what extent Glissant, Confiant, and Chamoiseau rely on (large parts of) Schœlcher’s definition, but also include colonial and post/colonial discourses of slavery and marronage within the French-Antillean context (such as the Négritude idealization and heroism) as well as metahistoriographic considerations about the necessity and realization of post/colonial ideologies based on historical phenomena or symbolic figures. Accordingly, the analysis of the three novels will be split up so as to demonstrate which poetic and literary methods are used to transpose the historical dichotomy of the significance of the maroon (illicit villain versus unquestioned hero of the anti-colonial resistance) into the complexity of post-slavery socio-political contexts of anti-modernist resistance. Re-narrations of the historical maroon Although Mahagony, Nègre marron, and L’Esclave vieil homme et le molosse are quite different in style and structure, we can observe in all three texts a similar depiction of the maroon in the historical context of colonialism and slavery. The three authors’ literary approaches to this topic show clear lines of convergence. This supports the abovementioned argument of a persistent dichotomist image of the historical maroon as either hero of anti-colonial resistance or uncritical servant

80 Sarah Gröning accepting slavery as an inevitable condition and voluntarily returning to his master. Nonetheless, the depiction of the historical maroons—Gani in Mahagony; the old nameless slave in L’Esclave vieil homme et le molosse; Salomon, Samuel, and Samson in Nègre marron—show first signs of the alteration of the historical maroon types described by Schœlcher into a ‘warrior of the imaginary.’ In Glissant’s Mahagony, one out of the three protagonists is placed in the context of slavery: Gani. His birth is dated to the year “mil et huit cent quinze [sic]” (Glissant, Mahagony 36) [thousand and eight hundred fifteen, my translation] and his story is told by three or probably four different narrators. In the course of the narration, where displaced fragments narrated by multiple narrators have to be put into relation, it becomes clear that Gani is “[l]’enfant prédestiné” (48) [predestined child, my translation]. His predestination is caused by his close link to a magic mahogany tree: both the placenta that nourished Gani in the womb of his mother and a snake that drank milk from his mother’s breast were buried under the mahogany tree (55). Gani as a creole slave is therefore permanently linked to the Caribbean archipelago and in constant interaction with all of its inhabitants. Furthermore, both the snake and the mahogany tree symbolize, in Creole tradition, primordiality (Masson-Perrin 156, 165), which underlines the eternal character of Gani’s predestination and significance for further generations of creolized individuals and communities. This multi-relational rooting allows Gani to run “par toute la terre outre les limites des plantations sans retenue” (Glissant, Mahagony 68) [all over the world beyond the limitations of the plantations without restraint, my translation] and to announce the Tout-Monde, i.e. a society which has been created through créolisation, is still evolving according to the same principles of eternally ongoing intercultural exchanges,14 and which can therefore be characterized as a heterogeneous community “de rouges nègres jaunes mélangés dans le maelström du temps [sic]” (45) [red negroes yellow mixed in the maelstrom of time, my translation]. Gani proleptically describes this Tout-Monde to his fellows and thereby surpasses the boundaries of time and space in his imagination: “Je vous montre à rêve le tout-monde, que la trace des pays la répétition des voix passent dans votre descendance” (83) [I show you in your dreams the all-world, where the traces of countries and the repetition of voices enter your descendance, my translation]. During his short marronage of only seven months (Glissant, Mahagony 115), Gani is able to metaphorically and physically create a new world by trampling the world figure into the soil of his native island, Martinique. In this act, committed by Gani at a time where marronage was still very diffuse and largely considered as not yet disturbing the colonial power structures, we can recognize an anachronistic prospection of the post-abolitionist reorganization of colonial history (including a glorification of the historical maroon). According to Mayaux, Gani’s disappearance has to be considered as an act of rebellion, in the first sense of Scœlcher’s classification of marronage, carried out by a slave who could not bear the annihilation of his self (356). But Gani’s uprising against his condition as a slave does not end with the physical withdrawal from the plantation society.

Transformations of the maroon 81 He additionally, and more importantly, imagines and creates a new perspective on the existing social and cultural dynamics between colonizers, colonized, enslaved and, later on, indentured workers,15 by connecting the African, Asian, and South American continents in one single image drawn into the soil of his homeland (64–65). The image itself excludes the European perspective but continents actually surround it in a geographical sense. This can be read as a parable on the center-periphery-discussion, in which Europe as ‘the center’ is not made visible but nonetheless included. The maroon Gani thereby surpasses the dichotomy between heroism and servility because the post/colonial ideology that he expresses in his creation of a ToutMonde prevails even after his violent death. Gani transforms into “une force qui aide” (Glissant, Mahagony 89) [a supporting force, my translation], a sort of nonheroified but still omnipresent reminder to the fragmentary character and socio-cultural situatedness of historical reconstruction. With his death, Gani fuses with the mahogany tree and therefore enters an eternal cycle of life, death,, and transition, which is also made explicit as Gani announces his transubstantiation from a postmortem point of view (89). In a distanced time, the narrator and protagonist of the opening chapter of Mahagony, Mathieu Béluse, can read Gani’s story and his announcement of a Tout-Monde in the tree itself.16 Gani’s form of anti-colonial resistance opens up a way for his following generations to understand resistance as an imaginative act, i.e. a mission that has to be accomplished not physically but spiritually: “il faut garder le tout-monde, courir après. Non pas sur deux jambes comme un fol dératé mais en serrant la pensée” (Glissant, Mahagony 69) [We have to preserve the all-world, run after it. Not on our two legs like a madman, but by focusing our thought, my translation]. A similar alteration from a servile and subordinate slave into a context-bound hero of anti-colonial resistance into a time-and-space-independent symbol of the transformative power of imagination can be observed in Chamoiseau’s L’Esclave vieil homme et le molosse. In this tale, the reader is introduced to “un vieux-nègre sans histoires” (Chamoiseau, L’Esclave 17) [an old negro, without histories, my translation]. He has no proper name and appears as an insignificant part of a mass of devastated people (25–26). The title of the first chapter, “Matière,” even suggests that the old man is a sort of construction element of the plantation. One day, the old slave is taken by a feeling unknown to him: the “déroute” (Chamoiseau, L’Esclave 37). He suddenly becomes aware of his own history and the stories of his people, which awaken him from his colonial lethargy. At first, he seems distraught and tries to suppress the ideas that come to him (49–50). But he cannot stand the power of these images and ideas and he has to succumb to an even stronger feeling of displacement: the “décharge” (49). The “décharge” can be described as “an involuntary urge that . . . signifies all slaves’ inherent refusal of captivity” (Garraway 156). According to Lynch, the old slave is shocked by the unexpected unveiling of his humanity and is overwhelmed by the feeling of self, completely new to him (108). The “décharge” can therefore also be interpreted as a powerful reinforcement of the third type of marronage classified by Victor Schœlcher: marronage out of despair which induces the slave to run away and

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discover himself as a self-conscious and self-determined individual with particular needs, i.e. as “le dévoilement de son humanité” (Lynch 108) [the unveiling of his humanity, my translation]. In Chamoiseau’s L’Esclave vieil homme et le molosse, this regaining of self-awareness and rediscovery of the protagonist’s humanity is expressed by a shift in voice from third person narration to first-person narration, “Je” (Chamoiseau, L’Esclave 89), or, as Chinien points out: “le vieil homme s’octroie graduellement le droit au ‚je’ ” (40) [The old man gradually grants himself the right for an ‘I,’ my translation]. During his escape from slavery and his emancipation from enforced selfabandonment, the old slave is followed by a giant Molosser.17 Being chased by a Molosser normally meant a sure death for the fugitive slave, but the old man is able to keep up his lead. He almost feels safe when “l’Innommable,” a venomous snake species which inhabits the island of Martinique, appears in front of him. Being trapped between the Molosser and the snake,18 both meaning sure death, the old man realizes his role as a member of a community which transcends time and space: “le savoir dont il devient le dépositaire dépasse la simple révélation de son humanité” (Lynch 109) [the knowledge of which he became the guardian goes beyond the simple revelation of his humanity, my translation]. Neither colonial reality (in the form of the Molosser) nor creole mysticism (in the form of “l’Innommable”) can suppress the old slave’s feeling of belonging to a newly emerging cultural community. On the contrary, he takes a further step towards becoming a warrior, not only in the physical and martial sense but also in the spiritual sense of a defender of humanity. Due to the further expansion of consciousness, the old slave has the courage to attack the Molosser: “Ne plus courir, me battre. Le combattre. Cette résolution me remplit d’épouvante. D’excitation aussi—vraiment inattendue” (Chamoiseau, L’Esclave 100, emphasis in original) [No longer run, fight. Fight against it. This resolution filled me with horror. Excitement as well—really unexpected, my translation]. During their fight, both the old slave and the Molosser become aware of the respective other’s suffering from colonization.19 As a result of this shared experience, the old man decides not to kill his persecutor, although he has the opportunity to do so. Instead, the old man continues his transformation into a “guerrier généreux” (Lynch 110) [generous warrior, my translation].20 It brings him back to the image of the circularity of life and death that he recognized in the snake-Ouroboros, where death does not put an end to existence but, on the contrary, is a precondition to life. As a consequence, the old man self-determinately prefers his own death to that of the Molosser, which enables him to discover his true vivacity and sets him free from both physical and cultural oppression. The exchange of compassionate gestures instead of humiliations between the old slave and the Molosser during the dying of the old man (metaphorically) marks the beginning of a post/colonial understanding of history. Resistance to cultural oppression and dehumanization is no longer expressed by physical fighting, but by overcoming established power relations and historical mutism due to selfawareness and solidarity: “Ces deux êtres mus et reliés par l’épouvante finissent le souffle de leur course en communion dans le silence d’un langage qui dépasse

Transformations of the maroon 83 la parole” (Desblache 65) [These two beings, driven and linked by the horror, end the action of their journey in harmony in the silence of a language which goes beyond speech, my translation]. In accordance with this spiritual unity, the old slave reconciles with his past and aspires to the common future of former antagonisms: “J’ai atteint une nervure d’alliance entre la mort et la vie, victoire et défaite, temps et immobilité, espace et néant” (Chamoiseau, L’Esclave 130) [I reached a vein of alliance between death and life, victory and defeat, time and immovability, space and nothingness, my translation]. Based on this insight, the old man’s death is not an end, but the beginning of a new phase in the process of cultural identity construction: “Je suis possédé d’une vie indestructible . . . Je suis un homme” (132–35) [I am possessed by an indestructible life . . . I am a man, my translation]. The resemblance to Glissant’s protagonist Gani is clearly visible as both characters’ deaths put an end to colonial certainties and open up a post/ colonial rethinking of power relations and fixed, antagonistic points of cultural identification. In contrast to Glissant’s Mahagony and Chamoiseau’s L’Esclave vieil homme et le molosse, the transformation of an enduring slave into a self-aware historical subject in Confiant’s Nègre marron is not undertaken by just one protagonist. The first three chapters of the tale cover a period of almost two centuries, where three different maroons experience different stages of colonialism in the Caribbean and their corresponding power structures: Salomon in 1687, Samuel in 1792, and Samson in 1841. The first chapter of Nègre marron, “L’échappé-courir,” starts with the arrival of the African captive Salomon on a Caribbean island in the 17th century, i.e. the age of the early establishment of European colonies in the Caribbean and the beginning of the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans. But instead of following his fellow captives, Salomon jumps off the ship (Confiant, Nègre marron 26–27) and thereby becomes the first maroon in this particular island’s history. With regard to Victor Schœlcher’s classification of fugitive slaves, Salomon’s escape would be identified as the first type of maroon who escapes spontaneously and out of fear from annihilation and abnegation. Although he has not yet experienced slavery in the New World, the experience of the Middle Passage compels Salomon to withdraw from the inhumane practice of slavery (25). The historical significance of his first act of liberation in the context of the tale is expressed by the insertion of several allegedly authentic sources into the story, in which the escape of Salomon is described as an economically significant material loss (Confiant, Nègre marron 21–22) and as an illegal acquisition of freedom (45–46). The status of slaves as ‘non-human merchandise’ is already anticipated by the epigraph that opens the first chapter: Article 38 of the Code Noir which regulates the punishment of fugitive slaves after their recapture (9). Paradoxically, the character of Salomon does not correspond to the image which is created of him through the alleged official documentation—“Il semble être très dangereux” (16) [He seems to be very dangerous, my translation]—and historic legislation respectively—“La liberté n’est pas un droit naturel pour la race africaine” (45) [Freedom is not a natural right of the African race, my translation].

84 Sarah Gröning On the contrary, Salomon is rather anxious about the unknown environment, but at the same time he has to adapt to it by transforming into a vegetative being (43). This transformation alludes to the initial meaning of “maroon,” i.e. becoming wild again, but also goes beyond this by pointing at the unnaturalness of slavery and the human urge for freedom. Salomon’s encounter with one of the Amerindian inhabitants of the island underlines this interpretation, as the latter moves freely over the island and lives a life apart from the European colonizers (46–50). The binary opposition between Salomon’s former life as a free African and the state of slavery he was forced into is expressed by the use of a second-person narration. The predominantly heterodiegetic narrator addresses the protagonist Salomon as part of an anonymous collective: “vous, les Bois d’ébène” (Confiant, Nègre marron 25) [you, the Ebony, my translation]. Untypically, the narrator also internally focuses on Salomon’s thoughts and narrates the latter’s observations and reflections in a way that a (narratologically illogic) identification of narrator and protagonist can be assumed. The confusion between distanced narrator, isolated protagonist, and addressed collective that is thereby created has to be understood as hint at the processes of cultural deracination and destruction of historical identity that the enslaved in the Americas have undergone: they are deprived of their individuality and form a large and heterogeneous mass of naked migrants, not being allowed to bring or keep anything from a former life (Glissant, Discours antillais 112). As Lorna Milne concludes, the individuality of the enslaved undergoes a degeneration which results in total mental lethargy (Milne, Patrick Chamoiseau 51). The deprivation of liberty and memory causes a sort of lethargy that prevents the slaves from rising up or running away. The slaves thus endure passively: On est huilé en silence. On débarque en silence . . . En silence, on se laisse acheter, transporter sur l’habitation, enseigner les nécessités du champ de café, d’indigo, de tabac ou bien de canne à sucre. En silence, on recompose lentement le monde. (Chamoiseau and Confiant 40). (We are oiled in silence. We are unloaded in silence . . . In silence, we are bought, transported to the plantation, taught the necessities about the coffee, indigo, tobacco or sugar cane fields. In silence, we slowly reconstitute our world, my translation) The theoretical consideration of Glissant and the Créolité authors can be recognized in Salomon’s observation: . . . ces nègres-là avaient oublié le Pays d’Avant . . . Ils ne rêvaient même plus de lui. N’en parlaient en tout cas jamais. Comme s’ils s’étaient résignés à ce que leur existence fût désormais ensouchée ici-là et que c’était tout aussi bien ainsi. (Confiant, Nègre marron 44) [these negroes there have forgotten the Former Land . . . They did not even dream about it anymore. Never talked about it at all. As if they were resigned

Transformations of the maroon 85 to what made their existence root right there from now on and what was just alright, too, my translation] The contrasting of the fugitive slave Salomon with those still in captivity on the island takes up the dichotomy between heroism and servility described above: for Salomon, the first maroon in Nègre marron, flight seems to be the only possibility to avoid forgetting about his past and his Bambara identity. However, according to Schulz (293), the fragmentation of the memories of the imported slaves, who are perceived as “des déserteurs de mémoire” (Confiant, Nègre marron 31–32) [deserters of memory, my translation] by Salomon, is the first step towards créolisation as described by Glissant, i.e. as “éclatement inouï des cultures” (Glissant, Poétique 46) [unprecedented rupture of cultures, my translation], and the authors of the Créolité, i.e. as “humanité nouvelle . . . brutalement déterritorialisée[], transplantée[] dans un environnement où elle [dut] réinventer la vie” (Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant, Éloge de la Créolité 26) [new humanity . . . brutally uprooted and transplanted in an environment where they had to reinvent life (Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant, In Praise of Creoleness 891–92)].21 Although Salomon withdraws from the plantation, he will not be able to completely ignore the transformation processes that have been initiated by colonization and slavery. The second maroon of Nègre marron, Samuel, seems to be an incarnation of Salomon. He is also a newly imported slave who maintains a close spiritual connection to his country of origin in the form of memories and dreams, and is similarly hit by slavery and by the dehumanization that it causes. However, unlike his predecessor Salomon, Samuel, does not escape right away. Upon his arrival at the plantation, the other slaves advise him to assimilate quickly (Confiant, Nègre marron 60). In combination with the “lot de tortures gratuites” (57) [lot of gratuitous tortures, my translation], the policy of assimilation of that era proves very effective: Samuel starts to forget about his past and his former cultural identity (74). Due to the establishment of a fully developed economic system based on slavery and acculturation in the 18th century, Samuel cannot, in contrast to Salomon, build up an existence beyond slavery. He is not able to imagine an identity as a free person because being part of an anonymous collective, “[qui] n’éprouvai[t] qu’un sorte de vide dans le crane” (Confiant, Nègre marron 68) [which only felt a sort of emptiness in their heads, my translation], already seems natural to him. The year in which Samuel’s story is situated, 1792, supports this interpretation of the unquestionable power relations between colonizers and colonized. Although the year 1792 evokes the age of the French Revolution of 1789 and the abolition of slavery in 1794—which both stand for human rights and freedom of choice— the slaves in the American and Caribbean colonies were excluded from the newly gained human and civil rights when slavery was reestablished in the colonies in 1802. Admitting that freedom cannot be regained by social or political measures, Samuel, like many other slaves, and like Salomon before him, recognizes the other slaves’ lethargy: “Tu hais leurs figures serviles, tantôt hilares, tantôt frappées

86 Sarah Gröning d’hébétude. La dignité semble être une idée inconnue de ces gens” (77) [You hate their servile figures, sometimes merry, sometimes stricken by dullness, my translation]. Only the death of a slave has a great value for them (59), as it puts an end to their curse (68).22 Samuel, who is torn between his memories of Africa, the atrocities of slavery that he witnesses, and his position as the Master’s favorite (Confiant, Nègre marron 73), consciously takes the decision to retreat from power structures and dehumanization by marooning. In contrast to Salomon, Samuel escapes out of desperation as he is no longer able to support slavery, and decides to ‘break his chains’ as the chapter title “Le péter-chaînes” already announces. In the case of the second maroon in Nègre marron, the circumstances that lead to the act of marronage show that marooning as a mode of resistance against slavery already has the potential to defy public order because “le Marron, fût-il ‘petit,’ a . . . goûté à la liberté, même brièvement, [et] en a conservé un vif désir” (Confiant, Nègre marron 61) [the Maroon, be he ‘small’ has . . . tasted freedom, at least shortly, and kept it a lively desire, my translation]. In comparison to Salomon’s escape, Samuel gets to know the system he decides to leave behind in detail. Whereas Salomon succumbs to an uncontrollable urge for freedom, which is natural to all human beings, Samuel’s escape needs a lot more self-awareness to recognize the growing complexity of colonial societies and to question the power structures that have been established to suppress thoughts of equality and freedom. Marronage in Samuel’s case therefore marks a clear step towards emancipation and heroism as it puts emphasis on the individual instead of the community. On the discourse level, this change of motivation is accompanied by a change of voice from “vous” to “tu”—“vous, les Bois d’ébène” (25) is transformed into “toi, le Marron” (81). However, full emancipation is not yet achieved. Feelings of anger, despair, and hatred befall Samuel while he wanders in the woods and looks for a way to the “ÎLE REBELLE” (82) [rebellious island, my translation],23 are an expression of unsystematic contestation of slavery, but cannot prevent Samuel from losing his orientation: as Samuel is not able to leave the island and his life as a slave behind, he falls into a mental state of “déraison” (86). Albeit “déraison” does not mean “folie,” i.e. a complete loss of mental capacities, the shift from Salomon’s ‘desire to return to Africa’ to Samuel’s ‘attempt to escape on neighboring islands’ can be read as an early manifestation of Antonio Benítez Rojo and Édouard Glissant’s archipelagic thinking. It is closely linked to chaos theory in that chaos is not equated with disorder or nothingness, but rather refers to the friction of different conceptions of time and space (Glissant, Chaos-monde 124).24 According to Glissant, archipelagic thinking is built upon ambiguity, fragility, and derivation which finally leads to “la pratique du détour, qui n’est ni fuite, ni renoncement” (Glissant, Traité du Tout-Monde 31) [the practice of detour, which is neither escape nor renunciation, my translation]. With regard to Samuel’s desire to travel the Caribbean islands in order to escape from slavery, the “détour” that is symbolized in the non-achievement of the desired passage can be regarded as one of the “uncertain voyages of signification”

Transformations of the maroon 87 (Benítez Rojo 2) because it one the one hand scatters and damages the related identities, but also strengthens them and protects their identity-autism (Glissant, Mémoires des esclavages 166). Additionally, the anaphoric juxtaposition of Salomon’s and Samuel’s intended passages to their respective places of refuge, can be read as a junction of times which is inherent to the chaotic character of archipelagic thinking (Glissant, Traité du Tout-monde 43). Thus, the symbolic power of the protagonists’ repeated but altered stories opens up a third space in the sense of Homi Bhabha, i.e. an epistemic space (between past and present, history and histories) which “challenges our sense of the historical identity of culture as a homogenizing, unifying force” and which “makes the structure of meaning and reference an ambivalent process” (Bhabha 53). The signification and influence of marronage as an act of resistance is again diversified in the course of the third chapter of Nègre marron. A further reincarnation of Salomon and Samuel, Samson, lives in the middle of the 19th century, an era that is characterized by the economic prosperity of the French colonies due to slavery on the one hand, and by the abolition of slavery in the British colonies in 1834/1838 on the other hand. Samson is a so-called “esclave créole,” i.e. a slave born in the New World and completely assimilated and acculturated. His dedication to the master reaches a grotesque degree as Samson does not accuse the commander for the punishment he receives, but the “NègresGuinée,” the “Nègres-Congo,” and the “Nègres d’Angole” (Confiant, Nègre marron 91). Instead of refusing the Code Noir as a symbol of the racist and inhumane domination of people of African descent by Europeans, Samson is only concerned about the enforcement of the few slave rights that had been added to the original Code Noir from 1685 in 1724. With regard to Samson’s auto-devaluation, the use of a first-person narrator “je” appears almost cynical. But with a closer reading of the many details that Samuel, as an insider to the plantation system, is able to offer to the reader, it becomes clear that the first-person narrator is supposed to show the growing ambivalences and tensions in the social and cultural system. The most obvious indication of a slow decline of the colonizers’ powers against the slaves is the established mutual dependence between slaves and slave owners. As a consequence, the slaves do not fear the master’s punishment, as they are aware of their material value (Confiant, Nègre marron 113–14). Both slaves and slave owners grow together in a sort of surrogate family which copes with the lack of integral social structures in the still very heterogeneous community.25 In Nègre marron, this socio-cultural interdependence is explicitly articulated by Samson when he describes his filial feeling towards his Master (97–98). Nonetheless, the decline of the colonial hegemony becomes more and more visible as the slaves overtly boycott the operation of the sugar cane or rum production (Confiant, Nègre marron 110–12). Samson, who initially condemns the disobedience of the other slaves, is one day taken over by a feeling that is comparable to the “déroute” which the old slave in Patrick Chamoiseau’s tale experiences. Samson rebels against his master and decides to kill him (98). But when he has the opportunity to fulfill his plan, he cannot follow through: “Alors,

88 Sarah Gröning pris de panique, je . . . me mis à courir-des-cendre le morne . . . Je partis donc en marronnage” (118) [Well, caught by panic, I . . . began to run up the ashy mountain . . . I escaped into marronage, my translation]. The fear of committing parricide is too strong, as he would lose a part of his own identity. Trapped between the irreconcilable desires for loving and killing his surrogate father, Samson, in a displacement activity, escapes into the woods (122) and thereby evades solving the inner conflict. In the legacy of Salomon and Samuel, Samson turns into a “grand Marron” (122). As a first step towards a comparative conclusion, it has been shown that in the texts under discussion marronage as a mode of resistance against colonial power structures evolved in accordance with the degree of conscious awareness of the own self as a slave. Individual endeavors of resistance through marronage are strongly related to questions of collectivity, subjectivity, and identity. The first two maroons of Nègre marron, Salomon and Samuel, as well as the old man in L’Esclave vieil homme et le molosse are outsiders from the beginning, continuing and establishing creolization processes and defying their deculturation by completely retreating from colonial society. In the case of Samuel and the old man, this is experienced not only physically but also mentally, through “déraison” and amnesia respectively. Samson (Nègre marron) and Gani (Mahagony) recognize themselves as being part of the colonial society and try to harmonize opposing feelings of servility and emancipation before, during, and after their acts of marronage. Historiopoetic invention of a (post)modern “Nègre marron” The similarities between Glissant’s, Chamoiseau’s, and Confiant’s depiction of the historical maroon are quite obviously inter- and hypertextually motivated. They do not only take up historical and historiographical depictions of marronage, but clearly refer back to the authors’ theoretical considerations on the topic. Gani, the nameless old slave, Salomon, Samuel, and Samson can be regarded as either rebellious slaves who are driven intrinsically by an unbearable urge for freedom, or as personifications of Caribbean colonial societies’ evolving self-awareness and the regaining of a personal and cultural identity, which leads them to a recognition of their transhistoric interrelatedness in the creolization processes. Through the literary construction of multivalent and interconnected maroon figures who assume a responsibility for prospective (and maybe also prophetic)26 identity-building, Glissant, Chamoiseau, and Confiant largely contribute to the subsequent occupation of the maroon’s legitimate and meaningful place in creatively reconstructed history and memory that goes beyond the dichotomist essentialisms.27 With a closer look at the genealogical successors of Gani, the nameless old slave, Salomon, Samuel, and Samson, who are situated in postcolonial times, the transhistoric impact of the maroon as a self-reflexive and self-determined icon of post/colonialism will become obvious. The three maroons in chapters one to three of Nègre marron reincarnate twice again as Siméon in 1936 and Simao in 1978.28 Slavery is no longer legal in these

Transformations of the maroon 89 periods, but the last two protagonists can also be described as maroons because they make use of similar strategies of resistance to withdraw and/or fight against power structures inherited from colonial times. Whereas Confiant’s depiction of the first three maroons induces a transformation of marronage from a historical phenomenon into a metahistorical ideology of resistance, the latter two maroon protagonists in Nègre marron encounter a sort of a-historic maroon legacy that further strengthens the evolving of modes of anti-modernist resistance.29 As the title “La grève marchante” and the epigraph of the fourth chapter already announce,30 Siméon lives in the politically and ideologically charged period of class struggle on the one hand, and African American civil rights movement and political emancipation on the other. He is a respected labor union leader, a “Chef syndicat” (Confiant, Nègre marron 139). In an act of impulse, Siméon kills the racist and exploitative plantation owner Maurice de Beauharnais (144–45). On a symbolic level, the killing committed by Siméon has to be read as the realization of the parricide that Samson was not able to accomplish, which again underlines the genealogical connection between the maroon protagonists in Nègre marron. Like his predecessors, Siméon also hides in the woods of Mount Pelé (Confiant, Nègre marron 146). But as he has been an honorable member of postcolonial society, the escape to the forest forces Siméon to transform into an outcast: “Siméon-Ça devint un Nègre marron presque cent ans après l’abolition de l’esclavage” (151) [Siméon-It turned into a maroon almost one hundred years after the abolition of slavery, my translation]. The use of the demonstrative pronoun “ça” by the implicit narrator instead of a personal pronoun shows the degeneration of the protagonist and links Siméon back to both the original sense of the word “marron” as a ‘savage animal,’ and the dehumanization of the slaves to things of material value.31 To support Siméon’s retrospective identification with his ancestors who suffered under slavery, his transformation includes a near-death experience (Confiant, Nègre marron 154). Siméon as a post-abolition maroon spiritually returns to the past to become a witness of the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans, and to encounter his ancestors (157). This immersion into the island’s past helps him to better understand his present: “Ça revécut une à une les épreuves majeures qu’avaient traversées ses ancêtres . . . dans le Ventre Immonde” (160–61) [It relived one by one the hardships which his ancestors had to go through . . . in the Hideous Womb, my translation]. As a consequence of this retrospective sequence, Siméon also connects to Salomon and Samuel, who physically experienced the Middle Passage. He regains the spirit of marronage due to a “baptême régénérateur” (162) [regenerative baptism, my translation]. With regard to the year of Siméon’s escape and transformation, we can assume that the “baptême régénérateur” can also be read as a hint to the Négritude and other movements of political and social emancipation in the Americas of the 1930s to 1960s. In the same way that representatives of the aesthetic and political movements drew inspiration from the pre-colonial past in order to denounce the colonial and postcolonial devaluation of the Afro-American and Afro-Caribbean population, Siméon finds courage in his collective history, and opposes the

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oppressors: “Sus à Siméon! Le Diable, le Nègre marron, la bête humaine, plus bête qu’humaine, celui qui était revenu pour déranger leur petite, leur misérable tranquillité de Nègres soumis et contents de l’être” (Confiant, Nègre marron 167–68) [After Siméon! The Devil, the Maroon, the human beast, more beast than human, he who came back to disturb their little, their miserable tranquility of Negroes who are pleased in their submissiveness, my translation]. The experience of becoming a “Nègre marron” (Confiant, Nègre marron 157) in postcolonial times and in the context of Négritude shows that marronage is not a restrictively historical phenomenon. The protagonist Siméon maroons himself from a society which does not live under the circumstances of slavery but is still widely influenced by it. In order to express an awareness for the weakening and self-denigration (Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant 37) that colonial history has caused among supposedly postcolonial societies, the concept of marronage is, in Nègre marron, transposed to the present era and serves as a metahistorical mode of questioning established power relations, and to support the development of multiple forms of anti-modernist resistance. The already strong link between past and present that the fourth maroon has established is again reinforced in the fifth chapter of Confiant’s Nègre marron, “Drive folle” [Drive of Madness]. At first, Simao seems to be a prime example of social advancement. In this respect, he takes on Siméon’s merits. Paradoxically, the positive development of the poor boy from the countryside also results in his return to the wilderness, but not into the forest. The capital of Martinique, Fortde-France, is depicted as a lawless and wild area, which is controlled by criminals, prostitues, and the so-called “driveurs” (Confiant, Nègre marron 197) Simao, who escapes from the woods to civilization and thereby physically moves away from the territory of his predecessors, soon realizes that “son nouveau lieu de travail ne différait guère de L’Habitation cannière” (Confiant, Nègre marron 190) [his new work place did not differ at all from the sugar cane plantation, my translation]. After having been involved in criminal acts and being forced to take responsibility for everything, Simao turns into an even more violent and less heroic maroon than Siméon. His motivation for escape is neither despair, nor fear of annihilation of his self, nor urge for freedom, nor fear of punishment, but a strong desire for revenge and troublemaking. Thus, Simao surpasses the categories of marronage that have been established by Schœlcher and taken over by postabolitionist discourses of colonial H/history, slavery, and marronage. Nonetheless, Simao does not ignore his predecessors and their efforts to find a self-reflexive and individualized form of withdrawal from dehumanization and oppression, but incorporates and transforms them into a post/colonial reinterpretation of anticolonial and anti-modernist resistance. His “drive folle” is an expression of historical and cultural disorientation, caused by a paralyzing “déveine éternelle” (204) [the eternal misfortune, my translation]. On the discourse level, this intertemporal and interdiscursive relation is expressed by the unsystematic use of the personal pronouns “il,” “je,” “tu” and “vous” as well as the demonstrative pronoun “ça.” Simao continually switches between the historical maroons Salomon, Samuel, and Samson and the present political

Transformations of the maroon 91 maroon Siméon. These shifts in time are supported by the almost random evocation of the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans (Confiant, Nègre marron 181, 198), the plantation economy (190), the Harlem Renaissance, and the Black Panthers (171, 206) as well as other cultural or literary intertexts, especially Glissant’s essay Discours antillais and his novel Mahagony. Thus, Simao’s physical displacements are accompanied by reflections on identity and community, individual and collective memories, as well as imagination wherein the act of marronnage is repeated infinitely (Ildem 35). In this respect, the last chapter of Confiant’s tale aesthetically demonstrates the Créolité-author’s idea of a common history in the form of interwoven histories (Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant 26), as well as Glissant’s vision of a ToutMonde, i.e. “le mouvement tourbillonnant par lequel changent perpétuellement—en se mettant en rapport les uns avec les autres—les cultures, les peuples, les individus, les notions, les esthétiques, les sensibilités etc” [the swirling movement by which perpetually change—by bringing each other into relationship—cultures, peoples, individuals, notions, aesthetics, sensibilities, etc., my translation] (À propos de Tout-monde, 121). In accordance with the cultural theory of créolisation and interrelatedness, the maroon appears to be a diversified and chaotic collection of historic, counter-historic, and transhistoric elements that are supposed to be maintained by the self-aware post/colonial society.32 Due to the interrelatedness of dicourses and intertexts implied in the last two chapters of Nègre marron, the parallels between Confiant’s last two maroons, Siméon and Simao, and the successors of Gani in Mahagony, Maho and Mani, are not surprising. Maho is, like Siméon, a Black labor leader in the 1930s in Martinique and escapes from civilization into the wilderness after a failed murder attempt. But in contrast to Siméon, who was considered a villain by the population, Maho, through his complete withdrawal from modern society, induces the population to mystify and heroify him as untamable giant (Glissant, Mahagony 120) whose pitilessness and brutality as well as dirty and repellent outer appearance are regarded in a positive sense (153). Thus, Maho is driven into a kind of anachronistic rigidity which alludes to the glorification of the African heritage and Black beauty by the Négritude and other Black emancipation movements: “il n’avait pas d’idée des rêves qu’il avait ramenées d’un passé vertigineux, ni des fières et inavouables tentations qu’il faisait grandir dans les têtes timides des habitants” (153) [He had no idea neither of the dreams he had brought back from a vertiginous past, nor of the proud and dishonorable temptations which he made grow in the inhabitants’ shy minds, my translation]. Despite his physical absence from society, Maho is omnipresent in his fellows’ minds as a legendary Black maroon (Glissant, Discours antillais 118),33 and thereby allows for a development of a post/colonial identity on the basis of barely noticeable traces in the collective unconsciousness (118) which continue to exist apart from European role models and assimilatory political and social measures. However, mystification and glorification of the pre-colonial past and forms of anti-colonial resistance during the colonial era are antagonistic to the ongoing modernization and assimilation of the Martinican society of the 1930s. In order

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to prevent society from identitarian agony and regressiveness, Odibert, a contemporary of Maho and one of the narrators of Mahagony,34 kills Maho while pointing out that a maroon is not at all a saint (Glissant Mahagony 164). Thus, Odibert acts as a metahistoriographic corrective and prompts both the population, which adhered to the glorification of Maho, and the reader of Mahagony to selfaware reflections on colonial history, mystification of historical figures, and effective forms of anti-colonial resistance. In this last respect, we find a remarkable parallel between Mahagony and Nègre marron: whereas Siméon gains power over his community’s history through a self-aware journey into the past, Maho gains power over his community’s collective memory through the personification of maroon heroism. Through their respective transformations, both protagonists develop from outlaws into idols of anti-modernist resistance against historiographical ignorance and cultural dominance, but then again are deconstructed and reduced to their mere humanity and vulnerability. The protagonists’ retrogression from heroes to historically insignificant individuals can be read as a hint to the question of history writing and mythmaking in the Caribbean. According to Glissant, neither historiography nor literature has successfully transformed the maroon into a tutelary hero (Discours antillais 266). But in deliberately ignoring the possibility for the creation of a founding myth or a legitimizing national history, they have pointed to the metahistorical question of a “désiré historique”35 whose principle is one of dizzying repetition (Discours antillais 257, Caribbean Discourse 80), which is even more important because the formulation of a “désiré historique” brings to light the dilemma of the communities which are still oppressed by a dominating culture (Discours antillais 260, Caribbean Discourse 83). The last of Glissant’s three maroons, Mani, provokes an even more durable “torsion de l’histoire antillaise” (Mayaux 358) [torsion of West Indian history, my translation] because, as Masson-Perrin points out, from Gani to Maho to Mani, the status of the maroon increasingly loses its grandeur (235), and almost results in a complete decline of the heroic image of the historical maroon. Accordingly, Mani is considered more of a “driveur,”36 who lives in a globalized modernity without really belonging to it, than a heroic maroon who inspires a glorified point of identification for the postcolonial society he lives in. Mani cannot adapt to his environment and the social rules and power structures controlling it. He instead behaves like “un morceau de la catastrophe à vif en rotation autour du monde” (Glissant, Mahagony 190) [a piece of bare catastrophe rotating around the world, my translation]. As he disappears, Mani’s existence is doubled by Marny whose topicality in the media and the common talk completely represses Mani’s obscurity (Glissant, Mahagony 205). With this contrasting of public and private, Britton understands Mani’s role as equivalent to the subaltern in Gayatri Spivak’s sense because Mani remains unseen although being omnipresent in common people’s lives (Britton 69; Spivak 67). In the same way as maroon histories have been covered by (post)colonial history, Mani’s escape story is covered by the strong media attention of Marny’s spectacular prison break. Only by a creative recombination of orally

Transformations of the maroon 93 transmitted knowledge—as represented in the novel Mahagony by the tellings of Marie Célat and Ida—and literary construction—as represented by the authorship of Mathieu Béluse—can a story such as Mani’s be uncovered and subsequently opposed to official documentation.37 Thus, the story of Mani is not only a further step in the diversification of the transhistoric signification of marronage but also a metahistoriographic and metanarrative reflection on the processes of knowledge creation and identity construction: “La raideur à élucider l’histoire cède au plaisir des histoires” (Glissant, Mahagony 229) [The rigidness of elucidating history yields to the pleasure of histories, my translation]. This, ultimately, leads to the conclusion that marronage—as a dehistoricized concept of refusal of and opposition to (post)colonial dynamics of power and hegemony—can be instrumentalized to support ideas of self-determination, recognition of multiplied identification of individuals and communities, as well as reflection about post/colonial questions on historical, social, political, and cultural dominance. In an abstracted summary of the motivations of escape of Confiant’s five and Glissant’s three maroons, regardless of the very different contexts they live in, we can conclude that all of them choose to escape when they have come to a point where the imposed rules of the society they live in—or have been forced into—become unbearable for them and their desire for selfdetermination: Salomon and Samuel escape from enslavement, Samson and Gani escape from institutionalized slavery, Siméon and Maho escape from a political and economic system that is based on the exploitation of Black workers and the unequal treatment of colored people, and Simao and Mani defy a postcolonial modernity which has forgotten about the past and does not allow for individuality. All of the protagonists are driven by affect or a feeling of “déroute,” so that their intrinsic desire for freedom outweighs every attempt to reasonably consider the different—and probably less sensational—opportunities for escaping their respective social and economic situation and regaining power over their individuality. Instead of being resistant heroes or servile slaves of their respective social and cultural environment, the maroons must be characterized independently from these essentialisms. Their multidimensional depiction in Confiant’s tale and Glissant’s novel both include and deconstruct the historically and historiographically transmitted images of vagabondism versus heroism of the maroon, which results in a strong argument in favor of post/colonial individuality and rethinking of the rhizomatic relations between past and present, as well as history, nonhistory, and memory. The same conclusion can also be drawn from Chamoiseau’s L’Esclave vieil homme et le molosse, more precisely in the merging of the old slave’s past and the narrator’s present through the image of the “Pierre-Monde.” At the end of his escape, the nameless old maroon lies down at a huge rock and becomes one with the stories of the past: “les disparus vivent en [lui] par le biais de la Pierre. Un chaos de millions d’âmes” (Chamoiseau, L’Esclave 130) [The deceased and forgotten live on in him through the Rock. A chaos of millions of souls, my translation]. Centuries later, the first-person narrator of the last chapter “Les os” also gets into contact with the “Pierre-Monde” and thereby feels the past entering

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his present: “C’étaient des os de guerrier . . . D’un guerrier sans souci de conquête ou de domination. Qui aurait couru vers une autre vie. Vie de partage et d’échanges qui transforment. Vie d’humanisation du monde en son total” (146) [There were the bones of a warrior . . . Of a warrior free of worry of conquest or domination. Who had run towards another life. A life of sharing and altering exchanges. A life of humanizing the world in its core]. This description of the narrator’s experience in touching the bones next to the stone echoes Glissant’s notion of the ToutMonde. But in consideration of Chamoiseau’s depiction of the “Pierre-Monde” in his essay Écrire en pays dominé, it becomes clear that the image of the “PierreMonde” combines the relatedness and disorder of the Tout-Monde with the importance of writing as a materialistic manifestation of the results of créolisation (Milne, Patrick Chamoiseau 166). Through this intertextual and metanarrative symbolism of the “Pierre-Monde,” the transformation of the old slave into a ‘warrior of the imaginary’ is fulfilled. The old slave’s experience of immersion into the past is doubled by the narrator of the last chapter of L’Esclave vieil homme et le molosse. As a result, the narrator—another presupposed alter ego of Chamoiseau—turns towards his readers and reminds them that the memories of the present are not intact anymore but “usées, emmêlées en dérive” [worn-out, tangled up, drifted] because they have never been passed on to build a lasting experience of self-consciousness and collective identity (Chamoiseau, L’Esclave 144). He then “underlin[es] the writer’s ethical and political duty to reshape the imaginary” (Milne, “The marron and the marqueur” 79) as it is the writer’s task to prevent the post/colonial community from being chased by the monster of the past which is not yet past.38 According to him, this can only be achieved by obsessively writing and rewriting the past: “J’étais victime d’une obsession, la plus éprouvante et la plus familière, dont l’unique sortie s’effectue par l’Écrire. Écrire. Je sus ainsi qu’un jour j’écrirais une histoire, cette histoire, pétrie des grands silences de nos histoires mêlées, nos mémoires emmêlées” (145) [I fell victim to an obsession, the most testing and the most intimate, whose only exit is made by writing. Writing. Like this, I only knew days of writing a story, this story, kneaded of great silences of our mixed histories, our tangled memories]. With the multilayered representation of marronnage as both a historical phenomenon and a mode of self-conscious awakening, metahistoriographic reflection as well as literary emancipation in L’Esclave vieil homme et le molosse, Chamoiseau transforms the image of the maroon into a hero of anti-modernist resistance who does not only represent the emergence of a creole identity throughout the past, but whose relevance for future generations reaches far beyond the original urge for evasion (Milne, Patrick Chamoiseau 167). In this last respect, Chamoiseau’s tale also links back to Glissant’s novel Mahagony in that both Chamoiseau’s narrator and Mathieu Béluse ‘read’ the engraved past (in the mahogany tree and the stone respectively) and feel enlightened to translate their personal transhistorical experience into a collective-bound writing project that understands marronage not as a historical phenomenon or mythical symbol, but as an aesthetic concept of self-reflexive and historiopoetic identity construction.

Transformations of the maroon 95

Conclusion As the analyses of Mahagony, L’Esclave vieil homme et le molosse, and Nègre marron have shown, the concepts of marronage and the maroon are not simplistic and one-dimensional, but complex. They incorporate Victor Schœlcher’s historical notions of rebellion and disobedience, hopelessness and resignation, as well as uncontrollability, and affect the post/colonial concepts of historical awareness, desire for self-determination, and modes of construction of collective identity. Instead of reproducing unifying essentialisms of the slave as either servile or rebellious and the maroon as either heroic or criminal, the maroon protagonists in Mahagony, L’Esclave vieil homme et le molosse, and Nègre marron are depicted as ambivalent figures that incorporate many different roles. As a consequence, the maroons cannot be understood as mere literary adaptations of the authors’ theoretical assumptions about the role of marronage in history. On the contrary, the maroon as a historical figure is decontextualized, dehistoricized, but at the same time reindividualized and rehumanized. As a result of this complex rethinking of the historical figure, the past is drawn to the present and the future in order to allow for an integration of metahistorical and metahistoriographic as well as metaliterary discourses into the literary text. In doing so, the authors highlight the constructedness of historical and historiographical discourses about the colonial past and thereby point to the necessity of questioning fixed points of cultural identity. Thus, the three novels are emblematic of the post/colonial society’s omnipresent discomfort concerning economic, political, and social structures inherited from colonialism. Arguably, the concurrent historicity, counter-historicity, and a-historicity of the maroons of Mahagony, L’Esclave vieil homme et le molosse, and Nègre marron serve to pursue the transformation of the historical figure into a ‘warrior of the imaginary’ and thereby to defend the post/colonial imaginary as a source of inspiration in an anti-modernist culture of resistance.

Notes 1 The use of the term postcolonial has been problematized by Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin (1989), Hall (1996), Bongie (1998), and Gyssels (2007) amongst others. In accordance with Chris Bongie’s definition, I use postcolonial when referring to the time period “covering approximately the last half of this century and describing certain societies that have been or still are under the formal or informal control of another nation” (13). Bongie’s neologism post/colonial will instead be used if the chronological sense of the term needs explicit contestation and “a self-reflexive component” (13). 2 The term “historiopoetic” refers to a metahistoriographical and metapoetic concept that I developed in Historiopoeten: Formen literarischer Geschichtsschreibung im französischen Roman der Karibik. It places emphasis on the multiple interferences between the historiography, theory of history, narratology and cultural theory with regard to the representation of the colonial past in literature. The concept of “historiopoetics” is in large parts built upon the main arguments of narrativist theory of history, in which the relation between the past and the historiographical or literary text can best be described as metaphoric (Munslow 114). Thus, the textual representation of past events and historical phenomena—be they historiographic or literary—have to be understood as mere “interpretations of the past” (Ankersmit 33) proposed by the

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historian or writer respectively. See also the influential studies of Hayden White, Roland Barthes, Paul Ricœur, and Paul Veyne in this context. In the course of Patrick Chamoiseau’s literary and theoretical texts, he develops an alter ego that transforms twice. Whereas he is an ‘ethnographer’ in Chronique des sept misères (and probably still in Solibo Magnifique), he develops into a ‘marquer de paroles’ [word scratcher] in Texaco, and transforms again into a ‘guerrier de l’imaginaire’ [warrior of the imaginary] in L’Esclave vieil homme et le molosse and Écrire en pays dominé. Chamoiseu’s later novel Biblique des derniers gestes retraces this transformation within one witness of the protagonist’s funeral, and Un Dimanche au cachot puts emphasis on the inner struggles of the ‘guerrier de l’imaginaire’ concerning the apparent contradictions between objectivity and imagination, educational mission and the pleasure of reading. The notion of anti-modernist resistance must not be understood as an expression of fear of modernity, progression, and civilization in general, but as a self-reflexive questioning of the transformations that modernity imposes on historical conditions and discourses. According to Carolyn Fick, Haitian historiography, especially, takes up this dichotomy, primarily due to retrospective glorification of the maroon leaders of the Haitian Revolution (5–14). Many subsequent studies have not questioned the binarism either. For detailed studies on slavery and marronage during the colonial era in the English and French Antilles see Debbasch, Debien, Fallope, Fouchard, Genovese, Manigat, and Price. For critical studies about forms of resistance among slaves see Craton, Fick, Regent; for abolitionist discourses see Schmidt; for studies about the depiction of the maroon in literature see Rochmann and Burton. The English term “maroon” as well as the French word marron are derived from the Spanish word cimarrón. The first use of the word cimarrón by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo in his Historia general y natural de las Indias (1543) can be translated etymologically as “living on the peaks” (Spanish “cima” means “peak” in English) and semantically as “become savage again” (38). For further explanations of the historical use of “cimarrón” and “marron” see also Labat (132); Bouton (69); Rochefort (322, 335); Aveillier (334–35); and Tardieu (238–42). Of course, Schœlcher’s categorization is debatable because his observations are made from a eurocentric and thereby politically and socially dominant point of view. However, the point here is not to discuss the legitimacy of Schœlcher’s abolitionist policy, but to underline the ambiguity of post/colonial discourses led by representatives of the formerly colonized and enslaved respectively. For further analyses concerning the depiction of the fugitive slave in Négritude literature, see Rochmann. For further analyses concerning the depiction of the fugitive slave in Glissant’s earlier novels, see Burton. Especially in Glissant’s later works one can find a reinterpretation and widening of the concept of marronage. As Restori points out, the relationship between forest and maroons, as Glissant has depicted it since La Lézarde and Le Quatrième siècle, has transformed from metonymy to allegory from Mahagony onwards (Restori 51, note 24). Mahagony is, according to Restori, an outstanding example of this transformation, but it is also worth mentioning Glissant’s latest novel Ormerod. The female protagonist Flore Gaillard is a product of the colonial era in a double sense and thereby inherits the once given dichotomy of servitude and assimilation versus resistance and transculturation. She is, firstly, a so-called “octavonne” (Glissant Ormerod 22), meaning a result of biological métissage. But as she is the dominant partner in her relationship with the commander Alvares, she inverts and deconstructs the image of métissage resulting from the rape and abuse of Black women. In support of this argument, Flore Gaillard attacks and defeats the “cribo,” a sort of primordial snake—overtly masculine by the evocation of phallic symbolism—who, until his death, successfully prevented

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16 17

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the island from being creolized (33–36). Secondly, Flore Gaillard is introduced as “marronne” (22), who does not only use the dense tropical forests as a refuge for her invented army (25), but becomes one with the forest and its inhabitants (“Flore Bois Gaillard” 280). For a more detailed description of the close link between the maroon, the ‘marqueur de paroles’ and the ‘guerrier de l’imaginaire’ in Chamoiseau’s work, see Burton, Garraway, and Milne. The names that Glissant has chosen for his protagonists already hint at the transhistoric relationship between them. They are derived from the French word for the title-giving tree “mahogany.” The inclusion of the three names in the word “mahogany” can also be shown graphically and described as a double parenthesis [Ma(ho Ga)ni] (see Crosta 159). Apart from this, “mahogani” is homophonic to “ma agonie,” as Glissant points out in an interview (“Interview Mahagony” N. pag.), which also relates to the struggle of the protagonists to resist against slavery and oppression and their personal failure. The names of Confiant’s protagonists show their relation through assonance, but they also point to a common origin in the Bible. The corresponding figures in the Bible can all be characterized as powerful and wise, and fulfil prophetic functions in their respective positions. Créolisation, according to Glissant, results from the interference of several distinct cultures in a social contact situation. More precisely, créolisation goes beyond synthesis or accumulation of single cultural elements because it produces completely new and unpredictable outcomes (Poetique de la Relation 46, Traité du Tout-Monde 37). Since its first appearance in Discours antillais and a detailed elaboration of the term in his subsequent works, créolisation, as defined by Glissant, has been critically discussed and further contextualized by many critics such as Ménil, Ortner-Buchberger, Tauchnitz, Ueckmann, as well as in the diverse contributions of the volume edited by Ludwig and Rösberg. On an aesthetic level, Glissant’s concept of créolisation is closely linked to postmodern modes of writing such as fragmentation, accumulation, alteration, and exaggeration. For a further discussion on Glissant’s creolized writing, see Schulz, Tauchnitz, Ueckmann, and Chancé, as well as Pessini. After the abolition of slavery in 1848, workers from West Africa, China and India were hired and brought to the Caribbean to replace the missing workforce. For further details concerning indenture and immigration to Martinique and Guadeloupe after the abolition of slavery, see the works of David, Blérald, and Renard. He, for example, sees an African warrior (Glissant, Mahagony 80) and the Indian continent (83). The term Molosser refers to the blood-hounds that were imported to the American and Caribbean colonies in order to chase fugitive slaves. Thanks to their ability to recognize the smell of humans over a long distance and due to their aggressiveness, the Molosser was largely feared by maroons. In accordance with the historical significance of the Molosser, the beast is described in L’Esclave vieil homme et le molosse as a monster that “exprimait la cruauté . . . et l’âme désemparée du Maître” (Chamoiseau, L’Esclave 45, 51) [expresses the cruelty and the distraught soul of his Master, my translation]. The description of “l’Innommable” refers to the mythical image of the Ouroboros: “L’Innommable n’est ni mâle ni femelle, L’Innommable n’as pas de commencement et l’Innommable n’as pas de fin. L’Innommable semble porter son double reflété dans du ciel et des miroirs de terre, et il peut s’avaler et renaître en même temps” (Chamoiseau, L’Esclave 96) [The Unnamable is neither male nor female, The Unnamable has no beginning and The Unnamable has no end. The Unnamable seems to bear his double reflection in heaven and earth mirrors, and it can swallow itself and be reborn at the same time, my translation]. The Ouroboros was already known in ancient Egypt as a snake that eats its own tail. It therefore forms an endless circle of life and death, both beginning and ending (Hornung 38, 77–78). According to Desblache, the Molosser can be regarded as a complementary counterpart of the old slave as it also symbolizes the mutism of the colonial era (65–66).

98 Sarah Gröning 20 The notion of the generous warrior has been brought up by Sarte. According to him, the generous warrior is characterized by “une affectation qui a la liberté pour origine et pour fin” (Sartre, Qu’est-ce que la littérature? 57) [a feeling which has its origin and its end in freedom, Sartre, What is Literature 58]. 21 Although Glissant opposed the concept of Créolité because he considered it too restrictive (Poétique de la Relation 103), the concepts of Créolité and créolisation are linked to one another in a way that Tauchnitz describes as “des tendances théoriques venant de différentes positions, qui se fécondent l’une l’autre et qui se font avancer, certes, sur différents chemins mais en allant dans le même sens” (57) [theoretic tendencies drawn from different positions, enriching each other to the extent that both advance in the same sense but on different paths, my translation]. Besides Tauchnitz, many other critics consider the two concepts as related (see e.g. Chivallon, Miura, Perret). Chivallon even goes as far as to see the two concepts as almost synonymous (155). For L’Étang, though, the relation between créolisation and Créolité is best described as an ongoing process (créolisation) with explicit cultural outcomes that can be defined as results of the process of créolisation (Créolités). He thereby follows Chamoiseau, who in his later critical works explicitly acknowledges Glissant’s notion of créolisation as being part of his understanding of Créolité (Chamoiseau, Écrire en pays dominé 222). 22 According to several testimonies of plantation owners and travelers to the European colonies in the Americas and the Caribbean, there was a belief among some slaves that upon death they—or their souls—would return to Africa. This kind of belief is nowadays referred to as transmigration and is discussed, for instance, in relation to suicide as a form of resistance used by slaves. See e.g. Matt, Bilby, Walker, Snyder and Roediger. However, in Confiant’s Nègre marron, this belief does not motivate the delight that overcame the slaves upon the announcement of a death. On the contrary, the creole slaves in Nègre marron, i.e. those born in the colonies, have no remembrance of Africa and use the word “Guinée” (59) as a swear word to insult slaves that were imported from Africa. 23 Supposedly, the “ÎLE REBELLE” refers to Dominica, a neighboring island of Martinique whose geography did not allow for plantation economy. Instead, the dense forests and steep mountains offered a relatively safe refuge for both indigenous people and fugitive slaves. 24 For Benítez Rojo, chaos means dynamic states or regularities in the form of repetitions or alterations that can be observed within the apparent disorder of nature: “Chaos looks toward everything that repeats, reproduces, grows, decays, unfolds, flows, spins, vibrates, seethes,” i.e. “all phenomena that depend on the passage of time” (3). As a result of these antagonistic movements of regularity and disorder, Benítez Rojo identifies the “detour without a purpose, a continual flow of paradoxes” (11) as the main characteristic of chaos. 25 Valerie Loichot identifies two kinds of family affiliation, biological and symbolic, the first being corrupted and the second supported by the plantation system. Biological families are torn apart due to the priority of socio-economic interests of the plantation owners. The loss of biological family members, who were left behind on the African continent, died, or sold to other slave owners, is, then, compensated by a symbolic family hierarchy between the slave owner as paternal guardian (“master-father,” Loichot 1) and the slaves as cultural orphans (“perennial children,” 2). 26 This is meant with a clin d’œil to Glissant’s “vision prophétique du passé” (Discours antillais 227) [prophetic vision of the past (Glissant, Caribbean Discourse 64)] or Bhabha’s “projective past” (253), i.e. “an ambivalent mix of projection and retrospection, of prophetic proclamation and nostalgic regret” (McCusker 11). 27 I am referring here to the impact of the “non-histoire,” a topic raised by Glissant. According to him, the concept “non-histoire” has to be opposed to colonial history and historiography in a double sense: it does not only refer to a desire for replacing the

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latter by histories, which are based on a more or less intact cultural and collective memory, but it points to a “raturage de la mémoire collective,” which, as a consequence, could only trigger fragmentary and disconnected histories as well as reveal the painful negation of the collective consciousness (Discours antillais 223–24). The dates that Confiant indicates for the five maroons in his tale correspond with the dates of “les ‘périodes’ de l’histoire martiniquaise” that Glissant defines in Discours antillais (270-72). Additionally, the last three maroons in Confiant’s tale correspond even more clearly with the dates of Glissant’s protagonists in Mahagony: 1832/1841 for Gani and Samson, 1936/1936 for Maho and Siméon, and 1978/1978 for Mani and Simao. For Ibtissem Sebai Ameziane “la marge entre marronnage, banditisme et vagabondage, semble si ténue qu’il est presque inéluctable de passer d’un camp à l’autre” (Ameziane 71). This exchangeability is valid in both directions: The modern “driveur” or “vagabond” can as well be identified as a maroonesque figure seeing that the historical maroon is associated with vagabondism and outlawry. The epigraph is taken from Les Damnés de la Terre (1961) by Frantz Fanon. The Code Noir defines slaves as furniture (article 44). The unsuccessful suicide attempt of Simao must be read in support of this last point, as he is meant to continue his errance throughout space and time. The incidence of Maho’s murder attempt and flight is mentioned with an explicit nomination of the protagonist in Glissant’s Discours antillais and furthermore described in detail, but without a direct reference to Maho or M. Beauregard (276–78). Odibert is one of the protagonists in Glissant’s novel Malemort and can be understood as an avatar for the decline of traditions, morals, and essentialist convictions. Michael Dash translated Glissant’s original term as “history’s yearned-for ideal” (Caribbean Discourse 83), but as I find this translation quite long-winded, I will stick to the original nomination as “désiré historique” throughout my argumentation. Caroline Mangerel underlines the continuity between marronage and the drive as a form of vagrancy: “Le driveur est nécessairement en marge de la société, tout comme l’étaient les Marrons. Il peut s’y complaire ou y répugner, mais il choisit généralement de demeurer dans ce lieu entre liberté de sa personne et l’emprisonnement de son esprit” (Mangerel 105) [The vagrant is necessarily at the edge of society, just like the maroons. He might be reluctant about it or enjoy it, but he generally decides to stay within that space between physical freedom and spiritual emprisonment, my translation]. The narrator Marie Célat even goes as far as to consider Gani, Maho, and Mani’s historical disorientation as a consequence of the antagonism between the Code Noir (and other regulatory documents of the colonial period) and the “code pour la sauvagerie” (Glissant, Mahagony 176), which is inherent to the past as it is chaotic and inaccessible from our present point of view. According to Lorna Milne in her article “The marron and the marqueur,” the monster of the past can be identified as either the colonial past or the Négritude. Her intertextual reading of L’Esclave vieil homme et le molosse considers the tale as a twin text to Chamoiseau’s essay Écrire en pays dominé. Both the protagonists in the tale and the alter ego of Chamoiseau in the essay undergo a transformation from identification with essentialisms to self-conscious awakening and aspiration of a new role in the course of the island’s (literary) history.

Works cited Ameziane, Ibtissem Sebai. La poétique de l’espace dans l’œuvre d’Edouard Glissant. Ph.D. thesis, University Michel de Montaigne Bordeaux III, 2014, tel.archivesouvertes.fr/tel-01205339/document. Accessed November 9, 2016. Ankersmit, Frank. History and Tropology. U of California P, 1994.

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Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, editors. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literature. Routledge, 1989. Benítez Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Duke UP, 1992. Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant. Éloge de la Créolité. 1989. Gallimard, 2004. ——. “In Praise of Creoleness.” Translated by Mohamed B. Taleb Khyar. Callaloo, vol. 13, 1990, pp. 886–909. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. 1994. Routledge, 2012. Bilby, Kenneth M. True-Born Maroons. UP of Florida, 2005. Blérald, Alain-Philippe, Histoire économique de la Guadeloupe et de la Martinique du XVIIe siècle à nos jours. Karthala, 1986. Bongie, Chris. Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post-Colonial Literature. Stanford UP, 1998. Bouton, Jacques. Relation de l’establissement des François en l’isle de la Martinique. Sébastien Cramoisy, 1640. Britton, Celia. Édouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Resistance. U of Virginia P, 1999. Burton, Richard D. E. Le roman marron: études sur la littérature martiniquaise contemporaine. L’Harmattan, 1997. Césaire, Aimé. Cahier d’un Retour au Pays Natal. 1947. Présence Africaine, 1983. ——. Notebook of a Return to the Native Land . . . Translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith. Wesleyan UP, 2001. Chamoiseau, Patrick. L’esclave vieil homme et le molosse. Gallimard, 1997. ——. Écrire en pays dominé. Gallimard, 1997. ——., and Raphaël Confiant. Lettres créoles: Tracées antillaises et continentales de la littérature: Haïti, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Guyane 1635–1975. 1991. Gallimard, 1999. Chancé, Dominique. Édouard Glissant, un ‘Traité du Déparler’: Essai sur l’œuvre romanesque d’Édouard Glissant. Karthala, 2002. Chinien, Savrina. “La figure du narrateur chez Patrick Chamoiseau: Le jeu du ‘Je’.” Antillanité, créolité, littérature-monde, edited by Isabelle Constant, et al., Cambridge Scholars, 2013, pp. 37–48. Chivallon, Christine. “De quelques préconstruits de la notion de diaspora à partir de l’exemple antillais.” Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales, vol. 13, no. 1, 1997, pp. 149–60. Confiant, Raphaël. Nègre marron. Écriture, 2006. Corzani, Jack. “West Indian Mythology and its Literary Illustrations.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 25, no. 2, 1994, pp. 131–39. Craton, Michael. Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies. Cornell UP, 2009. Crosta, Suzanne. Le Marronnage créateur: Dynamique textuelle chez Édouard Glissant. GRELCA, 1991. David, Bernard Abbé. Les origines de la population martiniquaise au fil des ans 1635– 1902. Société d’histoire de la Martinique, 1973. Debbasch, Yvan. “Le marronnage: Essai sur la désertion de l’esclave antillais.” L’Année Sociologique, vol. 3, 1962–1963, pp. 1–112 (1962), pp. 117–95 (1963). Debien, Gabriel. Les esclaves aux Antilles françaises: XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles. Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe, 1974.

Transformations of the maroon 101 Desblache, Lucile. Bestiaire du roman contemporain d’expression française. Presses universitaires Blaise Pascale, 2002. Fallope, Josette. Esclaves et citoyens: les noirs à la Guadeloupe au XIXe siècle dans les processus de résistance et d’intégration (1802–1910). Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe, 1992. Fick, Carolyn. The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below. U of Tennessee P, 1990. Fouchard, Jean. Les Marrons de la liberté. Éditions de l’École, 1972. Garraway, Doris Lorraine. “Toward a Creole Myth of Origin: Narrative, Foundations and Eschatology in Patrick Chamoiseau’s L’Esclave Vieil Homme et le Molosse.” Callaloo, vol. 29, no. 1, 2006, pp. 151–67. Glissant, Édouard. Caribbean Discourse. Translated by J. Michael Dash. UP of Virginia, 1989. ——. Le Discours antillais. 1981. Gallimard, 1997. ——. La Lézarde. Seuil, 1958. ——. Le Quatrième siècle. Seuil, 1964. ——. Mahagony. Seuil, 1987. ——. “Interview Mahagony.” 1987. Mondes Francophones, 2014, mondesfrancophones. com/dossiers/edouard-glissant/edouard-glissant-mahagony-1987. Accessed November 9, 2016. ——. “Le chaos-monde, l’oral et l’écrit.” Écrire la ‘parole de nuit’. La nouvelle littérature antillaise, edited by Ralph Ludwig, Gallimard, 1994, pp. 111–30. ——. “À propos de Tout-monde. Entretien avec Ralph Ludwig.” Unpublished. MarieGalante, 1994. Frankokaribische Literatur: Eine Einführung, edited by Ralph Ludwig, Narr, 2008. ——. Traité du Tout-monde. Gallimard, 1997. ——. Mémoires des esclavages. Gallimard, 2007. ——. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. U of Michigan P, 2010. ——. Tout-Monde. Gallimard, 1995. ——. Ormerod. Gallimard, 2003. Gröning, Sarah. Historiopoeten: Formen literarischer Geschichtsschreibung im französischen Roman der Karibik. Peter Lang, 2016. Gyssels, Kathleen. “Les crises du ‘postcolonial’? Pour une approche comparative.” Revue internationale de politique comparée, vol. 14, 2007, pp. 151–64. Hall, Stuart. “When Was ‘the Post-Colonial’? Thinking at the Limit.” The Post-Colonial Question, edited by Ian Chambers and Lidia Curti, Routledge, 1996, pp. 242–60. Ildem, Arzu Eternel. “Le mythe du nègre marron.” Dalhousie French Studies, vol. 86, 2009, pp. 29–36. Labat, Jean-Baptiste. Nouveau voyage aux îles de l’Amérique. 1741. L’Etang, Gerry. “Créolisation et créolité à la Martinique: essai de périodisation.” Montray Kreyol, 2004, www.montraykreyol.org/sites/default/files/creolisation_et_creolite_a_ la_martinique.pdf. Accessed March 18, 2009. Ludwig, Ralph. Frankokaribische Literatur: Eine Einführung. Narr, 2008. Ludwig, Ralph, and Dorothee Rösberg, editors. Tout-Monde: Interkulturalität, Hybridisierung, Kreolisierung, Kommunikations- und gesellschaftstheoretische Modelle zwischen ‚alten’und ‚neuen’Räumen. Peter Lang, 2010. Lynch, Molly. “Les Guerriers généreux de Patrick Chamoiseau.” L’écrivain caribéen, guerrier de l’imaginaire, edited by Kathleen Gyssels and Bénédicte Ledent. Rodopi, 2008, pp. 107–20.

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Mangerel, Caroline. “La Drive, le marronnage: Présentation d’un mode d’errance insulaire et créole.” Nouvelles Études francophones, vol. 25, no. 1, 2010, pp. 90–106. Manigat, Leslie. “The Relationship Between Marronage and Slave Revolts and Revolution in St. Domingue-Haiti.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 292, no. 1, 1977, pp. 420–38. Masson-Perrin, Valérie. Le statut du personnage dans l’œuvre romanesque d’Édouard Glissant. Ph.D. thesis, University of Cergy-Pontoise, 2006, biblioweb.u-cergy.fr/theses/ 06CERG0292.pdf. Accessed November 9, 2016. Matt, Susan J. Homesickness: An American History. Oxford UP, 2011. Mayaux, Catherine. “La structure romanesque de Mahagony d’Edouard Glissant.” Horizons d’Edouard Glissant, edited by Yves-Alain Favre and Antonio Ferreira de Brito. J&D Editions, 1992, pp. 349–63. McCusker, Maëve. Patrick Chamoiseau: Recovering Memory. Liverpool UP, 2007. Ménil, Alain. Les voies de la créolisation: Essai sur Édouard Glissant. De l’Incidence, 2011. Milne, Lorna. “The marron and the marqueur: Physical Space and Imaginary Displacements in Patrick Chamoiseau’s L’Esclave vieil homme et le molosse.” Ici-là – Place and Displacement in Caribbean Writing in French, edited by Mary Gallagher. Rodopi, 2003, pp. 61–82. ——. Patrick Chamoiseau: Espaces d’une écriture antillaise. Rodopi, 2006. Miura, Nobutaka. “Le Japon ou le degré zéro de la créolité.” Espace créole. Espace francophone, vol. 10, 2000, pp. 205–14. Munslow, Alun. Deconstructing History. Routledge, 1997. Ortner-Buchberger, Claudia. “Poetiken des Fremden. Vom exotisme Segalens zur créolisation Glissants.” Wenn Ränder Mitte werden: Zivilisation, Literatur und Sprache im interkulturellen Kontext, edited by Chantal Adobati, et al., Universitätsverlag, 2001, pp. 320–32. Perret, Delphine. La Créolité: Espace de création. Ibis rouge, 2001. Pessini, Elena, editor. Du Pays au Tout-Monde: écritures d’Édouard Glissant. Instituto di Lingue e Litterature romanze, 1998. Price, Richard. Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas. 3rd editon. Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Regent, Frédéric. La France et ses esclaves. Grasset, 2007. Renard, Rosamunde. “Labour Relations in Martinique and Guadeloupe: 1848-70.” Journal of Caribbean History, vol. 26, no. 1, 1992, pp. 37–61. Restori, Enrica. “Le récit empoisonné: Les romans glissantiens entre allégorie et rhizome.” Francofonia, no. 63, 2012, pp. 37–57. Ricœur. Paul. Temps et récit. Seuil, 1983–1985. Roberts, Neil. Freedom as Marronage. U of Chicago P, 2015. Rochefort, Charles de. Histoire naturelle et morale des Isles Antilles de l’Amérique. A. Leers, 1658. Rochmann, Marie-Christine. L’Esclave fugitif dans la littérature antillaise. Karthala, 2000. Roediger, David. “The Meaning of Africa for the American Slave.” Journal of Ethnic Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 1977, pp. 1–16. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Qu’est-ce que la littérature? Gallimard, 1948. ——. What is Literature? and Other Essays. Harvard UP, 1988. Schmidt, Nelly. Abolitionnistes de l’esclavage et réformateurs des colonies (1820–1851): Analyse et documents. Karthala, 2000.

Transformations of the maroon 103 Schœlcher, Victor. Des colonies françaises: Abolition immédiate de l’esclavage. Pagnerre, 1842. Snyder, Terri L. The Power to Die: Slavery and Suicide in British North America. U of Chicago P, 2015. Tardieu, Jean-Pierre. “Cimarrôn-Maroon-Marron, note épistémologique.” Outre-mers, vol. 93, no. 350, 2006, pp. 237–47. Ueckmann, Natascha. Ästhetik des Chaos in der Karibik. transcript, 2014. Walker, Daniel E. “Suicidal Tendencies: African Transmigration in the History and Folklore of the Americas.” The Griot, vol. 18, 1999, pp. 10–18.

5

Cultures of resistance Dialectical images of the Haitian Revolution in Haitian culture and literature Patrick Eser

Legacy, dialectical images, or culture of resistance? The contradictory and conflict-driven past of Haiti represents a constitutive factor not only of Haitian culture and its self-images but also of the external images of this country. The most salient historical event of Haitian history can be traced back to the revolution of enslaved people of 1791, a process of political resistance and emancipation which, in 1804, led to independence and the constitution of the Haitian state. Haiti was the first Latin American country to free itself from European colonial domination and enslavement, as a result of a 14-year process of “unpredictable radicalism” (Lüsebrink 145) from 1791 to 1805. The ‘Haitian Revolution’ is regarded as unique in being the first successful revolution of enslaved people in modern history. It thus constitutes a historical milestone as the first anti-colonial revolution. The resistance against the French colonial power exposed the strict limitations of the promises of the French Revolution, whose conception of human rights was not as universal as implied by the dominant. The revolutionary process can be interpreted as an attempt to bring about the ideals of freedom and equality. It showed not only the geopolitical and social limitations of the concept of human rights but also the restrictions of the political aims of the French Revolution and modern European Enlightenment thinking (Nesbitt). The uprising of enslaved people and the declaration of independence in 1804 stirred irritation within the Western hemisphere. Particularly the enslaving nations of Europe and the United States, as well as Caribbean colonies whose intensive plantation system was based on forced labor, were disquieted. The exterior perception of the political processes in Saint-Domingue—as the Western part of the island under French colonial rule was called before independence—and of the anti-slavery and anti-colonial developments produced a great range of diverse historical images and reactions oscillating between political euphoria and horrified angst. The irritation caused by the Haitian Revolution and its resulting long-term effects are still perceptible today. In the political and cultural history of Haiti the event is also an important event and a point of reference that is highly charged with symbolic value. The aim of this chapter is to examine the often polyphonic and contradictory cultural and political meanings that are attached to the Haitian

Images of the Haitian revolution 105 Revolution, on the one hand by reconstructing the historical discourse traditions and, on the other hand, by investigating recent reconfigurations and references. The interpretations of the Haitian Revolution and the internal and external images of Haiti possess their own histories which, over the last two centuries, have run through different phases, accentuations, and valorizations. The first peculiarity consists in the fact that reports about the happenings on the Caribbean island were ignored and silenced through news boycotts during the revolutionary period, while at the same time, European journals were full of articles on it (Buck-Morss, “Hegel”). While the revolutionary past of Haiti was generally silenced (M.-R. Trouillot, Silencing the Past) by mainstream Western historiography, during the 20th century it constituted an important point of reference for black intellectuals outside of Haiti and within currents like the Harlem Renaissance, Pan-Africanism, Black Marxism and Négritude (Kaisary). The works of C. L. R. James (Nesbitt 131) and other Caribbean intellectuals such as Aimé Césaire and Édouard Glissant (Gewecke), who reinterpreted the Haitian Revolution in different political and temporal contexts, had an important influence on the construction of subsequent counter-hegemonic discourses. During the last two decades, the Haitian Revolution has evoked new interpretations also beyond the Haitian or Caribbean context, which have been articulated and debated in historical and post-colonial discourses and within hegemonic contexts of knowledge production, including universities of the Global North. Those new interpretations emphasize the importance of the Haitian Revolution in the “universal history” of humanity, pointing out its impact on the conceptions and inherent contradictions of Western political philosophy (Buck-Morss, “Hegel”), on concepts of human rights and “universal emancipation” in currents of Radical Enlightenment (Nesbitt), and as a source of alternative modernities which counter the “disavowed modernity” (Fischer). Within the framework of these emphatic and diverse debates, the Haitian Revolution is represented as the historical starting point of universal human rights and of the idea of universal emancipation. In doing so, the limitations of the European Enlightenment and its promises of freedom and equality were emphasized. In view of the stimulated debate in the humanities about the Haitian Revolution and the historically unique case of Haiti, some scholars even speak of a “Haitian Turn” (Joseph). Despite these new approaches, old representations still persist, which stigmatize and depict Haiti as the poorest country in the Western hemisphere and as unable to properly govern itself. Similar negative images of Haiti can be found in cultural and supposedly apolitical representations that maintain demonizing horror aesthetics vis-à-vis Haiti. Noam Chomsky thus criticizes the continuing stigmatization of the country as “miserable, horrifying, black, ugly” (qtd. in Hörmann 62). As this short glance at the imagology of Haiti suggests, the external and internal images of Haiti and of the Haitian Revolution are diverse, contradictory and changing. In the following pages, I will give an overview of the diverse cultural and political meanings that are attached to the Haitian Revolution, first considering direct reactions on the international level and, second, the debate within Haiti. The focus of this discussion is on political and ideological interventions as well as on

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images in fictional/artistic discourses. This explication of different registers of knowledge of and perspectives on the Haitian Revolution will be contrasted with recent debates and discourses in Haiti, which I will analyze by questioning and investigating the importance of the cultural legacy of the Haitian Revolution and its usage in contemporary Haitian society and culture through a discussion of cultural productions by important contemporary Haitian intellectuals in historiographical, essayistic, and fictional discourses. I will also address the question if and how contemporary cultural representations of the Haitian Revolution shape what could be referred to as the dialectical images of this very revolution. The concept of the ‘dialectical image’ goes back to Walter Benjamin, who describes it as focusing on the past and being created as a politically charged moment which, removed from the historical continuum, is figured in the present as a topicality and a messianic struggle for liberation (Buck-Morss, Dialektik 268). These images resist the coagulation of the represented material and insist on their movable dialectical character. When analyzing recent Haitian culture, its contemporary literature, and the constructions of those dialectical images of the resistant past, one must take into account in how far these forms of representation can be considered as cultural resistance. If cultural representations of the past (especially of the Haitian Revolution) constitute an important act of situating oneself in a political legacy and provide counter-narratives of history which radiate in the present, inspiring the work and mission of liberation, they can be defined as acts of cultural resistance. They are to be situated in-between an inclusive relationship of culture and politics, remitting to a concept of poetry which considers the act of writing with the classical concept of arma et litterae— or, as the Spanish-Basque poet Gabriel Celaya has defined it, poetry as an arm charged with future (qtd. in Winter 133). This definition of the function of writing, both fictional and nonfictional, presupposes a close relationship of the political and the cultural which tries to highlight certain forms of literature as acts of resistance.

International reactions: between demonization and euphoria The immediate responses to the events of the Haitian Revolution and its echoes within the transatlantic public sphere were full of antagonistic positions. The Haitian Revolution was controversially discussed both in factual and fictional genres. Demonizing references to the horrifying character of Haiti and the representation of Haitians as ‘primitive savages’ unable to govern themselves were contrasted by positive and legitimizing readings of the Haitian Revolution which articulated a positive identification with the historical development and its protagonists. The political reactions of some sectors of the civil society of the colonial powers were predictable. It was the class of the slaveholders which started a delegitimizing discourse about the cruelty and irresponsibility of the political processes following the slave revolt. The slave-holding class held a very hostile stance towards the development in Haiti and its organic intellectuals. As a result, narratives in different

Images of the Haitian revolution 107 Western literatures were composed for the purpose of demonizing the revolutionary movement and the emerging new state in Saint-Domingue. Especially in the neighboring countries where the plantation system based on slave-labor was still intact, the demonizing reference to the revolution and the new state was an important ideological instrument to suggest that Haitians were ‘primitive savages’ unable to govern themselves. The anti-colonial revolution was equated with zombification, terror, and death in this ideological counter-discourse whose different artistic expressions invented zombie-narratives and other tropes of horror in order to control the effects of the political process, at least on a discursive level (Hörmann). Thomas Jefferson (president of the USA from 1801 to 1809), a slaveholder himself, proposed in a letter of February 1799, addressed to Aaron Burr (who would become his vice-president), that they stop the free trade with the “cannibals of the terrible republic” (Jefferson) in order to prevent the spread of dangerous ideas among the slaves. After the success of other anti-colonial independence movements on the South American continent, an interesting picture presented itself in the 1830s. Whereas slavery had been abolished in most parts of Latin America, it still continued to exist in other European colonies and in the US. Since the Haitian Revolution, a stark conflict between Haiti and the US or, in the words of Domenico Losurdo, a “sort of cold war” had been established: in one country, former slaves gained power in one of history’s most singular revolutions, whereas another country has been under the political control of slaveholders ever since (196). Opposed to such dystopic and demonizing narratives, euphoric reactions conjuring up quasi-utopian representations of the Haitian Revolution were propagated by abolitionists in Western countries. One of the first and most famous statements of these euphoric references regarding the processes in Saint-Domingue was a poem by the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth, written in 1803. The glorifying poem, To Toussaint Louverture, which is dedicated to one of the leaders of the revolutionary process, stresses the universal importance of the Haitian Revolution for human history. Further milestones of euphoric cultural productions about the Haitian Revolution are, on the one hand, the very popular statements by US-American abolitionist Wendell Phillips, who gave a famous speech on the eve of the American Civil War in 1861, linking the fate of USAmerican slaves to the Haitian Revolution, and, on the other hand, the drama Toussaint Louverture by the French poet Alphonse de Lamartine. This play was staged in Paris in 1850 and provided an abolitionist interpretation of the events in Haiti. Both the revolutionary process and the protagonist Toussaint Louverture are portrayed in a positive light. The play was a success in Paris and was translated into German (1850) and Spanish (1853), and also performed in the corresponding European countries. In 1860, the Haitian author Demesvar Delorme stated that the work of de Lamartine has to be recognized as a “justification of the Haitian revolution and the glorification of our political independence” (qtd. in Arnold 185). In general, the French discourse can be regarded as a special case. In the immediate aftermath of the revolutionary processes, the former plantation owners

108 Patrick Eser shaped the first perceptions of the events in Haiti. Since they were forced to emigrate, it comes as no surprise that the tenor of their depiction was terrifying. A fictitious biography of Dessalines written by Dubroca (1809), the dialogue Rencontre d’un colon avec les égorgeurs de son pays (1792) by Thérou or Gaterau’s ‘history,’ combined with fictitious stories, Histoire des troubles de Saint-Domingue, depuis le mois d’octobre 1789 jusqu’en juillet 1791 (1792), are examples of this type of fictitious representation of the events in Haiti which spread the ‘demonizing narrative’ (Lüsebrink 153; my translation). But there were also benevolent writings and reports by French abolitionists, namely the association Amis des Noirs and Jacobin circles, all of whom were accused of being traitors and responsible for the national disaster. After the official recognition of the Haitian state and the imposition of an indemnity for independence by King Charles X, interest in Haiti decreased. As a result, only nine French fictional works that dealt with the Haitian Revolution were published during the second half of the 19th century. In comparison to other European literatures, this amount of literary output represents a rather small number, which was mainly due to the circumstance that, whereas “the French do not particularly enjoy writing and reading about an inglorious defeat at the hand of black slaves, neither English nor American novelists have such qualms” (Hoffmann 347). Also in German literature, several works were published on the Haitian Revolution, such as the early Hans Kiekindiewelts Reisen in alle vier Weltteile (1795) by Friedrich Rebmann or Die Verlobung in St. Domingo (1811) by Heinrich von Kleist, as well as the anonymously published demonizing work Dessalines: Tyrann der Schwarzen und Mörder der Weißen auf St. Domingo (1805). As suggested by the works of Marie Biloa Onana, Gert Eisenbürger, and Karin Schüller, there is a wide-spread variety of discourses which not only reproduced horrifying depictions, but also created appreciating images of the political struggle for emancipation, while at the same time criticizing the use of (revolutionary) violence. This short overview of the different representations shows that the Haitian Revolution created a great and contradictory global echo. In the same way that the narratives about the event oscillate between legitimizing and demonizing pictures, the characterization of the revolt leaders, Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, is also very ambivalent, veering between heroic portraits and negative stereotypes of the ‘brutal black.’ It is appropriate to say, as Lüsebrink does, that the Haitian Revolution is, just like the earthquake of Lisbon, the conquest of the Americas, and the French Revolution, one of those historical events which evoked an echo on the level of world literature: on several continents, by innumerable writers and over a long period of time (152). Also in the 20th century, the Haitian Revolution remained a captivating historical topic which generated different and antagonistic reinterpretations as well as diverse fictional imaginations on a global scale. Positive and euphoric references and images were created, for instance, during the occupation of Haiti by US military forces (1915–34), during the Harlem Renaissance (1920s–1930s), and in the context of the Négritude-debate.1 The diversity of these examples demonstrates that the reference to the Haitian Revolution can serve as an important tool for different forms of political rhetoric.

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Haitian perspectives on the resistant past In Haiti, the positive vision of the Haitian Revolution developed into an important factor for molding a national identity. During the 19th century, references to the Haitian Revolution created an epic discourse in which poets and writers established a “pantheon of heroes of the Revolution” (Arnold 182)—a pantheon clearly gendered and infused with masculinism and visions of masculine heroes (Drayton). During the entire 19th century in Haitian literature we can observe the strong presence of the legitimizing narrative that had a fundamental influence on the national consciousness. The Proclamation de Gonaives on January 1, 1804 can be seen as the “very first Haitian written expression” (Jonassaint 201) and as the starting point of legitimizing national narratives. During much of the 19th century, these narratives were expressed mostly in politically motivated historical essays, but barely in fictional texts—with the exception of the allegorical novel Stella (1859) by Émeric Bergeaud (1818–1858), which is the very first novel in Haitian literature (Jonassaint 215–16). Politico-historiographical essays also pronounced proud and universal messages: “from the beginning to the end of the 19th century, Haitian writers undertook to present their revolution not as unique in human history but as the harbinger of freedom for oppressed people everywhere” (Arnold 183). The mentioned pantheon of national heroes of the revolution was articulated in neoclassical odes like the ode to independence, addressed to Jean-Pierre Boyer (Haitian president from 1818 to 1843), or in Réflexions sur . . . les Noirs et les Blancs, written by Pompée Valentin, a patriotic praise of the ‘fatherland’ as the “sole heaven of liberty where the black man may raise his head and contemplate the gifts of the universal father of all men” (qtd. in Arnold 183). The early programmatic writings of Antoine Métral, De la littérature haïtienne (1819), the essay De la réhabilitation des Noirs par la République d’Haïti by Hannibal Price, posthumously published in 1893, and L’égalité des races humaines (1885) by Anténor Firmin can be considered as the most important texts of 19th century Haitian literature. A prominent example for the legitimizing representation of the Haitian Revolution is the epical poem L’épopée des aïeux (1900) by the Haitian writer Oswald Durant (1840–1906), which draws a heroic picture of the events between 1791 and 1804. The epic’s written verse form and the intertextual references to the Iliad as well as to the Spartacus rebellion in ancient Rome were used to reevaluate the Haitian event stylistically (Lüsebrink 153–54). This epic and heroic historiography was directed against the racist denigration and delegitimization of the young Haitian state and the images that powerful groups from US civil society and from European colonial powers in the Caribbean propagated and tried to impose on Haiti. The Haitian writers were not only engaged in presenting the Haitian Revolution as something unique in the history of mankind, but also as an important step in the struggle for freedom and for all oppressed people everywhere, criticizing all racist discrimination against black people and the systems of slavery worldwide. Those legitimizing discourses were transformed in the 20th century under the influence of indigénisme, which

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emphasized the ethnic uniqueness and the African roots of the Haitian population. Beginning in the 1920s, indigénisme rose as a cultural counter-movement and as a form of protest against the US occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934, with Ainsi parla l’Oncle (1928) by Jean-Price Mars as its most popular expression. Under the occupation, the ideologically motivated recourse to the Haitian Revolution gained momentum and was combined with the cultural expressions of indigénisme and the later noirisme, an ideological-cultural movement with the magazine Les griots as its central medium of expression. Against the occupation and its racist bias, both movements advanced a strong black identity which fully recognized the African roots of the Haitian population and celebrated ethnic uniqueness. Both movements considered the Haitian Revolution a great black event. Since the 19th century, positive views on the revolutionary processes have expressed a deep respect for or, rather, an exaggerated veneration of the leaders and protagonists of the Haitian Revolution and other Haitian politicians who played a key role within the new Haitian state. This epic discourse, praising the revolution and its protagonists, propagated by the Haitian elites and intellectuals, was, on the one hand, directed against the racist denigration of the new state. But, on the other hand, it also established a kind of apologetic discourse on the basis of which the political elite was able to constitute a harmonious and homogenizing national(ist) ideology, emphasizing the unique interest of the national community. The discourse prevailing between 1791 and 1804 cultivated a positive image of blackness, which was necessary in a world dominated by Whites and by antiblack racism. However, this epic discourse was also used either as an instrumentby the political elite against political adversaries at home or as a historical alibi to underpin claims to political leadership (M.-R. Trouillot, “Undenkbare Geschichte” 97). François Duvalier and his political visions of the politicistic glorification of the heroes and great statesmen of the Haitian Revolution and the noiriste and indigéniste ideology constituted both a paradoxical combination and an ideological corruption. Duvalier (1959–71) absorbed the noiriste and indigéniste ideology as sources of legitimation for his own regime, and also referred to the legacy of the anti-colonial black struggle against Western colonial tutelage and slavery. Duvalier integrated this position into his self-representation as a black leader or as leader du Tiers monde, a term with which he titled his autobiography Memoires d’un leader du Tiers monde (Eser 273–74). In the propagandistic writing Catéchisme de la révolution, which provides a good insight into the self-image of the dictatorship, the regime’s claim to have inherited the genealogy of the great black political leaders of Haitian history is expressed: “Dessalines, Toussaint, Christophe, Pétion et Estimé sont cinq Chef d’État distincts, mais qui ne forment qu’un seul et même Président en François Duvalier” (Fourcand 17). Apart from the symbolic reevaluation of Duvalier’s ‘natural body’ and the creation of a political body imagined as guaranteeing the continuity of the regime, the ‘national revolution’ was projected as a process which intended to fulfill the political aims of noirisme and as standing in the tradition of the ‘black cause’ successfully founded by the constitution of an independent Haitian state by Jean-Jacques Dessalines. This

Images of the Haitian revolution 111 apologetic and corrupting attitude of Duvalierism added another facet to the discourse on the Haitian Revolution, which made it much more ambiguous. The time after Duvalierism, subsequent to the escape of Baby Doc—the son and successor of François Duvalier—in 1986, was marked by a resurgent concern for the resistant Haitian past. The concern arose in a post-dictatorial context after nearly 30 years of rigid suppression of every political opposition, although there was also a more noticeable reluctance to confront the colonial and revolutionary past during the first years. L’année Dessalines (1986) by Jean Métellus and Aube tranquille (1990) by Jean-Claude Fignolé embody a significant exception in their “tendency to look at [the colonial or revolutionary past] through the lens of current events or contemporary characters” (Jonassaint 218). It is only in the last years, and not before the first decade of the 21st century, that modern “Haitian writers seem to be interested in fictionalizing their colonial or Revolutionary memories” (Jonassaint 219). Une heure pour l’éternité (2008) and Moi, Toussaint Louverture . . . avec la plume complice de l’auteur (2004) by Jean-Claude Fignolé, La Deuxième mort de Toussaint-Louverture (2001) by Fabienne Pasquet, and Rosalie l’infame (2003) by Evelyne Trouillot are only the more important and well-known examples of this recent engagement with the resistant past.

Visions of the resistant past in contemporary Haitian culture What function does the reference to the political past of the Haitian Revolution have in the contemporary cultural memory of Haitian society and, therefore, for the constitution of Haitian identity? Through which different narratives is this particular past reflected and what functions does the reference to the past fulfill in the political and cultural present of Haiti? In order to illustrate different perspectives, I focus my discussion on three Haitian intellectuals and their historiographical, essayistic, and fictional writings. Historiographical revision: Michel-Rolph Trouillot The historiographical writings of Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1949–2012) innovated the field of studies on the Haitian Revolution. Trouillot affirms in his landmark work on the Haitian Revolution, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995), that the events in Saint-Domingue between 1791 and 1804 represent a historical sequence as well as an evolutionary step for which contemporary Western societies did not have any concepts or patterns of rationalization. In general terms, the Western reaction to this unthinkable history was the profound silencing of the Haitian Revolution, or, as Trouillot puts it, the “revolution which the world forgot” (M.-R. Trouillot, Silencing the Past 71). Even the extreme French and English Left were not able to conceptualize the revolution. Their reaction was also the compulsion, conscious as well as unconscious, to silence the event and, thus, in diachronic-historiographical perspective, to silence the past. The silence that tended to surround the Haitian Revolution can be explained by the inability of contemporary observers to understand or describe the revolutionary

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events; their incapability to find words for them. At the time, Western thinking had no linguistic terminus or categorical concepts at their disposal in order to adequately classify the aspirations of the enslaved and the results of their actions. Trouillot observes a tendency to trivialize or dismiss the revolutionary events since the very first reports. At times, they were not documented at all. Even political philosophy was delayed in its response and at first unable to understand or interpret the successful revolution.2 The refusal to accept the official political autonomy of the young independent Haitian state by Western colonial powers was accompanied by tendencies of disavowal within historiography and within the production of historical knowledge. Trouillot diagnoses a ‘profound silence’ surrounding the Haitian Revolution within Western humanities discourse over the past two centuries. He investigates the silence within Western, particularly French and US-American historiography and identifies denial, erasure, and banalization as causes that relegated the Haitian Revolution to the realm of the unthinkable. In this regard, silencing does not mean so much absence of speech or discourse, but rather a willful act. As Trouillot affirms, it is “an active and transitive process: one ‘silences’ a fact or an individual as a silencer silences a gun. One engages in the process of silencing” (M.-R. Trouillot, Silencing the Past 48). This silencing is manifested in the historiography which speaks, concerning the time span between 1776 and 1848, of an ‘age of revolution’ but at the same time silences the most radical political revolution of that period, namely the Haitian Revolution. Garraway summarizes Trouillot’s critical approach as follows: that, unable or unwilling to imagine that slaves had the capacity to mount an organized insurrection, let alone that such an uprising could lead to the creation of an independent state, whites in Europe and the Americas forced events in Saint-Domingue to conform to their colonialist worldview, thus denying their revolutionary significance. (63) Racist limitations made it impossible to grasp the radical universalistic notion of freedom that the Haitian Revolution had declared. This was the case in the subsequent period because the construction and limitation of historiographical knowledge and its (in-)visibility stifled the world-historical importance of the matter. Based on this assumption, it is Trouillot’s aim to counteract the dominant Western narratives and their strategies of silencing and trivializing the Haitian Revolution on the historiographical field. These strategies involved the distribution of prejudiced views of Haiti and the invention of negative images and stereotypes. These include the still popular misconception of Haiti as a violent place or as a damned country. On the other hand, Trouillot warns the local Haitian production of historiographical knowledge against banalizing tendencies and against reducing the Haitian Revolution to an epic narrative of black heroes. Moreover, Trouillot advises readers not to reduce the historical visions to just the cultivation of a positive image of blackness.

Images of the Haitian revolution 113 Trouillot intervenes in the field of academic historiography in order to reconstitute an adequate discursive frame which allows for the acknowledgment of the historical importance of the Haitian Revolution. As a political act of emancipation which fundamentally shocked the foundation of the colonial power structure and undermined the exploitative system of slavery, the Haitian Revolution threatened to trigger off a revolutionary chain reaction. However, it was not on the national Haitian level that the cultural memory concerning the Haitian Revolution was banalized—that would have been impossible—but on an international level. On the latter, the creation of negative images and the denial of the historical significance of the Haitian Revolution predominated. It therefore comes as no surprise that Trouillot criticizes the ‘post-colonial’/’colonialist’ matrix in the field of historiography as well as the persistence of the epistemological power of Western modernity and its stigmatizing prejudices concerning Haiti. Essayistic writing: Yanick Lahens Yanick Lahens (*1953) is one of the most famous contemporary Haitian writers and an important intellectual voice in her country. In her literary works—which have been honored with many literary prizes, such as the prestigious prix Fémina for her novel Bain de lune (2014)—she confronts the political reality, the historical destiny, and questions of identity in Haiti. These themes also run through several of Lahens’ comments written about the earthquake catastrophe of January 2010, such as in the opinion piece entitled “Haïti ou la santé du malheur,” which was published five days after the disastrous earthquake on January 19, in the French newspaper Libération. Several shorter pieces on the crisis are recompiled in the essay collection named Failles (2011). In the wake of the terrifying earthquake, old Western clichés and stereotypes re-emerged and were used to explain the so-called “disaster of Haiti.” Lahens, in turn, combines the positive picture of the Haitian Revolution with the criticism of the external and internal causes of the subsequent poverty and social inequalities in Haitian society. According to Lahens, the causes can be traced back to the international isolation of the “black republic” which was designed and carried out by major colonial powers and slave traders (Lahens, “Kant” 28). She thus criticizes the persistence of the classic and still effective cliché of the “damned Haiti” as a meaningless and futile essentialization. Against these discourses, Lahens affirms the fundamental role black enslaved people played in the success of the revolution. In addition, she asserts that the Haitian Revolution is the “greatest of the revolutions” which emerged as consequences of the European Enlightenment (Lahens, “Kant” 28). With their pursuit of the universal validity of freedom and equality, the slaves revealed the contradictions and limits of the European project of modernity. This, too, is a reminder that modernity is constantly confronted with its unfulfilled promises. This denotes an uncomfortable knowledge which has not yet been confirmed in the Western historical self-image. Moreover, the idea that the Haitian Revolution developed autonomously and cannot be reduced to a by-product of the American

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or French Revolution has yet to be acknowledged. Although Haiti was internationally isolated and had been burdened with debts by the French state in order to compensate for the loss of the lucrative colony and its enslaved human lives, the Haitians and their new state nevertheless felt responsible to show international solidarity for others who fought for freedom, like Simón Bolívar (Lahens, “Haïti ou la santé”). In light of political isolation and poverty, the Haitian experience is, according to Lahens, an early model for the international unequal power structures which later on came to be called ‘North–South relations.’ Lahens states that, not just due to its history, Haiti had an equal right to communicate on an international level, and thus makes the North–South relations a subject of discussion and political debate. In this way, the most urgent problems in countries of the ‘Global South’ could be addressed (Lahens, “Haïti ou la santé”). The critical diagnostic by Lahens does not only focus on international relations and the ensuing problems for Haiti but deals with the inner social reality of Haiti. Concerning the latter, she criticizes the socio-economic structures of inequality, like the corruption of the political class in Haiti and the racist social division between “créoles” and “bossales.” In the face of the incredible disaster and the deep crisis generated by the 2010 earthquake, Lahens reconsiders the situation and its associated consternation. The evocation of positive historical images which consider the historical and progressive achievements acquired by the Haitian Revolution and the Haitian state is an important rhetorical strategy of her crisis discourse, as it constitutes the basis for a historical and collective self-esteem. The stress of the positive aspects and achievements of Haitian history is accompanied by the critical diagnostic of the long tradition of Western imperialist intervention in Haitian politics. These historical images constitute the basis of the articulation of a strongly motivated prospect of the future of Haiti. Lahens’ rhetorical maneuvers in her essays gain in importance in the face of the devastating aftermath of the earthquake. In her writings, the lively and vibrant historical images constitute a hopeful view into the future and, thus, an intervention into the concepts of historical and political time, betting on future political changes. At the same time, Lahens attacks the classical negative Western clichés concerning Haiti, without ignoring the persisting problems within Haitian society, and calls for a critical debate on these problems. Reinterpretation through fiction: Lyonel Trouillot Lyonel Trouillot (*1956) is also considered a famous and influential contemporary Haitian writer whose thinking and artistic creations reflect the historical role and present identity of Haiti and Haitian culture. In his novel Bicentennaire (2004), Trouillot describes a rally in Port-au-Prince on the eve of the bicentenary of the Haitian declaration of independence. The protest is directed against the official celebrations of Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s regime and expresses the public disapproval of the official appropriation of the anniversary. The novel, which reflects on the disastrous living conditions for the majority in the country, is

Images of the Haitian revolution 115 narrated from the perspective of the young student Lucien Saint-Hilaire, the protagonist of the novel, who leaves his poor district to join the demonstration against the official celebration in the center of Port-au-Prince. While walking to the center, the reader witnesses, through the eyes of Lucien, the intolerable living condition of the poor masses in the city and the irresponsibility of the rich and political elites. The novel, as its title with its historical and national reference already suggests, can be regarded as a reflection of the ‘state of the nation.’ Although the country’s past is not an explicit topic of the novel, the bicentenary, along with its memory, provides the background and deeper meaning of the novel. The conflict about the past, as expressed by the student protest, is also a conflict about the future and the Haiti yet to be built. Therefore, the student protest against the manner and intention of the Aristide-regime to celebrate the bicentenary opens up the field of historiographical conflicts or interpretations of the past. In addition, the student protest enables the reclamation of the students’ own political discourse and of oppositional projects. In this way, a reevaluation by means of referring to the resistant symbolism of the remembered historical event is made possible. At the same time, the resistant attitude of the students is not framed by a defined political desire or articulated in terms of political strategy. The students savent qu’il n’y a pas de moyen de savoir ce qu’il y a au bout de la marche, mais qu’il leur faudra désormais marcher. Ensemble, de préférence . . . Ernestine Saint-Hilaire, je ne sais pas pourquoi je marche. Même quand je crois le savoir, je ne le sais pas vraiment. Mais je sais qu’il me faut lutter contre l’immobile en moi. Marcher. (L. Trouillot, Bicentennaire 66) There is no clear emancipatory vision which could unite the diffuse discontent of the students and constitute a common project. The protest is an expression of a mere destructive critique, which does not project a common vision. Far from articulating a concrete political will, the demonstration seems to express an existentialist confirmation of the students’ political subjectivity directed against their own immobility. The protest against the official celebration of the government does not articulate a political and historical counter-narrative to the corruptive use of the resistant past. In spite of the pessimistic reality and the pictures of a fissured country, Trouillot lets the figure of an old man comment on the events of that day, countering the pessimistic voices: “Mais c’est l’année du Bicentenaire, tonnerre! Il y a un pays à construire!” (Bicentennaire 118). Against the supposed apolitical protest of the students and the corruptive use of history by the government, this character appears like a glimmer of hope which correlates the remembrance of the past and possible political projects in the future. Like Yanick Lahens and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Lyonel Trouillot criticizes the negative external perspectives which have been imposed on Haiti by Western discourses since the revolution and national independence in his essayistic writing: “Rares, les États ayant cultivé le long de leur histoire une telle somme de

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déshonneurs” (“Écrire” 12). The still prevailing prejudices are a symptom of the persistence of (post)colonial attitudes towards Haiti. Some Western discourses still circulate simplistic and/or negative stereotypes concerning Haiti, thus reducing it to a place where violence and poverty are the dominant characteristics without giving thought to the complex social realities of that country. In light of the classical binary stereotypes, Trouillot calls for Haitian writers and intellectuals to break and rewrite these representations and concepts. It is up to the Haitian intellectuals to present alternative perspectives on the complex reality of Haiti. In an interview, Trouillot stresses that their concepts or artistic ideals should be concerned with “speaking about the country” (“parler du pays”): il faut aussi raconter le pays pour éviter les réductions, les clichés . . . C’est ce que j’appelle ‘parler du pays’. Instruire d’une certaine façon sur les multiples aspects du réel, le donner à voir tel que les gens le vivent, le ressentent, le subissent et souhaitent le modifier. (Flamerion) The everyday life of the Haitian society becomes the object of Trouillot’s fiction, imagination, and art. At the same time, Trouillot, through his writing, wishes to motivate other Haitian writers and intellectuals to project complex images of the Haitian reality on an international scale in order to break down the domination of the Western stereotypes that present Haiti as the ‘absolute alterity’ of Western modernity. The international reports on the situation in Haiti subsequent to the earthquake reproduced old stereotypes to explain the catastrophe and its consequences while neglecting the inner complexity of the social situation: il s’agissait avant tout de clichés et que beaucoup de journalistes sont venus trouver en Haïti ce qu’ils étaient venus y chercher: la pauvreté, le désordre. Mais ils n’ont pas cherché à comprendre ce qui faisait de ce pays une société vivante et toujours debout, dynamique, solidaire, courageuse et créatrice. (Flamerion) Trouillot strives to transcend this opposition by affirming the transformative potential of literature in order to overcome the negative pictures imposed by international media. The remembrance of the 200th anniversary of the declaration of independence seems to carry a high potential for inspiring ideas for an alternative conception of the social world and for providing political activism. The binary logic, inherited from the colonial past and still effective in the post-colonial present, which is based on the simple opposition between Western identity and subaltern alterity, has to be transcended by contemporary arts and culture. This, too, is one of the aspects of Lyonel Trouillot’s poetological concept which affirms the dynamic and transformative potential of literature. When it comes to dealings with the past and its frequently negative depiction, Trouillot nevertheless stresses the potential of re-appropriation and continuation of the resistance project, be it expressed on the cultural level or by direct political action.

Images of the Haitian revolution 117

Conclusion These recent examples of contemporary Haitian cultural production show that the reference to the unique historical event of the Haitian Revolution is still a fascinating historical reference point. As such, it remains a highly contested issue, an object of diverse historiographical explanations and yet subject to new interpretations. The review of the successful struggle of the enslaved, directed against political oppression and economic exploitation by colonial powers, is an important factor in Haitian culture as well as in the negotiation process of collective self-images. As such, it is also a useful instrument for the political class of Haiti. The work of Michel-Rolph Trouillot underpins the significance of the struggle for the international recognition of the Haitian Revolution as a fundamentally important event. His intellectual commitment consists in analyzing the underlying racist bias of the Western counter-discourse and its horrifying narratives about Haiti which made it impossible to think of the radical universalistic notion of freedom articulated by the Haitian Revolution. His work is an important starting point for further historiographical investigation. His thesis regarding the invisibilization of historiographical knowledge, facts and meanings, which prevented the recognition of the world-historical importance of the event, has encouraged the recent flourishing interest in discourses about the Haitian Revolution in the socalled Haitian Turn. In addition, Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s work discloses the ideological uses underlying the historiographical knowledge in Haitian politics by example of the ideological corruption by the Duvalier regime. Yanick Lahens combines in her essayistic articles a critical diagnosis of Haiti’s present after the earthquake with historical explanations, insisting on the historical achievements of her country and the tragic consequences of the Western treatment of the young post-colonial and post-emancipatory state. Her crisis discourse illustrates the importance and foundational function of historical images, narratives, and myths by activating the historiographical-temporal location and by involving the population. Moreover, her discourse opens up the horizon for generating prospective collective aims by conveying a historiographically founded orientation in the present time. In so doing, Lahens establishes the identity function of the discourse on the Haitian Revolution in an overt manner. It is in the context of the shocking aftermath of the earthquake and in light of the international reactions to it that she refers back to the glorious resistant past of her country in order to inspire optimism, a vision, and fierce resolution for the next steps to rebuild the country as a common project. In his writings, Lyonel Trouillot tries to break up the binary logic and opposition between Western identity and subaltern Haitian alterity inherited from the colonial past and still in effect in the post-colonial present. Trouillot strives to transcend this opposition by affirming the transformative potential of literature in order to overcome the negative pictures imposed by the international media. The celebration of the 200th anniversary of the Haitian Declaration of Independence seems to carry a high potential for inspiring ideas for an alternative conception of the social world and for providing political activism.

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These critical interventions represent different forms of reestablishing the political and revolutionary past of Haiti. In different fields of social and artistic debate, these interventions can be interpreted as articulations of the counterhegemonic perspectives; perspectives which are voiced against the meta-narratives of Western historical discourse, against stereotypes and stigmatizations, but also against the antagonistic and hierarchical structures within Haitian society and the corrupt political class of the country. In the face of the then upcoming bicentenary celebrations of the Haitian state in 2004, all three intellectuals signed a declaration against the announced official commemoration in the previous year. The Déclaration de principe sur le Bicentenaire, signed in total by almost 60 Haitian intellectuals and artists, was directed against the government of Aristide and its plan to celebrate itself by means of the official memorial ceremonies. The cultural legacy of the Haitian Revolution was the point of departure of their critique: ce gouvernement travaille aujourd’hui à canaliser toute l’attention de la communauté internationale et des personnalités étrangères intéressées par le Bicentenaire vers une campagne de propagande aux fins de légitimation d’un pouvoir usurpé et reconnu aujourd’hui comme despotique et totalitaire, négateur des principes et des valeurs à la base de la révolution haïtienne. (Déclaration) This declaration affirmed the significance of the historical event on a national as well as on a global level. At the same time, it refers back to the political and historical legacy of the Haitian Revolution and uses this interpretation as a rhetorical instrument within the internal politics of Haiti, and as a means against the Aristide government and its ascribed ‘totalitarian methods.’ The intervention showcases the political self-conceptions of these intellectuals who understand their historiographical/essayistic/fictional modeling of the historical images in their writing as political interventions, or, as explained above, as acts of cultural resistance. This intervention unfolds on two levels: on the level of the international perception of Haiti and the Haitian Revolution, where the subaltern Haitian revolutionary perspective is advocated, and on the level of an internal political debate, where the cultural legacy is employed for hegemonic purposes at the national level. Having overcome the post-dictatorial stage and the partial ideological contamination of its cultural legacy, the Haitian Revolution has returned to the field of open political debate and discussions of reinterpretations. The Haitian Revolution continues to be a ‘founding myth’ which is still also open to the ideological maneuvering of the political class and its intent to construct a national myth, serving to ensure its cultural hegemony and political domination: it is what Michel-Rolph Trouillot calls the “historical alibi” (“Undenkbare Geschichte” 97) of the political elite and its political claims. Such ideological schemes can be described with the drastic expressions of Walter Benjamin who warns against history becoming “a tool of the ruling classes”: “. . . even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious” (255,

Images of the Haitian revolution 119 original emphasis). Furthermore, the topicality of the progressive reinterpretations of the Haitian revolutionary period can be observed.3 On the one side, it is a stable part of the official collective memory, and, on the other side, it continues to provoke counter-hegemonic representations of the official national myth, trying to illustrate the flashing and activating memorial forces of such events: “memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” (Benjamin 255). Just like the dialectal image tries to open up the continuum of the past, to make it accessible and integrate it into a process of reawakening with the aim of “fanning the spark of hope in the past” (Benjamin 255), the writings of the discussed Haitian intellectuals about the history of the Haitian Revolution and its importance can be interpreted as acts of cultural resistance.

Notes 1 2 3

The film Queimada (1969) by Gillo Pontecorvo is only one cultural expression of this cycle. See also the reconstruction of contemporary liberal political philosophy in Losurdo (165–233). This tendency is also illustrated in international political debates which refer to the Haitian Revolution as creating new appropriations of this political heritage. The Haitian Revolution has gained momentum in the heterogeneous debates and conceptualizations of new global perspectives of emancipation and has reached an almost iconic status in the debates about resistant perspectives in the Global North. The reinterpretation by Susan Buck-Morss, for instance, stimulated vivid debates, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, in their very influential work Empire (2000), returned to Toussaint Louverture as a subject (and symbol) of the struggle for new forms of liberty and equality in the growing interconnected world (Hardt and Negri 117). Further, Slavoj Žižek refers to the Haitian Revolution in several writings about emancipatory perspectives, and the Jacobin, a successful political journal project of the American left, dedicated to reflecting on new socialist perspectives on politics, bears the portrait of Toussaint Louverture on its front pages.

Works cited Arnold, James A. “Recuperating the Haitian Revolution in Literature.” Tree of Liberty: Cultural Legacies of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, edited by Doris L. Garraway. Virginia P, 2008, pp. 179–99. Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations, edited by Hannah Ahrendt. Harcourt, 1968, pp. 253–64. Biloa Onana, Marie. Der Sklavenaufstand von Haiti: Ethnische Differenz und Humanitätsideale in der Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts. Böhlau, 2010. Buck-Morss, Susan. Dialektik des Sehens. Walter Benjamin und das Passagen-Werk. Suhrkamp, 2000. ——. “Hegel and Haiti.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 26, no. 4, 2000, pp. 821–65. “Déclaration de principe sur le Bicentenaire: Pétition rendue publique le 30 septembre par des intellectuels-elles, artistes et éducateurs-trices haitiens-ennes autour de la célébration des 200 ans d’indépendance d’Haiti.” AlterPresse, September 30, 2003, www.alterpresse.org. Accessed January 7, 2015.

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Drayton, Richard. “The Problem of the Hero(ine) in Caribbean History.” Small Axe, vol. 15, no. 1, 2011, pp. 26–45. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/426751. Accessed January 10, 2015. Eisenbürger, Gert. “. . . als die Schwarzen die Weißen ermordeten: Deutschsprachige SchriftstellerInnen und die haitianische Revolution.” Ila: Zeitschrift der Informationsstelle Lateinamerika, vol. 341, no. 10, 2010, pp. 31–37. Eser, Patrick. “Live and let die: Corpus Mysticum, Horror und Herrlichkeit in der Repräsentation des haitianischen Président à vie François Duvalier.” Machthaber der Moderne: Zur Repräsentation politischer Herrschaft und Körperlichkeit, edited by Patrick Eser and Jan-Henrik Witthaus. Transcript, 2015, pp. 257–92. Fischer, Sibylle. Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution. Duke UP, 2004. Flamerion, Thomas. “Vivant et capable d’écrite. Interview de Lyonel Trouillot.” Le Figaro, May 18, 2010. Fourcand, Jean M. Catéchisme de la révolution en l’honneur du Docteur François Duvalier Président Constitutionnel à vie de la République d’Haïti et de Madame Simone O. Duvalier première Marie-Jeanne d’Haïti. Édition Imprimerie de l’État, 1964. Garraway, Doris L. “Légitime Défense: Universalism and Nationalism in the Discourse of the Haitian Revolution.” Tree of Liberty: Cultural Legacies of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, edited by Doris L. Garraway. U of Virginia P, 2008, pp. 63–88. Gewecke, Frauke. “Les Antilles face à la Révolution haïtienne: Césaire, Glissant, Maximin.” Haiti 1804: Lumières et ténèbres: Impact et resonances d’une revolution, edited by Léon-François Hoffmann, Frauke Gewecke, Frauke and Ulrich Fleischmann. Vervuert, 2008, pp. 251–66. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard UP, 2000. Hoffmann, Léon-François. “Representations of the Haitian Revolution in French Literature.” The World of the Haitian Revolution, edited by David Patrick Geggus. Indiana UP, 2009, pp. 339–51. Hörmann, Raphael. “Tropen des Terrors: Zombies und die Haitianische Revolution.” ZfK – Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften: Zombies, edited by Gudrun Rath, vol. 8, no. 1, 2014, pp. 61–72. Jefferson, Thomas. “Writings on St. Domingue (Haiti),” 1799 February 11 (Jefferson to Aaron Burr). Monticello, www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/st-dominguehaiti. Accessed January 7, 2015. Jonassaint, Jean. “Toward New Paradigms in Caribbean Studies.” Tree of Liberty: Cultural Legacies of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, edited by Doris L. Garraway. Virginia UP, 2008, pp. 200–22. Joseph, Célucien L. “ ‘The Haitian Turn’: An Appraisal of Recent Literary and Historiographical Works on Haitian Revolution.” The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol. 5, no. 6, 2012, pp. 37–55. Kaisary, Philip J. The Haitian Revolution in the Literary Imagination: Radical Horizons, Conservative Constraints. Virginia UP, 2014. Lahens, Yanick. “Haïti ou la santé du malheur.” Libération, January 19, 2010, www.liberation.fr/planete/2010/01/19/haiti-ou-la-sante-du-malheur_605105. Accessed January 7, 2015. ——. “Können Neger Kant verstehen? In der haitianischen Revolution von 1804 haben sich schwarze Sklaven erstmals Achtung, Freiheit und Menschenrechte erkämpft: Eine Würdigung.” Kulturaustausch: Zeitschrift für internationale Perspektive, vol. 61, no. 4, 2011, pp. 28–29.

Images of the Haitian revolution 121 Losurdo, Domenico. Freiheit als Privileg: Eine Gegengeschichte des Liberalismus. PappyRossa, 2010. Lüsebrink, Hans-Jürgen. “Von der Geschichte zur Fiktion: Die Haitianische Revolution als gesamtamerikanisches Ereignis.” Amerikaner wider Willen: Beiträge zur Sklaverei in Lateinamerika und ihre Folgen, edited by Rüdiger Zoller, Vervuert Verlag, 1994, pp. 145–60. Nesbitt, Nick. Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment. U of Virginia P, 2008. Schüller, Karin. Die deutsche Rezeption haitianischer Geschichte in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts: Ein Beitrag zum deutschen Bild vom Schwarzen. Böhlau, 1992. Trouillot, Lyonel. Bicentennaire. Actes du Sud, 2004. ——. “Écrire pour Haïti: L’invention du prochain.” Revue des littératures de langue française, vol. 13, 2011, pp. 12–14. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Beacon P, 1995. ——. “Undenkbare Geschichte: Zur Bagatellisierung der haitianischen Revolution.” Jenseits des Eurozentrismus: Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften, edited by Sebastian Conrad, Shalini Randeira, and Regina Römhild. Campus-Verlag, 2013, pp. 73–103. Winter, Ulrich. “‘Como después de una detonación cambia el silencio . . .’ El atentado de ETA contra Carrero Blanco, la acción directa y la cronopolítica de la Resistencia antifranquista.” El atentado contra Carrero Blanco como lugar de (no-)memoria: Narraciones históricas y representaciones culturales, edited by Patrick Eser and Stefan Peters, Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2016, pp. 125–38. Žižek, Slavoj. In Defense of Lost Causes. Verso, 2008.

6

Postcolonial poetics El reino de este mundo and the resistance of lo real maravilloso Marius Littschwager

“Pero que es la historia de América toda sino una crónica de lo real-maravilloso?” (Carpentier, El reino)

Introduction The epigraph to this chapter is the concluding affirmation of Alejo Carpentier’s famous prologue to El reino de este mundo. The prologue’s ending marks a beginning. Thus the question already initiates the literary performances of the prologue’s conclusion, and therefore affirms not only a marvelous history of America but demonstrates and inscribes it as a constant element in the course of history for the entire hemisphere. More than fifty years after its first publication,1 the dynamics between both the term and idea of lo real maravilloso and its poetical endeavor in El reino de este mundo, which are put forward by the combination of conclusion and beginning in between both texts, are still (to be) negotiated in the realm of cultural and social resistance in the Caribbean. The following observations on El reino de este mundo and its prologue are to be understood as examinations of a poetical theory and narrative practice guided by the following question: how can resistance be articulated and what are the modes and uses of this resistance? The poetics Carpentier proclaimed are considered to be both inscribed into ideas of resistance and as expressive of forms of resistance.2 Through this procedure emerges yet another issue related to the problem of the forms of resistance to be invoked by the elaboration and argumentation of the very notion of lo real maravilloso itself as well as its narrative performance in El reino de este mundo. Consequently, the example of this narration signifies forms of resistance on a theoretical and practical scale regarding both representation (itself) and forms of resistance as practices being narrated.3 The application of the prologue’s poetology is to be studied here on the level of narrative forms as resistance and the narration of practices of resistance: América está muy lejos de haber agotado su caudal de mitologías. Sin habérmelo propuesto de modo sistemático, el texto que sigue ha respondido a este orden de preocupaciones. En él se narra una sucesión de hechos extraordinarios, ocurridos en la isla de Santo Domingo, en determinada época

Postcolonial poetics 123 que no alcanza el lapso de una vida humana, dejándose que lo maravilloso fluya libremente de una realidad estrictamente seguida en todos sus detalles. (Carpentier, El reino 17) [America is far from having exhausted its wealth of mythologies. Without any systematic intention of my part, the text that follows [The Kingdom of This World] is concerned with this sort of preoccupation. In it is narrated a sequence of extraordinary happenings which took place on the island of Santo Domingo [Hispaniola, divided into Haiti and The Dominican Republic], in a certain time which does not equal the span of a man’s life, allowing the marvelous to flow freely from a reality precise in all its details.] The “succession of extraordinary events” Carpentier refers to in this part of the prologue appears later in the narration as a rewriting of both the advent and the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution, which entangles the official historiographic discourse with real and imagined mythologies taken from sources formerly excluded from institutional pedagogies. One of the central topics of El reino de este mundo therefore is resistance and revolution. With its combative tone and polemics against artificial art forms which Carpentier locates in Europe, the prologue presents the Haitian Revolution as an event able to question self-contained “Western histories [perceived] as coherent narratives of human freedom” (Buck Morss 22). The conjunction of theory and/as practice in both texts seeks to resist Eurocentric approaches to American history. While the historiography criticized in these accounts has placed Haiti and the Haitian actors of its revolution at the margins of history, the narration of El reino de este mundo does not put Haiti at its center. Instead, it creates a net of entanglements between various spaces of content and action pointing to different connections and in different directions. The prologue already manifests Haiti’s position within the Americas as one of the (multiple) central spaces and its supposed marginality as a result of the oppression of knowledge, and the acknowledgment of those dimensions which for Carpentier are genuinely, authentically and integrally (hemispheric) American. Questioning European aesthetics, art traditions, and trends from a Caribbean standpoint is achieved by replacing them with lo real maravilloso as a poetological exercise used as an “ampliación de las escalas y categorías de la realidad” (Carpentier, El reino 15). Therefore, both production and dissemination of knowledge establish the historical and political reality in the imaginative process. Such resistance can consequently be called a postcolonial poetics. As such, it expands the literary and narrative horizons of observation towards a project of searching.

Markings of resistance and counterpoint: Surrealism Such a project of postcolonial poetics rises explicitly from a discussion of the Surrealist aesthetics that dominate the whole prologue. This discussion can be read as a historical account of the French Surrealists’ cultural productions in order

124 Marius Littschwager to analyze the artificial character of their aesthetics which creates le merveilleux: “La sugerencia del escritor cubano es que todo es artificial: el arte es artificio si no conduce con la realidad. Y la realidad europea no es maravillosa” (Paz Soldán 37). Carpentier marks a counterpoint as resistance to European cultural traditions entangled with a historical and political vision that becomes a poetical project in El reino de este mundo. Lo maravilloso comienza a serlo de manera inequívoca cuando surge de una inesperada alteración de la realidad (el milagro), de una revelación privilegiada de la realidad de una iluminación inhabitual o singularmente favorecedora de las inadvertidas riquezas de la realidad, percibidas con particular intensidad en virtud de una exaltación del espíritu que lo conduce a un modo de ‘estado límite’. Para empezar, la sensación de lo maravilloso presupone una fe. (Carpentier, El reino 15) [The marvelous unequivocally starts being when it arises from an unexpected alteration of reality (a miracle), a privileged revelation of reality, an unaccustomed or singularly favorable illumination of the previously unremarked riches of reality, an amplification of the measures and categories of reality, perceived with peculiar intensity due to an exaltation of the spirit which elevates it to a kind of limit state. First of all, the sense of the marvelous presupposes a faith.] Pisaba yo una tierra donde millares de hombres ansiosos de libertad creyeron en los poderes licantrópicos de Mackandal, a punto de que esa fe colectiva produjera un milagro el día de su ejecución. (Carpentier, El reino 17) [I was treading on land where thousands of men anxious for freedom had believed in the lycanthropic powers of Mackandal, to the point where this collective faith produced a miracle on the day of his execution.] Besides the continuity between the marvel of the maravilloso and the merveilleux of the Surrealists that lies in the claim of a superior reality (“la revelación privilegiada de la realidad”), Carpentier sketches a concept assumed to be an opportunity that recognizes and compromises the marvelous as real. But the marvel just becomes real by belief in Carpentier’s vision, while there is no prior “access to a superior reality” or a constant state of a supposed marvelous nature.4 Despite the critical dialogue Carpentier holds with the French Surrealists, especially as an exercise of resistance against the aesthetic and cultural hegemony of Europe’s incapability to recognize and establish other forms of knowledge, it is nonetheless necessary to question his intention to break with Surrealism by means of the historiographic representation he reclaims. The narration and mediation of El reino de este mundo gives an example at the beginning:

Postcolonial poetics 125 Mientras el amo se hacía rasurar, Ti Noel pudo contemplar a su gusto las cuatro cabezas de cera que adornaban el estante de la entrada. Los rizos de las pelucas enmarcaban semblantes inmóviles, antes de abrirse, en un remanso de bucles, sobre el tapete encarnado. Aquellas cabezas parecían tan reales . . . como la cabeza que un charlatán de paso había traído al Cabo, años atrás . . . Por graciosa casualidad, la tripería contigua exhibía cabezas de terneros, desolladas, con un tallito de perejil sobre la lengua, que tenían la misma calidad cerosa . . . (Carpentier, El reino 21–22) [While his master was being shaved, Ti Noel could gaze his fill at the four wax heads that adorned the counter by the door. The curls of the wigs, opening into a pool of ringlets on the red baize, framed expressionless faces. Those heads seemed as real -although their fixed stare was so dead- as the talking head an itinerant mountebank had brought to the Cap years before . . . By an amusing coincidence, the window of the trip-shop next door there were calves’ heads, skinned and each with a spring of parsley across the tongue, which possessed the same waxy quality.] The imagination of the “abundance of heads”5 evokes Surrealist cinematographic and photographic techniques which produce sequential transitions of images in order to create a flow of observations and transitions between the external and internal world. Anke Birkenmaier demonstrates that Alejo Carpentier relates his works not just through literary quotations and intertextual references but, more importantly here, underlines them by means of narrative methods and perspectives which he exchanges and shares with the Surrealists, or those he takes from radio broadcasting and disciplines such as ethnography. By 1942, the Cuban author had already published his historical and ethnographic study La música en Cuba (1946) and was also known and recognized as an essayist before he became a famous fiction author. But methods of music and discourses of ethnography also deserve more attention with regard to the question of resistance, since its conceptualization is at stake here in theory and in practice. El reino de este mundo may be read as an ethnographic story that is incorporated into a historiographic fiction about the French Illustration and the affirmative function of Vodou6 religion and practices for the Haitian Revolution. At the same time, references to colonial chronicles and the text’s essayistic parody of Bartolomé de las Casas and Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca take up the ethnographer and traveler as narrator, while dramatic, poetic, and epic expectations are created through paratexts, most of them taken from Siglo de Oro drama and poetry (e.g. by Lope de Vega, Quevedo, Calderón). The colonial stereotypes and the hegemonic version of conquest related in the chronicles recalled are put side by side with parodic statements that subvert these colonial remarks. Between the title El reino de este mundo and the epigraph of the first part and chapter, which quotes a play by Lope de Vega (El Nuevo Mundo descubierto por Cristobal Colón, 1589–1603), this parodic scheme is clearly set from the beginning.7 This beginning, understood here as a process of framing the

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story, corresponds to a narration or discourse which performs contrapuntal modes of music. The contrapuntal scheme of narration follows this musical technique of composition—punctum contra punctus—in order to juxtapose at least two different points of view and at least two distinct voices speaking about the same event narrated in the story, one mainly from the point of view of the (White) colonizers of the French aristocracy and the other from the point of view of the (Black) slaves: Monsieur Lenomard de Mezy y su esclavo salieron de la ciudad por el camino que seguía la orilla del mar. Sonaron cañonazos en lo alto de la fortaleza. La Courageuse, de la armada del rey, acabada de aparecer en el horizonte, de vuelta de la Isla de la Tortuga . . . Asaltado por recuerdos de sus tiempos de oficial pobre, el amo comenzó a silbar una marcha de pífanos. Ti Noel, en contrapunteo mental, tarareó para sus adentros una copla marinera, muy cantada por los toneleros del puerto, en que se echaban mierdas al rey de Inglaterra. (Carpentier, El reino 25) [M. Lenormand de Mézy and his slave left the city by the road that skirted the seashore. A salvo rang out from the parapets of the fortress La Courageuse, of His Majesty’s fleet, had been sighted, returning from the Île de la Tortue. . . . Old memories of his days as petty officer stirred in the master s breast, and he began to whistle a fife march. Ti Noel, in a kind of mental counterpoint, silently hummed a chanty that was very popular among harbor coopers, heaping ignominy on the King of England.] As this excerpt from the first chapter indicates, and as is revealed throughout the whole narration, the idea of counterpoint dominates the composition both in terms of theme and structure by means of multiple focalizations (Chanady 490) and divergent perspectives which are juxtaposed, thus leading to what Paul Miller calls the mutual exclusion and cultural opposition of European Enlightenment and Afro-Caribbean cultures (Miller 42; 53).8 The theme of Vodou, represented as a form of spiritual and practical resistance for the enslaved population in El reino de este mundo, enters the scheme of the contrapuntal narration in a significant way. It is when Mackandal is about to be executed in public by the White masters that, in a joint vision, the Black slaves who had been gathered to witness his execution, see him escape and transform into a mosquito right before their very eyes. And although the focalization of the slaves is interrupted or destroyed, as Chanady argues (490), the imagination of the shared vision among the slaves remains as an effect of the marvelous, a “privileged revelation” of particular intensity that leads to an extreme experience (Carpentier, El reino 15). The subjunctive clause9 that precedes what remains unseen by the majority of the slaves and is focalized in a distanced manner as being seen almost exclusively by the White observers of the scene, opposes

Postcolonial poetics 127 a judgmental privileged position of the Whites with the privileged imagination or revelation of the slaves, but does not reduce the credibility of the latter, as Chanady assumes (490). Rather, Mackandal’s execution remains in the imagination of his escape via metamorphosis and therefore creates an alternative space that holds on to the belief—as an expression and extension of la fe, as Carpentier claims it in his prologue—that the rebellion, although repressed by the colonizers and planters, is about to gain new force because the codes of the slaves’ syncretic and transcultural belief system and the manifestations of their popular culture as a form of resistance are alien to the colonial rulers. From a narrative standpoint, this relates to Jorge Luis Borges and his definition of an aesthetic experience: “la inminencia de una revelación que no se produce” (21). In relation to the changing and clearly valued perspective within the scene, the execution would be an experience of dissent capable of spreading agency (García Canclini 27–31). The scene of Mackandal’s execution can therefore also be considered as a contrapuntal composition that does not resolve the tensions and divisions of two different worldviews, which are both shared and divided by the narrator at the same time.

Nomadic characters and the entangled narrator10 It was Edward Said who from the 1980s onward proposed and applied the contrapuntal analysis of oriental and postcolonial texts and who relates the method to the idea of exile: As we look back at the cultural archive, we begin to reread it not univocally but contrapuntally, with a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts. (Said, Culture and Imperialism 129) [E]xiles are aware of at least two (homes), and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that – to borrow the phrase from music – is contrapuntal . . . [E]xile is life led outside habitual order. It is nomadic, decentered, contrapuntal . . . (Said, On Exile 239) Said’s recognition of the link of nomadic features and postcolonial relations to the idea of exile can be applied to the contrapuntal narrative of El reino de este mundo for an explicatory expansion of its modes of resistance. Carpentier’s entangled narrator is central to the awareness he attributes to the nomadic character Ti Noel. This narrative strategy is twofold, as the narrator is itself entangled in the course of the story to be told, while at the same time this strategy grasps the embeddedness and integration of the narrator in the story he tells from a multipolar perspective, which also implies the active or entangling part as mediator of this process. In the construction of his narrative, history contains stories, both told and untold, that need to be entangled and connected. And it is not primarily a political

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agenda that guides the project of lo real maravilloso as a concept and its implementation otherwise in El reino de este mundo. It is foremost a cultural and poetic, or even poetological endeavor to recognize spaces of resistance. Within these spaces, created narratively through the cyclical and elliptical structures of the story,11 resistance is not assessed by the success of a revolutionary process or an uprising told in the narration, but by its reference to and addition of alternative modes of knowledge beside the dominant ones. These different modes of knowledge, which are combined and rearticulated through the character Ti Noel, show modes of the cultural circulation of ideas and practices through spaces and times which represent an entangled history. An entangled narrator, as a strategy used in El reino de este mundo, combines witnessing, speaking, and knowledge as interconnected elements but not simultaneous or concurrent to the personal perspective which is imminently related to the nomadic protagonist Ti Noel. The mediation of Ti Noel creates a character that collects his knowledge from oral traditions and initiation rites while the narrator suggests a developing utopian consciousness for the protagonist, who mixes the already syncretic Vodou deities of the Afro-Caribbean with his contemporary Enlightenment and also postEnlightenment philosophies. The entangled narrator follows the nomadic character while bridging narrative circles and temporal gaps through minimal narrative transitions between the four main plot circles, thus creating a different history. This collaboration constructs a metropolitan narration connecting those other histories, against which and together with which the entangled narrator acts.12

Ti Noel as Trickster: vodouizing Hegel The chronicle of lo real maravilloso represented in El reino de este mundo is characterized by a double gesture: historiography as the main reference of the narration is converted into a series of mythographies. The myths that help to subvert and model the reflected history are displaced into different and alternative histories about the Haitian Revolution as a series of revolts and acts of resistance. The described version recognizes popular emancipations and their practices based on other forms of knowledge. In this sense, El reino de este mundo enacts artistic resistance in that it creates a poetic memory capable of formulating a program that includes perspectives and forms of knowledge which are not limited to a supposed literary field. Its transgressive capacity stems also from an amplification of the concept of literature itself. And within this constellation the mode of resistance proposed by Carpentier in both the prologue and its so-called chronicle oscillates between observation and creation. The foundation of the concept of lo real maravilloso can be taken as a creative strategy that escapes traditional and modern categories of literature. While Carpentier in his prologue departs from a distinction between two different ontological determinations with the result of staging authenticity (America) against artificiality (Europe), the narration leaves this realm of confrontation with the help of the entangled narrator. As a dynamic authority the narrator creates the effect of a third instance via voice and view, which not only stages the oscillation of

Postcolonial poetics 129 differentiations but also makes it the object and problem.13 The entangled narrator vodouizes Hegel’s philosophy of history and freedom which is inscribed in the narration by combining the idea of reason with other belief systems which through mixed arrangements create the nomadic itinerary of the narrative representation. Hegel is made Haiti through this narrative course.14 The process of vodouizing therefore constitutes a polyphonic opening of Hegel’s philosophy to an understanding of an alternative idea of liberty expressed by the Vodou practices being narrated. Thereby, Ti Noel functions as a trickster-figure,15 though he is made Eshu-Elegba/Legba16 by traversing Hegel’s dialectical relation of master and slave, which the narrative counterpoint creates.17 Following Cuervo Hewitt’s correlations of how Carpentier constructs Ti Noel’s development of consciousness with Hegel’s philosophical explanations of freedom, history, and spirit and, at another point, interwoven with Oswald Spengler’s thesis on civilization(s), it is also important to focus on the narrator’s mediation of these constructions.18 Thus, the trickster provokes questions about the forms and limitations of the narrative mediation of contradictions.19 The entangled narrator represents lo real maravilloso as mythological thinking that is not guided by an a-priori cultural ontology, but functions itself in trickster modes as a mediation of and within contradictions of the narration in between Hegel’s philosophy, Eshu’s rituals (shifting symbolic significations), and Legba’s forces (metamorphosis), for example. The life narrated in El reino de este mundo is arranged as a nomadic transgression and condensation of liminality in extreme forms: journeys without destination, fluctuations, and turbulences; changes of status, travesty, and mockery; metamorphosis and indeterminacy; solitude and humiliation of one’s own consciousness. And it is this character’s life, told by a mediator— or, rather, entangled narrator—who throughout the narrative course composes and decomposes, builds structure and anti-structure in and through counter-focalizations. Like the ending/beginning space in between the prologue and the narration, the ending of El reino de este mundo as narration is combined with yet another beginning in Ti Noel who, as a trickster-figure, relates to Cuban Santería and Haitian Vodou and unites Eshu-Elegba and Legba as an imagination of the crossroads and natural forces: In . . . Carpentier’s The Kingdom of this World, the Caribbean wind force is the symbol for an imaginary historical revolution envisioned after Fernando Ortiz’s allegorical interpretation of Huracán as symbol for change. This change, imagined by Ortiz and by the Minoristas in the thirties and forties, had been closely associated . . . with the representation of afrocubanía as an act of rebellion. (Cuervo Hewitt 108) The hurricane as a mythological space and as a concrete, perpetual disaster represents continuity and change at the same time. It is inscribed in the history and inscribes itself in the history as a natural catastrophe that brings the idea of a new beginning. It functions in the narrative as an ending that has always already begun.

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As González Echevarría has noted, “the complicity of history and nature pervades the whole story” of El reino de este mundo (136). In the last scene, the narrator disappears, leaving the destiny of Ti Noel unresolved as to his survival of the hurricane, his possible death, or an ultimate metamorphosis into a vulture. The last entanglement of this narration brings together the image of the previous uprisings told in the story, Vodou mythology through the implication of EshuElegba/Legba,20 and the “disaster community”21 (Schwartz 121).

Conclusion The fact that both of the texts discussed here, “Lo real maravilloso de América” and El reino de este mundo, are constantly focusing on the becoming of things qualifies them for an attempt to theorize and poetize postcolonial history. In this sense, the theory and practice of Carpentier’s writings, with all its philosophical and ontological burden—Oswald Spengler, Hegel, and the French Surrealists— and entangled with his not less problematic anthropological and ethnological inclusions of Vodou and other religious belief systems, as they have been classified by his contemporaries such as Fernando Ortiz, become a search for forms, taking into account the transcultural histories of these transformations. It is the resistance of the practice to the theory that disturbs and contradicts Carpentier’s own project. Lo real maravilloso as performed in El reino de este mundo is not to be found, as it is claimed, in the manifesto of the prologue. Instead, a critical dialogue is established in the relation of both texts. It is a critical dialogue that continues today and enables a permanent reexamination of both texts. Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo thereby cannot be directly related to the rhizomatic, nomadologic, and polyrhythmic theories of Deleuze/Guattari, Glissant, and Benítez Rojo, although they share some postcolonial narrative strategies that

Postcolonial poetics 131 put into fiction the epistemological terminology of ellipses, spirals, and plateaus.22 The novel and the prologue, in combination, express the contradictions of shared and divided histories as an entangled history that connects the Caribbean (or rather, the Americas), with Europe and Africa. The category of lo real maravilloso and the narration of El reino de este mundo as a poetological endeavor resist other forms of theoretical formation as a transcultural set of ideas already formed and informed by ethnographic studies, personal experience, convergent literary fields, and oral traditions which still preoccupy contemporary debates. The narration of El reino de este mundo shows, in contrast to the ontological assumptions of cultural authenticity, the process of circulation through appropriation, reevaluation, and recontextualization of cultural signifiers, practices, and ideas in a dynamic process that itself transcends the notion of lo real maravilloso. The narrative mediation of misery and the resistance to it, through the creation of imaginative spaces and the trickster-figure, admits actions and nomadic practices into the closing circles drawn by powerful institutions or despotic leaders, by showing both structures and anti-structures at once, functioning not as opposites, but as entanglements.

Notes 1 “Lo real maravilloso de América,” the prologue to El reino de este mundo, was first published in 1948, without a title, as a stand-alone item. 2 Leonardo Padura and Edmundo Paz Soldán already hint at this differentiation and inflection, the latter suggesting that “[l]eídos juntos, el ensayo y el prólogo pueden verse como una suerte de teoría y práctica de lo real maravilloso en la novelística de Carpentier. El ensayo . . . sirvió como ejemplo perfecto de cómo un proyecto narrativo podía encontrar su forma” (Paz Soldán 36). 3 Mariano Siskind already added a postcolonial dimension to this argument, stating that “. . . the importance of Carpentier’s marvelous real to postcolonial determinations of the definition of magical realism may be said to reside in the contradiction between what the preface of El reino de este mundo says and what the novel does” (Siskind 76). 4 Siskind’s argument is twofold in this regard. He claims that the “marvel gave access to a ‘superior reality’” and that the “marvelous arises . . . from a privileged revelation of reality” (73–77). 5 “Había abundancia de cabezas aquella mañana” (Carpentier, El reino 22). 6 The usage of the term Vodou (Haitian religious practices) in distinction to voodoo (imagined religion of popular culture) relies on the argument offered by Adam M. McGee (231–56). 7 While the title El reino de este mundo may create the expectations of a fantastic story by positive means of a kingdom as a better place, or even utopic space, the epigraph reveals this place as a dark place of evil that the Demon/Devil, declaring itself as “El rey de Occidente,” already claims to be among his possessions (Carpentier, El reino 19). 8 Paul B. Miller emphasizes the temporal divergence—prospective and retrospective— of the Afro-Caribbean and the colonizer created in El reino de este mundo and characterizes it as a main theme or motif establishing a contrapuntal composition dominant in part one of the novel (43–47). 9 “En el momento decisivo, las ataduras del mandinga . . . dibujarían por un segundo el contorno de un hombre de aire . . . Y Mackandal, transformado en mosquito zumbón,

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iría a posarse en el mismo tricornio del jefe de las tropas . . .” (Carpentier, El reino 42). I would like to thank Kirsten Kramer for her helpful suggestions with regard to this narrator. See Cuervo Hewitt (62–120) and Echevarría (97–154) for an exhaustive interpretation of cyclical structures in El reino de este mundo. Also see Echevarría 97–154. See also Cuervo Hewitt for a meticulous analysis of Carpentier’s intellectual history and the intertextual and transcultural history that connects El reino de este mundo to other texts, arts, and to anthropological discourse (62–120). See Albrecht Koschorke’s “Die Figur des Dritten.” This expression alludes again to Susan Buck-Morss’s analysis of the impact Haiti had on Hegel’s philosophy, although it is never mentioned in his philosophical groundings. For an introduction to the trickster as third-space character departing from EshuElegba, see Schüttpelz’s “Der Trickster.” A broader discussion of the trickster in relation to world literature and ethnography can be found in Schüttpelz’s Die Moderne im Spiegel des Primitiven. Eshua-Elegba is understood here as the (Afro-Cuban) Yoruba designation and Legba as the (Haitian) Vodou designation for the same type of mediator in both religions as the Lord of the crossroads and entrance spaces in general. See Buck Morss’s discussion of the problematic of its origins in Hegel (40–52). “Ti Nöel’s experiences through more than a hundred years of historical turmoil and reversals allows him to arrive by the end of the novel to a knowledge that could not be obtained through theoretical abstractions. This is a Hegelian concept that Carpentier applies to an otherwise Spenglerian Ti Nöel. At the same time, contrary to Spengler, Hegel’s concept of historical Time proposes that consciousness arrives through a series of inverted (dialectical) movements, to self-consciousness. This is the moment in which, for Hegel, consciousness arrives to Absolute Knowledge/Freedom: a moment that ‘arises from our governing together.’ . . . Conscious ‘becomes’ self-consciousness only through a process of understanding, of ‘becoming through experience,’ always as a return from the ‘other,’ . . . when a new consciousness arises from the old one. For Hegel, Knowledge is Freedom, and Freedom is the essence of Spirit . . . This process is a difficult phenomenological road that must be lived (experienced), not learned from books. In The Kingdom of This World this is the life-road traveled by Ti Nöel before he reaches an understanding of humanity’s being-in-the world. In this process, and through a dialectical encounter with the other, Ti Nöel learns that the causes of human bondage are not just racial, but a condition created (as in Marx’s reading of Hegel) by economic and political power” (Cuervo Hewitt 70–71). In this quote, Cuervo Hewitt almost exclusively focuses on Carpentier’s intellectual history as it is applied to the text. For a profound, wide, and concise analysis of El reino de este mundo which already takes into account the category of resistance with a focus on symbolical symmetries of the text as patterns, see Cuervo Hewitt (30–120). “The question concerning the trickster turns out to be a matter of the nature and internal limitations of narrative mediations (and their exposure) of contradictions. An endless flight of equivalences are available to this question . . .” (Schüttpelz, “Der Trickster” 214, my translation). “In Afro-Caribbean cosmogony the vulture is a symbol of Legba-Elegua, Lord of metamorphosis: who presides over the transforming possibilities of the Word, and, as such, the mercurial bridge between the ‘there’ of Vodou misteres (like the Afro-Cuban potencias) and the ‘here’ of humanity” (Cuervo Hewitt, 93). “Hurricanes and other disasters had over time created a sense of common threat and shared dependency within the empires, but also between the colonies of all the empires” (Schwartz 121). See Benítez Rojo, Glissant, and Deleuze and Guattari.

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Works cited Benítez Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and The Postmodern Perspective. 2nd edition. Duke UP, 1996. Birkenmaier, Anke. Alejo Carpentier y la cultura del surrealismo en América Latina. Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2006. Borges, Jorge Luis. “La muralla y los libros.” Obras Completas II. Emece, 1997. Buck-Morss, Susan. Hegel, Haiti and Universal History. U of Pittsburgh P, 2009. Carpentier, Alejo. El reino de este mundo: Los pasos perdidos. Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1983. ——. Ese músico que llevo dentro. Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1987. ——. Ensayos. Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1990. ——. Los confines del hombre. Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1994. Chanady, Amaryll. “La focalización en El reino de este mundo.” Crítica Semiológica de Terxtos Literarios Hispánicos, edited by Miguel Angel Garrido Gallardo, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1986, pp. 485–92. Cuervo Hewitt, Julia. Voices Out of Africa in Twentieth-Century Spanish Caribbean Literature. Bucknell UP, 2009. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. García Canlini, Néstor. “¿De qué hablamos cuando hablamos de resistencia?” Estudios visuales, no. 7, 2010, pp. 1–22. Glissant, Édouard, and Betsy Wing. Poetics of Relation. U of Michigan P, 1997. González Echevarría, Roberto. Alejo Carpentier, The Pilgrim at Home. U of Texas P, 1990. Koschorke, Albrecht. “Die Figur des Dritten: Ein kulturwissenschaftliches Paradigma.” Die Figur des Dritten: Ein kulturwissenschaftliches Paradigma, edited by Eva Esslinger, Suhrkamp, 2010, pp. 7–31. McGee, Adam M. “Haitian Vodou and Voodoo: Imagined Religion and Popular Culture.” Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses, vol. 41, no. 2, 2012, pp. 231–56. Miller, Paul B. Elusive Origins: The Enlightenment in the Modern Caribbean Historical Imagination (New World Studies). U of Virginia P, 2010. Ortiz, Fernando. Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar. Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1978. ——. El huracán: Su mitología y sus símbolos. Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2005. Padura, Leonardo. Un camino de medio siglo: Alejo Carpentier y la narrativa de lo real maravilloso. Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2002. Paz Soldán, Edmundo. “Alejo Carpentier: teoría y práctica de lo real maravilloso.” Anales de la Literatura Hispanoamericana, vol. 37, 2008, pp. 35–42. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. Vintage Books, 1993. ——. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Harvard UP, 2000. ——. Orientalism. Penguin, 2003. Schüttpelz, Erhard. Die Moderne im Spiegel des Primitiven: Weltliteratur und Ethnologie (1870–1960). Wilhelm Fink, 2005. ——. “Der Trickster.” Die Figur des Dritten: Ein kulturwissenschaftliches Paradigma, edited by Eva Esslinger. Suhrkamp, 2010, pp. 208–24. Schwartz, Stuart B. Sea of Storms: A History of Hurricanes in the Greater Caribbean from Columbus to Katrina. Princeton UP, 2015. Siskind, Mariano. Cosmopolitan Desires: Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America. Northwestern UP, 2014.

Part II

Resistance in/as activism From theory to practice and back

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Caribbean activism for slavery reparations An overview Claudia Rauhut

The claims of the CARICOM Reparations Commission Claims for reparations for the atrocities and long-term damages caused by the enslavement of dozens of millions of Africans during the transatlantic trade have a traceable historical dimension. They became publicly and politically more visible and stronger after the declaration of the Durban conference in 2001,1 which condemned slavery as a crime against humanity and called on the former European colonizing countries for an official recognition and apology. This can be considered as a path-breaking step since it recognized, for the first time at the global level of international organizations like the United Nations, that European colonialism and slavery have caused a structural marginalization and racial discrimination which is still persisting until today and affecting the lives of people of African descent. The Durban agenda has been reinforced by the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) in 2014, when heads of Caribbean governments, mainly composed by the former British colonies, the Commonwealth Caribbean, adopted a ten-point plan entitled “Reparatory Justice Framework” that had been worked out by the CARICOM Reparations Commission, CRC (CARICOM Press Release 53/2014). This commission seeks to engage European governments as successors of former colonial European powers such as Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, which actively participated in the trade, in a dialogue on reparatory justice. Reparatory justice in a broader sense appeals to the ‘correcting of a wrong’ by implementing measures of compensation at different levels in order to address the living legacies of the crimes committed against indigenous populations and enslaved Africans and their descendants. More specifically, the CRC urges European states to recognize slavery as a crime against humanity, to apologize officially and to undertake measures to repair the long-term damages of slavery. These measures should contain the dimensions of education, health, culture, debt cancellation and general investment in infrastructure in order to fight the structural social and economic disadvantage and racial discrimination of the Afro-Caribbean population. A key issue is to link present fundamental development problems in Caribbean societies to long-term patterns of inequalities caused by slavery and colonial exploitation. The CRC basically represents the Anglophone Caribbean and therefore currently negotiates predominantly with Great Britain. But of course there are also other

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regional, historical, cultural, and political approaches on reparations from the French-, Spanish- and Dutch-speaking Caribbean. At least in the Hispanic Americas and the Caribbean, political and academic activism of Afrodescendientes2 has emerged over the last 20 years. These actors have initiated a lot of debates and projects that might not always refer explicitly to the term reparations, but address similar issues related to fighting inequalities and racial discrimination. Some organizations and intellectuals have coined the term Afro-reparaciones, which, however, does not necessarily emphasize slavery reparations (see for instance Mosquera Rosero-Labbé and Barcelos). The transnational network Articulación Regional Afrodescendiente de América Latina y el Caribe (ARAAC), founded in 2009 by academics and grassroots organizations of Afrodescendientes of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Colombia, Honduras, and Ecuador, has only recently discussed including the issue of slavery reparations more explicitly in their agenda.3 Reparations calls must therefore be considered not as a particular and singular case of CARICOM or the Anglophone Caribbean, but as part of a much broader and long existing struggle in the whole region, in which networks of people, practices, and ideas, despite the colonial divide, selectively influence each other. In this contribution, however, I focus on the Jamaican case, although I am quite aware of transregional entanglements in the current debate.4

Historical-global contexts of Caribbean entanglements and reparation claims The Caribbean region has experienced the longest history of slavery and colonialism worldwide. The unpaid forced labor of millions of enslaved Africans in highly efficient plantation economies became the major source of Europe’s wealth and hegemony—a thesis which was first presented in the 1940s by Trinidadian historian Eric Williams and has been further developed and debated among scholars until the present. Centuries of slavery, colonial dominance, economic exploitation and racial-cultural categorization have marked deep patterns of colonial mentality and social inequalities along the lines of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and religion. They have not been overcome after the formal end of slavery but continue to be reproduced and transformed in contemporary Caribbean societies as well as in the context of Caribbean migration (see Grosfoguel, Cervantes-Rodriguez, and Mielants). The persistent discrimination of people of African descent therefore must be considered in relation to the longterm implications of slavery and colonial-racialized social orders. The Caribbean experience is a paradigmatic example of historical transregional entanglements and the central role of slavery as a departing point of modernity (Mintz). A stronger inclusion of slavery and colonialism in the reflection of modernity and its “darker sides” (Mignolo, Darker Side) entered academic debates in the form of Latin American postcolonial and decolonial approaches. Authors like Fernando Coronil and Walter Mignolo have extended Anibal Quijano’s concept of the “coloniality of power” and coined the paradigm modernidad/ colonialidad (Quijano; Coronil; Mignolo, Local Histories; Mignolo, Darker Side).

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Their analysis of the ongoing patterns of colonial order at the level of epistemology as well as in global economic structures of capitalism is essential for reflecting on contemporary Caribbean societies. As these societies do not compose an isolated world region but are intrinsically connected to Europe and Africa by— in Conrad’s and Randeria’s reading, “shared and divided” (17)—histories of entangled (and uneven) modernities, I would emphasize Boatca˘ ’s suggestion to combine approaches on modernity, entanglements, and coloniality. However, I am convinced that the epistemological impulse offered by decolonial approaches can be usefully enriched by a stronger empirical perspective on different forms of agency countering coloniality, such as an examination of the arguments enacted by Caribbean reparations activists, which might clarify the relevance of decolonial projects not only as theory, but as practice. The claims for reparations have a long history of agency in the global context. Different persons and groups have constantly appealed to Europe to take responsibility for the historical debt inherited from slave owners and colonial masters. Numerous scholars point at the importance of Maroon rebellions and other forms of resistance against slavery and colonial domination in the Americas since the 17th century.5 Further, a few exceptions of missionaries, travelers, theologians, and poets are documented who, motivated by Christian, humanistic and moral doubts, in various periods have asked to end slavery and to compensate the victims (Sala-Molins). Caribbean intellectuals of the mid-20th century inspired by Marxism, like C.L.R. James, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, or Walter Rodney, have appealed to Europe to come to terms with colonial guilt in relation to colonized people by emphasizing the constitutive interrelations between colonized and colonizing societies. At the same time, they have written and advocated against the negation, devaluation, and inferiorization of African practices through colonial hegemonic values and discourses. Especially Fanon was deeply engaged in anti-colonial liberation struggles in Africa and analyzed the deep patterns of development and underdevelopment as a result of colonialism. Consequently, in his main oeuvre Les damnés de la terre (1961; translated into English in 1963 as The Wretched of the Earth), he raised arguments for reparation, arguing that European wealth “was stolen from the underdeveloped peoples” (Fanon 102). In a similar way Walter Rodney claims in his book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa that Europe would never have been able to develop to such an extent without the unpaid labor and resources of Africans (and, we might add, AfroCaribbeans). Reparationists systematically elaborate their arguments based on these radical thoughts that have inspired generations of scholars and activists. With regard to the organized activism for reparations, Jamaicans play a key role in the Caribbean and even at a global level. Since the 1950s, referring to a long tradition of resistance in the region, some Rastafari elders have repeatedly petitioned the Queen to facilitate their repatriation to Africa as a form of reparation (Shepherd 25).6 The recent CARICOM call pays tribute to the pivotal role of Rastafari by including repatriation as the second point in their ten-point-agenda (CARICOM Press Release 285/2013). Another collective call for reparations has been articulated by numerous individuals and organizations within the Black

140 Claudia Rauhut Power Movement and its aftermaths in the US (Martin and Yaquinto, Munford, Robinson). Its leading figures have maintained strong connections to activists in the Anglophone Caribbean, who have pointed to specific problems and strategies such as expounding the problems of incomplete decolonization and the way in which the demographic majority of “Blacks” and “Browns” was ruled by a “White power structure,” or enacting more inclusive concepts of Blackness, as Bogues, Lewis and Quinn have shown in their work about the transnational networks of Black Power in the Caribbean (Quinn; for the Jamaican case see Lewis and Bogues). Finally, there has been a recurrent engagement of African leaders for a global pan-African movement of reparations. They have mobilized within different meetings and world conferences for international exchange, support, and visibility in the global arena.7 The call for reparations has certainly been continuously pushed forward by 20th century civil society activism in the US. Academic debates, however, tend to overemphasize or singularize the case for reparations in the US and apply rather US-centered approaches to the topic in general. It is therefore extremely important to investigate the activism for slavery reparations not as a singular national phenomenon but via approaches of transregional entanglements, taking especially the different Caribbean protagonists into account. It was, for instance, particularly due to the Jamaican and other Caribbean delegations that reparations were included in the final declaration of Durban in 2001 (Beckles 191). Its agenda has been reinforced and further developed by international organizations such as the UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent and, finally, integrated in the UN “International Decade for People of African Descent: Recognition, Justice and Development” (2015–2024). The UN-sponsored measures aimed at the improving of living conditions and overcoming of structural racism and inequalities would not have been thinkable without the long-standing individual and organized mobilization work by people of African descent in the Americas in the long 20th century.

Global support for Caribbean calls for reparations The CARICOM Reparations Commission has on various occasions acknowledged the strong contribution of these historical protagonists as ancestors to the reparations struggle. What is quite new in the recent call, however, is the level of articulation and global support. Reparations are not only claimed by community activists, human rights advocates, Rastafari people, or academics, but they are now also supported by national governments and international organizations and circulate globally through international media presence. The agenda was signed by the prime ministers of nearly all CARICOM member states as well as by the governments of Cuba and Venezuela and regional associations like CELAC and ALBA.8 The addressees are not private persons, companies, or banks, but European governments because, as activists argue, they are the successor states of those colonial governments that have created the legal, political, economic, and cultural-racial framework in which the organized crime of the slave trade was

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possible. Instead of individual compensation the CRC claims investment in infrastructure in the fields of education, health, work, and culture and, further, requires a transfer of technology and knowledge as well as debt cancellation (CARICOM Press Release 285/2013). Reparations activists underline their arguments with reference to precedents of reparations in relation to historical injustices such as the reparations programs for the Holocaust, for colonial crimes against the Maori in 1995 (Maori Waikato Raupatu Claims Settlement Bill 1863) or for the Mau Mau independence fighters in 1950s Kenia in 2012 (Beckles 12; Shepherd 25). By referring to cases that are comparable but very different in scale and results, reparations activists emphasize the global relevance, possibility, and legitimacy of reparations. They build strategic alliances with other interestgroups in the US and Europe and thus locate their Caribbean agenda in a global context. The chair of the CARICOM Reparations Commission, Sir Hilary Beckles, has clearly outlined the programmatic target in his speech in the House of Commons on July 16, 2014: “This 21st century will be the century of global reparatory justice” (CARICOM Press Release 188/2014). Professor Beckles teaches economic history at the University of the West Indies in Barbados and is currently vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies (UWI). In his constitutive and widely quoted book Britain’s Black Debt (2013) he reconstructs a variety of empirical details of enrichment by enslaved labor of British royal families, churches, merchants, and intellectual elites. He further offers an overview of the global movement for reparations and the particular Caribbean case. Beckles as well as other members of the CRC like Professor Verene Shepherd (social historian and chairperson of the Jamaican National Commission on Reparations) or the advocate Lord Anthony Gifford have prominently engaged in and worked towards systematic research based on the topic, especially as it immediately became necessary to disprove the strong counter-arguments against reparations not only from moral, historical and economic perspectives but specifically from a juridical point of view (Beckles; Shepherd et al.; Gifford; see also the juridical anthropology approach of Wittmann). In this sense, a historically grounded research base is considered as extremely important in order to prepare and defend legal arguments in case the topic of reparations for slavery has to be discussed at the level of international law and international courts of justice.9

Activists’ arguments for reparations The following chapter outlines the more empirical dimension of the specific Jamaican case for reparations, which constitutes a forerunner in the region. During the bicentennial celebrations of the abolition of the slave trade in 2007 the debates on reparations gained a lot of public impetus in Jamaica and other former British colonies in the Caribbean, as well as in Britain itself. A lot of voices have criticized the hegemonic way of remembering and honoring exclusively the British abolition movement and its role in ending the slave trade, while the preceding 300 years of enrichment by a brutal system of exploitation of and crimes against Africans as well as the active role of enslaved people themselves in fighting slavery have been

142 Claudia Rauhut erased from public memory. The disappointment and anger reached its peak when Tony Blair and the Queen refused any form of recognition and apology towards the descendants of the victims (Shepherd 26). Britain’s systematic rejection of reparations, even after the international backing of the CRC call, has clearly been demonstrated again by David Cameron’s visit to Jamaica in September 2015, during which he disrespectfully suggested that Jamaica should “move on from painful legacy of slavery,” as Cameron was quoted by The Guardian and other newspapers.10 During my first research in Jamaica in February–March 2014 I conducted interviews with activists of the Jamaican National Commission on Reparations (JNCR).11 This commission, the first to have been set up in the region in 2009, is chaired by Professor Verene Shepherd, who as a main protagonist of the movement represents and elaborates on Jamaican experiences and perspectives within the regional level of the CRC. The JNCR is composed of academics, lawyers, human rights activists, and representatives of the Rastafari to whom the commission pays special tribute: I would say that the Rastafarian movement across the Caribbean as well as elsewhere in Africa provides the main impulse and energy for keeping that issue on the agenda. Because they embody a certain approach to our history which recognizes the transatlantic slave trade as a defining moment in the separation of millions of Africans from the continent. So with the embodiment of that particular moment they challenge the national mythology, the mythology of the nation as being developed or constructed . . . that has not to include, well, how come all these people to this part of this world? And they were raising a fundamental issue of how do we historicize our presence in this part of the world and the relationship between that presence and the systems of labor that enabled Europe to enrich itself? (Interview with Rupert Lewis on March 10, 2014 in Kingston) In this interview, Rupert Lewis, political scientist and reparations activist since the 1980s, reasserts the notion that Europe’s industrialization and wealth is rooted in slavery and colonial exploitation as already elaborated by Williams, Fanon, or Rodney—to whom Lewis and others frequently refer. But Lewis particularly appreciates the Rastafari contribution to raising these concerns. Pointing consequently to the notion that “there is no modernity without slavery,” Lewis urges for a stronger historical awareness of slavery-based entanglements in the self-conception of national narratives of postcolonial nation states and, as I would add, also in European nation states. The re-negotiation of historical economic entanglements between the Caribbean and Europe and the respective responsibility for inequalities is also a major concern of Verene Shepherd: we cannot continue like this. Our relationship with Europe is really, really bad. One reason is that people cannot forget the past. There is some awareness

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in the society, through history education, of what European colonialism was like. The often expressed view is that what happened under colonialism was not right; that an apology is due; that an apology should be followed by some kind of settlement to Caribbean people. You can’t just not apologize and not make any kind of settlement to Caribbean people as, even with independence, the Caribbean was left undeveloped . . . (Interview with Verene Shepherd on February 27, 2014 in Kingston) This quote is especially relevant with regard to three central dimensions of reparations: development, legal arguments, and the recognition of historical injustice. Shepherd prominently links the reparations struggle to the discourse of development and thereby counters dominant modernist development discourses. Because it must take into consideration that Britain, after the formal ending of slavery in 1838 and colonialism in 1962, left Jamaica with fundamental economic, social, and educational development problems including high rates of illiteracy, chronic health diseases, inadequate employment and living conditions and persistent severe poverty. Consequently, she and many others argue that British development aid for the Caribbean can no longer be framed in terms of morality or charity, but rather as reparation for historical injustice. In a similar way David Scott, anthropologist and expert on the Caribbean, has recently advocated for the CARICOM agenda precisely because it challenges common concepts and discourses of developmentalist models of the modern nation states. While refusing to recognize historical injustices and to fight their consequences within a framework of reparatory justice, European nation states continue to reproduce the dominant dependency structures. Thus, Scott rigorously highlights the key concern: Might it be then, that, one of the things that the reparations argument potentially does is to redescribe the past’s relation to the present in such a way as to foreground the sense in which Caribbean debt is the other side of European theft—that the “persistent poverty” of the Caribbean has been a constituting condition for ill-gotten European prosperity? The two—the debt and the theft—are internally, not accidentally, connected. The point is that this is not the story of a mere episode in a marginal history; it is the integrated story of the making of the modern world itself. What the Caribbean politics of reparations seeks, therefore, is not economic aid (with all its disciplining technologies and moral hubris), not help in the subservient sense of a mendicant seeking assistance, but what is owed to the Caribbean by former slave-trading and slave-owning nations as a matter of the justice of redress. (Scott ix, emphases in original) With regard to Shepherd’s aforementioned awareness of injustices in history within the Jamaican population, it might be necessary to briefly refer to a particular historical account: Shepherd, as a historian and director of the Institute for Gender & Development Studies, is part of an interdisciplinary and international research team that investigates the long-term enrichment of slave holders and companies

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involved in the trade. As a ‘prize’ for emancipation, slave owners in the British colonies of the Caribbean received 20 million pounds at that time from the British parliament in compensation for their ‘loss of property.’ In contrast, the formerly enslaved persons entered freedom without possessing capital and land or the right of full citizenship (see also Monteith and Richards). The reparations activists consider this historical context as particularly relevant because it can counter arguments against reparations for two reasons. For one, by investigating the money and where that money has gone in terms of subsequent development, they present a research base that shows the long-term implications of these unequal conditions. They thereby, secondly, underline the reparations claim by empirical work of real calculations in order to deconstruct the widespread skepticism that reparations can only be imaginary. These results, again, are being systematically elaborated in relation to research on historical injustices in international law. Shepherd’s quote also reveals the evocation of historical memory and narratives of the people as a justification of reparations. This is also the central point for Ras Miguel Lorne, a lawyer and Rastafari activist involved in the struggle since the 1980s: The reparations are not taught in schools, the history of slavery isn’t nearly touched upon, history is not even compulsory in schools, and in an environment like ours, history should be compulsory to give us a sense of pride, of culture, of achievement! . . . In other words, the hangover and the strength of the colonial system are still so strong. As a lawyer, I can testify that our court system is probably more conservative and colonial than Britain! In areas of British law, that Britain has become progressive, we are still far behind, our prison structure and all these things . . . So we need a radical thought process to bring us up to date and therefore . . . all of this is connected, because if you get reparations in an atmosphere of backwardness, then the colonial enemies are gonna find a way that all of that compensation goes back to them and benefit their economy more than it benefit us! . . . We see the fight for reparation as a fight to restore the dignity of black people, to re-connect us with Africa, to eliminate racism . . . (Interview with Ras Miguel Lorne on March 3, 2014 in Kingston) Ras Miguel Lorne reflects on inequalities as a result of the colonial order that persisted after independence, especially through a system of education that rather lead people into the stated miseducation. On the grounds of the colonial structures maintained in certain Jamaican institutions he is afraid of potential problems in the distribution of possible future reparations. He focuses on the role of education for raising consciousness not only about the history of slavery, but also about a revaluation of African practices. By a similar argument the ten-point-program of the CRC claims investment in school reforms, to build up cultural institutions, museums, and research centers in order to investigate and show the history of

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slavery in a non-hegemonic way. But the program also claims the installation of an African knowledge program enabling cultural and religious exchanges with Africa (CARICOM Press Release 285/2013). Reparations therefore include a whole dimension of revaluation and revitalization of Afro-Caribbean practices which have been marginalized and whose adherents were criminalized for centuries by colonial orders and prejudices in nearly all parts of the Americas. When Jamaican reparations activists refer to African traditions as important sources of socio-cultural and religious identification and counter-hegemonic knowledge, they might opt for this for similar reasons as the protagonists of “reafricanization” in Afro-Atlantic religions like Cuban Santería or Brazilian Candomblé (Palmié “Introduction”; Frigerio; Rauhut). Education and the spread of knowledge is therefore a key concern of the JNCR. They are currently mobilizing, together with other academic and cultural institutions like the African Caribbean Heritage Institute of Jamaica/Jamaica Memory Bank, a broader campaign to make the reparations agenda more widely known publicly. As director David Brown commented to me, lots of people are aware of the injustices committed by slavery, but productive knowledge and discussion on the matter have been systematically unattended in education and public discourse. This might change now, since due to the work of Shepherd and her colleagues the issue has gained considerable local and international media attention, political and even governmental support.

Transregional approaches to slavery reparations In conclusion I want to highlight the most relevant dimensions of reparations in at least four aspects: 1. Reeducation and rewriting of history Actors emphasize the need for a national and even global historiography that prominently recognizes the history of slavery as a departing point of modernity— a history that includes the narratives of African people, their social, cultural and religious practices, and their agency of resistance. These narratives have been marginalized and silenced for centuries and, to speak in Dussel’s term, exteriorized from the canon of Eurocentric master narratives (Dussel). While colonizers and their colonial heritage in the Caribbean imposed to a great extent what should be remembered as part of history, the reparations discourse reinforces the initiatives to recuperate the silenced narratives and to break with idealized Caribbean as well as European national historiographies. 2. Decolonizing knowledge about slavery and its legacies Reparations can thereby contribute to a decolonized knowledge about slavery and its legacies and might thus challenge the hegemonic structures of knowledge production.

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3. Reframing development as reparations As reparations discourse addresses present structural problems of Caribbean societies as a result—albeit not in a mono-causal and unidirectional way—of the long-term consequences of slavery, it urges Europe to recognize its central role in it. By appealing to European governments to seriously engage in fighting poverty and underdevelopment and recognizing their deep historical roots, the reparations activists reframe the development discourse as an obligation to repair historical injustices, rather than as charity. 4. Reparations as a globally entangled matter In this sense, reparations must be understood as a global concern, not only of Africans and peoples of African descent, but as a matter that has to be dealt with especially by people positioned as privileged in the global structure of inequality. Activists in Jamaica consider reparations as a global concern that requires the building of alliances and networks of knowledge circulation and practices. As a former chair of the “UN-Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent” (2009–2012), Verene Shepherd has actively mobilized to place reparations on the agenda of the UN “Decade for People of African Descent” and at the level of international organizations and state affairs. So we hope to become a global movement—we are also hoping that it is not only African descendants who will join the movement but also human rights activist of whatever ethnicity who see that it is about social justice. We hope also that other countries that have somewhat [benefitted] from colonialism will join. (Interview with Verene Shepherd on February 27, 2014 in Kingston) Shepherd has more concretely expressed a desire for a stronger cooperation with reparations approaches and activists not only from the Anglophone, but also from the French-, Dutch- and Spanish-speaking Caribbean in order to strengthen the weight of reparations claims for the whole region. It might be a difficult task to work on a common agenda, as the region is still extremely shaped by barriers in language, mobility, communication or citizenship as a result of the colonial divide and consecutive problems after the official end of colonialism. However, the reparations issue is bridging a common historical experience and struggle in the present that urges to take into account the persistent inequalities and power asymmetries within the region and beyond. Anthropologist Faye Harrison has precisely advised that there is “no need for comparative research on Caribbean issues that draw boundaries that include or exclude on the basis of shared language and common colonial masters rather than on the basis of factors that may actually be more significant for understanding the workings of cultural, economic, and political development” (Harrison 206). Relying on Harrison’s argument, the Caribbean reparations movement should be analyzed by taking into account transregional approaches that consider different

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regional, historical, cultural, and political perspectives within the Caribbean region itself as well as within its transatlantic interrelations, to reparations discourses and activists in Africa, Europe and the US. Reparations must therefore be approached as a global struggle, but one focused on concrete social micro-contexts and empirically accessible practices in which different individuals, groups, civil and state institutions and international organizations are involved. They have of course no unified and homogeneous agenda and might enact conflicting interests. That is why we should seriously deal with the agency of the activists as a focus of research, not only as providers of empirical data and information, but with regard to their impact for the production of other epistemologies and theories. This might finally contribute to overcoming the once supposed periphery status of the Caribbean in the social sciences, instead locating the region and its impact for critical knowledge production at the center of global and transregional entanglements and academic research on reparatory justice. Despite the growing support for the CARICOM reparations agenda by artists, intellectuals, scholars, national, and international organizations in many parts of the Atlantic world, European governments until now have systematically refused to enter into any dialogue on reparatory justice. The Caribbean reparations claims inevitably challenge Europe to reflect on its own history in relation to the history of its colonies. It offers a perspective of how injustices of the past can be restored in the present and how to think about historical-global entanglements of inequalities in a more inclusive way—in academia as well as in politics. A serious and straightforward consideration of the current Caribbean claims would certainly contribute to a stronger awareness of the still relevant consequences of slavery, not as a non-European experience, but as an intrinsic part of European history and responsibility, as a result of entangled histories, and as part of our shared present. In this sense, reparations claims finally urge for an overdue reexamination of colonialism and slavery within a framework of reparatory justice not only in the Caribbean but in Europe itself.

Notes 1 World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance. The final declaration is available at www.un.org/WCAR/durban.pdf. Accessed 22 July 2015. 2 This Spanish term for people of African descent has been adopted especially by national and transnational policies as a new political concept in order to replace racialized terminology. 3 Personal communication with Roberto Zurbano in March 2013 in Havana and January 2015 in Berlin. I thank Roberto Zurbano and Sandra Álvarez for sharing their reflections and insights of the specific context of activism of Afrodescendientes in Cuba. See also their contributions in this volume. 4 As the review process for this chapter ended in August 2016, current developments within the CARICOM Reparations Commission as well as within the Jamaican National Commission on Reparations could not be included here. 5 The term maroons (Spanish Cimarrones, cimarronaje) refers to the runaway slaves escaped from the plantations, mines and urban settings. They organized their survival in the mountains by resisting European colonial soldiers. In Jamaica, Surinam and

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other Caribbean nations today quite a lot of communities declare themselves to be descendants of maroons. For the extensive literature on marronage and many other practices of resistance in the Americas, see for instance Agorsah; Thompson; Zips, Black Rebels; Lao-Montes. The first Rastafari community was founded in the early1930s by Leonard Howell in Pinnacle, a rural village 20 miles away from Kingston. Using language, clothes, religion, arts, and craft as well as forms of education and production, Rastafari express their refusal of the ruling system (Babylon) and simultaneously revalue African practices (Chevannes; Zips, Rastafari). First World Conference on Reparations in Lagos (1990); Pan-African Conference on Reparations For African Enslavement, Colonisation And Neo-Colonisation in Abuja, Nigeria (1993); UN World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa (2001). For the programmatic debates, conflicts, and resolutions see the works of Mazrui as well as Howard-Hassmann and Lombardo. Comunidad de Estados Latinoamericanos y Caribeños (CELAC). Declaración especialsobre la cuestión de las reparaciones por la esclavitud y el genocidio de las poblaciones nativas, https://celac.cancilleria.gob.ec. Accessed 22 Oct. 2015; see also Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América (ALBA), www.portalalba.org. Accessed 22 Oct. 2015. The CARIOM reparations commission has contracted a British law firm specialized in human rights and international law. See www.leighday.co.uk/News/2014/March2014/CARICOM-nations-unanimously-approve-10-point-plan. Accessed 22 Oct. 2015. See www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/30/jamaica-should-move-on-from-painfullegacy-of-slavery-says-cameron. The international press echo has articulated some discomfort with Cameron’s position, see e.g. Mason; Bilefsky; “David Cameron rules out slavery reparation during Jamaica visit.” I am deeply grateful to Verene Shepherd, Rupert Lewis, Ras Miguel Lorne and other activists on reparations who have offered their time for an interview, have shared their insights with me and have substantially inspired my reflection on the topic. I further thank Birte Timm for facilitating some contacts at the University of the West Indies, Mona, in Kingston.

Works cited Agorsah, Emmanuel K. Maroon Heritage: Archaeological, Ethnographic, and Historical Perspectives. Canoe P, 1994. Beckles, Hilary M. Britain’s Black Debt: Reparations for Caribbean Slavery and Native Genocide. U of the West Indies P, 2013. Bilefsky, Dan. “David Cameron Grapples with Issues of Slavery Reparations in Jamaica.” New York Times, September 30, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/10/01/world/americas/ david-cameron-grapples-with-issue-of-slavery-reparations-in-jamaica.html?_r=0. Accessed October 18, 2016. Boatca˘, Manuela. “Two-Way Street: Moderne(n), Verwobenheit und Kolonialität.” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie, vol. 38, no. 4, 2013, pp. 375–94. doi:10.1007/s 11614-013-0108-0. Bogues, Anthony. “Black Power, Decolonization, and Caribbean Politics: Walter Rodney and the Politics of The Groundings with My Brothers.” boundary, vol. 2, no. 36, 2009, pp. 127–47. CARICOM Press Release 188/2014. “Chairman of CARICOM Reparations Commission addresses British House of Commons.” CARICOM Caribbean Community, July 29, 2014, caricom.org/media-center/communications/press-releases/chairman-of-caricomreparations-commission-addresses-british-house-of-commo. Accessed October 18, 2016.

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CARICOM Press Release 53/2014. “CARICOM Leaders accept Caribbean Reparatory Justice Programme as basis for further action on reparations.” CARICOM Caribbean Community, March 18? 2014, caricom.org/communications/view/caricom-leaders-acceptcaribbean-reparatory-justice-programme-as-basis-for-further-action-on-reparations. Accessed October 18, 2016. CARICOM Press Release 285/2013. “CARICOM REPARATIONS COMMISSION PRESS STATEMENT Delivered by Professor Sir Hilary Beckles (Chairman).” CARICOM Caribbean Community, December 10, 2013, caricom.org/communications/view/caricomreparations-commission-press-statement-delivered-by-professor-sir-hilary-beckles-chair man-on-behalf-of-the-caricom-reparations-commission-press-conference-regionalheadquarters-uwi-10th-december-2013. Accessed October 18, 2016. Chevannes, Barry. Rastafari: Roots and Ideology (Utopianism and Communitarianism). Syracuse UP, 1994. Conrad, Sebastian, and Shalini Randeria. “Einleitung.” Jenseits des Eurozentrismus: postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften, edited by Sebastian Conrad and Shalini Randeria, Campus-Verlag, 2002, pp. 9–49. ——. “Einleitung: Geteilte Geschichten - Europa in einer postkolonialen Welt.” Jenseits des Eurozentrismus: postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften, edited by Sebastian Conrad and Shalini Randeria. Campus-Verlag, 2013, pp. 32–70. Coronil, Fernando. “Latin American Postcolonial Studies and Global Decolonization.” The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, edited by Neil Lazarus. Cambridge UP, 2004, pp. 221–40. “David Cameron Rules Out Slavery Reparation during Jamaica Visit.” BBC, September 30, 2015. www.bbc.com/news/uk-34401412. Accessed October 18, 2016. Dussel, Enrique. Transmodernity and Interculturality: An Interpretation from the Perspective of Philosophy of Liberation. eScholarship, U of California, 2012. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. Grove Press, 2004. Frigerio, Alejandro. “Re-Africanization in Secondary Religious Diasporas: Constructing a World Religion.” Ateliers, 2004. Gifford, Anthony. “Formulating the Case for Reparations.” Colonialism, Slavery, Reparations and Trade: Remedying the Past?, edited by Fernne Brennan and John Packer. Routledge, 2012, pp. 77–96. Grosfoguel, Ramón, Margarita Cervantes-Rodriguez, and Eric Mielants. “Introduction.” Caribbean Migration to Western Europe and the United States: Essays on Incorporation, Identity, and Citizenship, edited by Ana M. Cervantes-Rodríguez, Ramón Grosfoguel, and Eric Mielants. Temple UP, 2009, pp. 1–17. Harrison, Faye V. Outsider Within: Reworking Anthropology in the Global Age. U of Illinois P, Combined Academic, 2008. Howard-Hassmann, Rhoda E., and Antonino Lombardo. Reparations to Africa. U of Pennsylvania P, 2008. Lao-Montes, Agustín. “Cartografías del Campo Político Afrodescendiente en América Latina.” El Nuevo África en América, edited by Casa de las Américas. Editorial Casa de las Américas, 2011, pp. 16–38. Lewis, Rupert. “Jamaican Black Power in the 1960s.” Black Power in the Caribbean, edited by Kate Quinn. UP of Florida, 2014, pp. 53–75. Martin, Michael T. and Marylin Yaquinto, editors. Redress for Historical Injustices in the United States: On Reparations for Slavery, Jim Crow, and Their Legacies. Duke UP, 2007.

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Mason, Rowena. “Jamaica Calls for Britain to Pay Billions of Pounds in Reparations for Slavery.” The Guardian, September 29, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/ sep/29/jamaica-calls-britain-pay-billions-pounds-reparations-slavery. Accessed October 18, 2016. Mazrui, Ali A. Black Reparations in the Era of Globalization. Institute of Global Studies, 2002. Mignolo, Walter. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking. Princeton UP, 2000. ——. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Duke UP, 2011. Mintz, Sidney. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. Viking, 1985. Mosquera Rosero-Labbé, Claudia, and Luiz C. Barcelos, editors. Afro-reparaciones: Memorias de la Esclavitud y Justicia Reparativa para Negros, Afrocolombianos y Raizales. U Nacional de Colombia, Fac. de Ciencias Humanas, Dep. de Trabajo Social Centro de Estudios Sociales, 2007. Munford, Clarence J. Race and Reparations: A Black Perspective for the 21st Century. Africa World Press, 1996. Palmié, Stephan. Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition. Duke UP, 2002. ——. “Introduction: On Predications of Africanity.” Africas of the Americas: Beyond the Search for Origins in the Study of Afro-Atlantic Religions, edited by Stephan Palmié. Brill, 2008, pp. 1–37. Quijano, Aníbal. “Colonialidad y Modernidad/Racionalidad.” Perú Indígena, vol. 13, no. 29, 1992, pp. 11–20. Quinn, Kate. “Black Power in Caribbean Context.” Black Power in the Caribbean, edited by Kate Quinn. UP of Florida, 2014, pp. 25–51. Rauhut, Claudia. “A Transatlantic Restoration of Religion: On the Re-construction of Yoruba and Lúkúmí in Cuban Santería.” Transatlantic Caribbean: Dialogues of People, Practices, Ideas, edited by Ingrid Kummels, et al. Transcript-Verlag, 2014, pp. 181–200. Robinson, Randall. The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks. Plume P, 2001. Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Bogle-L’Ouverture, 1972. Sala-Molins, Louis. Esclavage Réparation: Les Lumières des Capucins et les Lueurs des Pharisiens. Lignes, 2014. Scott, David. “Preface: Debt, Redress.” Small Axe, vol. 18, no. 1, 2014, pp. vii–x. Shepherd, Verene A. “Jamaica and the Debate over Reparation for Slavery: An Overview.” Jamaica Journal, vol. 31, no. 1–2, 2008, pp. 24–30. ——., et al. Jamaica and the Debate over Reparation for Slavery: A Discussion Paper Prepared by the Jamaica National Bicentenary Committee. Pelican, 2012. Thompson, Alvin O. Flight to Freedom: African Runaways and Maroons in the Americas. U of West Indies P, 2006. Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. U of North Carolina P, 1944. Wittmann, Nora. Slavery Reparations: Time is Now: Exposing Lies, Claiming Justice for Global Survival. Power of the TrInIty Publishers, 2013. Zips, Werner. Black Rebels: African Caribbean Freedom Fighters in Jamaica. Ian Randle Publishers, 1999. ——, editor. Rastafari: A Universal Philosophy in the Third Millenium. Randle, 2006.

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Debated existences, claimed histories Black Indigenous women’s diasporic lives in Costa Rica Christina Schramm

Introduction Well, the Black race with the Indigenous [they] have been like even. There is no, no racism between them, because the Indian and the Black are suffering, we are mistreated, we have been despised, we have been so many things. So, there is a union. There is not this, this contempt. Therefore you can see many Black races, children here with color, . . . because there is a unity between the Black and the Indian. . . . If they did not like each other as a couple, still they got along, understood each other. (Dionisia, personal interview) Dionisia’s characterization of the close ties between Blacks and Indigenous people in Talamanca Bribri, an Indigenous territory in Costa Rica, draws attention to a common reality in the Central American Caribbean. However, their intersections remain little studied. This chapter discusses this issue by analyzing the interracial subjectivity of Dionisia and three other Black Indigenous women in Costa Rica, whom I interviewed for my dissertation in Society and Culture Studies at the University of Costa Rica.1 These interviews are part of a larger set of narrative interviews with fourteen Afro-Costa Rican and Indigenous Bribri women.2 In Costa Rica, a Catholic country by constitution with a national imaginary built upon modern conceptions of Whiteness and ‘Europeanness,’ Indigenous peoples have long been associated with the colonial past, while a discursive separation between (the supposed insignificance of) people of African descent in colonial Costa Rica and the labor immigration of Afro-Caribbean people to the Caribbean province of Limón in the late 19th and early 20th centuries has strengthened the imaginary of Afro-descendants living in Limón.3 One effect of this “racialization of the space” (Hooker 325)4 is that the interviewed women are among the most subalternized members of the society,5 often seen by others as strangers. How do Black Indigenous women deal with these “effects of violence” and processes of othering (Steyerl and Gutiérrez Rodríguez 10)? How are their racialized subjectivities shaped by their own and others’ perceptions of their family, community, national or diasporic belonging? And why do mutual bonds between Blacks and Indigenous peoples in the region remain so little studied?

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Scholars around the world have demonstrated that theories and methodologies are widely based on Western systems of classification and representation. “[T]heories about research are underpinned . . . by views about human nature, human morality and virtue, by conceptions of space and time, by conceptions of gender and race” (Smith 44). In consequence, Western knowledge production has extensively silenced any connections between Blacks and Indigenous people and their common histories. In the Americas, “white supremacist constructions of history have effectively erased from public collective cultural memory the recognition of solidarity and communion among Native Americans, Africans, and African Americans” (hooks 181–82). Across the continent, “documents and information affirming the depth of these ties” have been suppressed or history has been rewritten “from the colonizing standpoint” (182). In 17th-century colonial Central America, the Audience of Guatemala prohibited and punished commercial trade, kinship and solidarity between people of African descent and Indigenous people (Cáceres 89–90).6 Similarly, in late 17th-century colonial Oaxaca, as part of what is now Mexico, “vice-royal charters established that slaves and freedmen were personae non gratae in Indian communities” (Córdova Aguilar 139), and people of African descent were expelled by Indigenous communities “for being considered a ‘bad example’ and ‘persons of bad customs’” (140).7 However, “in practice many of them frequently had relationships with Indians” (139). Hence, social ties between people of African descent and Indigenous peoples are “a topic yet to be studied” (139). Against this background of violent erasure of knowledge, or “epistemicide” (Santos 12), cross-cultural and ethno-psychoanalytical approaches may offer strategies to deconstruct modern understandings of science, scientific standards and procedures. Mario Erdheim and Maya Nadig (190) suggest a triangulation between academia, the researched and the researcher in order to decipher power relations, ethical dilemmas and structures of violence in which research is embedded. This triangulation is not limited to “the subjectivity of both parties involved in research” (Hauser 48), but needs to be seen in a broader context of international knowledge production. For example, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui problematizes tensions between Northern (US) academia, Latin American universities and Indigenous and Afro-descendent intellectuals by characterizing their relations as “triangles without a base” (60).8 Expanding on this critique with Raka Shome, the “larger systemic issues of geo-politics and global capital” as intrinsically interwoven with international academia (713) also become relevant. We thus need to “rethink ‘decolonization’ ” beyond its relation to Eurocentric power structures (715) and ask critically how far we, as researchers, leave our comfort zones. “[H]ow do we cross borders and barriers in a downward movement even within the same nation/region?” (715, emphasis in original). Do we address dilemmas of translation (711)? What amount of time do we have to cross downward borders and barriers? And what does it mean to research Afro-descendent and Indigenous women’s lives, considering one’s own positionality not only as a White researcher, but also as a queer migrant, as has been my case?9

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Black Indigeneity as an art of survival Emily, 52 years of age, is the daughter of a Costa Rican Indigenous Boruca mother and an Afro-Colombian father. Growing up with her father in the southern rural region of the Province of Puntarenas, on the Pacific side of Costa Rica, for many years domestic work and farming were more important for her to satisfy her economic needs than to think about her “mixture of Black and Indian.”10 Only as an adult, when moving to her Indigenous husband’s community in one of the Indigenous territories in the province of Puntarenas, did she become aware of herself as a Black Indigenous woman. One reason was a community meeting: A woman told me, “but you have neither voice, nor vote here. How will there be permission given to a Black woman on [the] Reservation?”, and I don’t know what. I tell her, “but you are wrong. I am Black, but I am Boruca.” . . . Then with my paper I showed her that I am Black, but I am Boruca. (Emily) Her neighbors asked her to verify her Indigeneity and excluded her from female community labor. This continued until Emily opened a small restaurant that became a site of material and symbolic security. Her economic and emotional independence increased and she distanced herself from the discriminating attitude against her because of her dark skin color.11 Now she recognizes herself as “a mixture of cultures” in which “the Black blood is stronger than the Indigenous one” (Emily).12 Because she is Black and cooks well, Emily copes with one of the strongest stereotypes associated with Black women in Costa Rica: to be from the province of Limón. Many of her customers assume this: “[T]hey ask you, ‘what a delicious meal, but are you from Limón?’ ((laughing)) And ‘nothing to do with Limón,’ I say. I don’t know Limón” (Emily). The question concerning Emily’s origins is based on asymmetric power relations between those who ask and those who are expected to answer. Emily challenges these relations by resisting the imposition inherent in this question. At the beginning of our interview and without having been asked, Emily introduces herself with the following words: Sometimes people ask me, “And you, where are you from? And which origin do you have?” And I always might be a little rough and say, “I am Black, Indian and when I get angry, I come out of the devil.” (Emily) Emily stops annoying questions about her origins. Her metaphorical reference reminds me of Frantz Fanon’s discussion of the dehumanization of Black people through racism and their internalization of these racist stereotypes. In Black Skin, White Masks (1986 [1952]) Fanon focuses on the psychological effects of racism inherent in and perpetuated by Western imaginaries that associate Blacks with the savage, the devil or the bad. This violent negation of Blacks as human beings and

154 Christina Schramm their supposed lack of culture and civilization facilitate the internalization of racism: in a social context dominated by White supremacy, many Blacks face the dilemma to “turn white or disappear” (75, emphasis in original). Blacks who might wish to be seen as Whites, bodily and symbolically, in order to leave behind racist stigmas, assume that the recognition of their existence as humans by Whites depends on a process of Whitening their bodies, minds and selves (73). However, to overcome the “inferiority complex” as colonized and racialized people (9), Blacks, according to Fanon, should become conscious of their own existence and possibility of agency (75). Fanon’s thought is echoed by Afro-Costa Rican poet and scholar of Black studies, Eulalia Bernard, who begins her poem “Dehumanization” (103–4) with the following words: Slavery what have you done to me? Art-ti-culate me back into being EXISTENCE Can we speak? not as slaves, slaves speech is non existent, slaves do not exist, non existent, not humans. Only humans speak.13 Bernard claims the right for Black people to speak as humans.14 Existence may mean to break with the epistemic violence, to recover one’s own agency as human being, to be able to speak and be listened to as such.15 As I understand Bernard, she brings to the fore the intersubjective relation between the colonized and the colonizers, Blacks and Whites, and, hence, their mutual responsibility to dismantle racist legacies. However, “[i]f,” as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argues, “in the contest of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, [and hence] the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow” (274), Bernard’s insistence on being articulated “back / into being / EXISTENCE” (103) can be understood also as recovery of her/the Black female voice. This positive and intersubjective self-awareness of one’s own existence as a Black human, calls my attention in relation to Emily’s reaction to the question of where she comes from. By stressing her existence as a free-speaking subject, Emily rejects being associated with a subalternized otherness; rather, by rhetorically subverting racist imaginaries, she turns the asymmetrical power structures to her favor. She contests the racist expectation to prove to be a ‘good Black,’16 distancing herself also from constructions of femininity associated with submission or passivity.

Debated existences, claimed histories 155 Emily claims agency by emphasizing her Blackness over her Indigeneity. This becomes more evident when she positions herself as a woman: The mixture of Black and Indian doesn’t bother me, because I am a very resistant woman. . . . I was [one] of those women who [worked] all day long. . . . I know what it is to turn over a pig and kill it. So, many, many things that . . . an Indigenous woman doesn’t do. Because of being Black, I am a person with that culture, of that level, therefore nothing holds me back. (Emily) Emily’s strength is primarily linked to herself as a physically hard-working Black woman who knows how to survive. As I understand her, she does not only reaffirm herself as a feminine subject, but as a subject who is part of the African diaspora in Central America with cultures and histories of resistance against dehumanization. Yet, the question remains how far she has developed a sense of belonging to the Greater Caribbean as an area that geographically and symbolically extends to the Pacific side of Costa Rica, Central America and beyond.17 At the same time, Emily construes her Blackness in contrast to her Indigeneity and to her female neighbors. In this gendered and racialized context, I wonder how far Emily really overcomes racist oppression. As hooks observes in Ain’t I a Woman?, in White feminist contexts Black women are often perceived as strong when “coping with oppression,” but “to be strong in the face of oppression is not the same as overcoming oppression . . . endurance is not to be confused with transformation” (6). How far might this stereotype be echoed or contested by women like Emily? The next quotation might give some answers: As [a] woman, it is a huge difference; because the Indigenous woman starts crying for no reason and does not feel like defending herself. . . . It hurts me a lot to see other [Indigenous] families, where mom cannot speak, because the son silences her; because mom n e v e r had either [the] strength or [the] voice to say anything. . . . I am proud to be Black and to be [a] woman, because it lets you [be] respect[ed]. (Emily) By labeling her female Indigenous neighbors as voiceless, she seems to transfer her experience of once having been silenced by them; now it is not her anymore who is without voice, but other Indigenous women. That is, despite her individual resistance against racism and her empowerment as an Indigenous Black woman in an Indigenous community, the question remains as to how far Emily has not yet overcome the painful experience of having been silenced because of how others disvalued her Black Indigeneity. The mute echo of Emily’s pain and vulnerability might still be heard when listening to her referring to other Indigenous families’ domestic violence. By considering her Indigenous neighbors as weak and voiceless, Emily’s perspective might be interpreted in the way in which she once again refers to the hard struggles she went through to obtain recognition of

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her Indigenous descent. In this sense, Emily not only counters her individual silencing, but also voices interracial tensions that in Costa Rican society and academia does not seem to get acknowledged at all.

Tensions between self-perception and the perception of others Whereas Emily foregrounds her Blackness, Dionisia does so with her Indigeneity.18 Dionisia is a 59-year-old Bribri woman living in the Indigenous territory of Talamanca Bribri, on the Caribbean side of Costa Rica, close to Panama. Her mother was a Costa Rican Bribri of Afro-Nicaraguan descent and her father was a Black Panamanian Bribri. Dionisia was born in Panama; however, her maternal grandparents wanted her in Costa Rica: They didn’t want me Panamanian. . . . [T]hey said, “well, if the girl is tica,19 then the girl returns to her territory.” . . . [T]here was no school and there were mountains, . . . that’s why they brought me here. (Dionisia) This rupture became more intense as she was also rejected by her sisters during her childhood: Well, I consider myself Indigenous. But because I am the darkest of the group, my sisters . . . say that I am Black. And this hurts me a lot. . . . Because I felt that I am not Black. (Dionisia) This gap between her perception of herself and the one her sisters had of her is also a result of how her parents referred to her. Her mother saw Dionisia as Bribri, while her father referred to her as Black. In-between these two poles lies a history of much pain: Dionisia’s pain as a child, when she felt rejected by her sisters who questioned whether she was their biological sister. There is also the pain of Dionisia’s father, who at a young age became an orphan and later referred to Dionisia as Black, because her skin color reminded him of his own mother. Dionisia talked to her father, who revealed to her these legacies of her Blackness. Interestingly, the knowledge of having the same skin color created a close transgenerational relationship to her dead grandmother, blurring the fact that she never knew her personally. Instead, it gave Dionisia the chance to reinterpret and accept her Blackness and to establish supportive friendships with other Black people. One example is the way she remembers her friendship with a Black Bribri girl at primary school who was mobbed by classmates. [F]or the other Indigenous children it was something strange to have a Black girl in the group . . . So, even the very same teachers had [something] to do with [that], because she was sooo Black. So, teachers said, “where did she appear from?”20 . . . That was something, something like a mystery that

Debated existences, claimed histories 157 happened in these zones of Talamanca. ((Laughing)) . . . [S]o, therefore with the Black community I have much . . . (Dionisia) In those days, non-Indigenous White teachers, who came from other parts of the country, were apparently not accustomed to Black Indigenous offspring in Talamanca. Almost unable to communicate with Bribri parents and children, if not in Spanish, they counted on bilingual pupils like Dionisia, who mediated—in this case—between Bribri, Black and non-Indigenous people. For Dionisia, her close friendship with the other girl is also an act of solidarity in a context of racial discrimination. This growing awareness of contacts between Black people was later reinforced by others. “Therefore,” she concludes, “I amongst Blacks, I have . . . something very strong.” I don’t know why, I don’t understand it, . . . but I get to a Black man’s home, to a Black woman’s home, well, without asking for coffee, they give me coffee, . . . It is something that I feel that they appreciate me a lot. I don’t know if it is because of the color. I don’t know if it is that my blood/ eh/ attracts this, I don’t know, but Blacks have a lot of friendship with me, and Black women. (Dionisia) Dionisia experiences her Blackness in an affective sense, something that she feels and that brings her emotionally close to other people of African descent. In a more cognitive sense, mestizaje between Blacks and Indigenous people stays partly inexplicable to Dionisia, as her wondering expresses. This ambivalence is striking in view of her general knowledge about Black Indigenous ties in Talamanca and her deeply rooted sense of being a Ditsö, with a mother tongue that addresses another Black person as one’s own brother or sister.21

The Afro-Caribbean and Indigenous diaspora in “only one root” In contrast to Emily or Dionisia, 40-year-old Bëkwö equally appreciates her Black and Native Bribri roots: “I shall not say that, that because I am Black, I incline myself only to . . . ‘No, I am Black; no, I am Bribri.’” For Bëkwö, who lives in the same Indigenous territory as Dionisia, “the two mixtures” are “only one root” and part of humanity. Bëkwö benefits from the fact that her family told her about the diverse migration processes of her ancestors, who moved within the Indigenous territory, as well as from Jamaica and the Nicaraguan Miskito coast to Limón, Costa Rica. As a Black Native she became aware early of the possibility of bearing a Black child. From her mother she further learned for the sake of a peaceful conviviality not to differentiate between people ethnically or racially. By reading Bëkwö’s positioning as Black Native against the background of (critical) Western knowledge production, one conclusion might be that she resists the violence of Western identity politics to favor hierarchically one category over

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others. She rejects the colonial/modern/capitalist logic in the politics of mestizaje of keeping Blacks and Indigenous peoples (or other subalternized social groups) apart from each other. Without discrediting this interpretation, I suggest discussing Bëkwö’s subject position also in the context of matrilineal Bribri cosmology, according to which knowledge is transmitted from mothers to daughters, from grandmothers to granddaughters. Bëkwö respects this transgenerational, matrilineal transmission of conceptions of humanness and human co-existence. Through a unifying, though not homogenizing perception of humans, Bëkwö expresses a notion of the human that in Bribri thought is associated with keeping different types of polarities in balance. Daniel Rojas Conejo explains that “the role of the purely human is related to the search and comprehension of the dis-equilibriums in order to try to balance them and find equilibrium again” (143). The human being is conceived from an integral vision, departing from “a balanced relationship with the surrounding world” (140)—a world that is conceptualized through “the organizing principle of cultural mixture, or of the relation of complementarities between opposing poles,” rather than through “the principle of exclusion or of radical antagonism” (128). Within this logic, Bëkwö’s statement evidences some principles of Bribri science, according to which human beings are clan-like, communal and relational beings, rather than autonomous or individualists. Besides, peaceful co-existence based on respect and reciprocity is extended to the nonhuman, too. Bëkwö knows that she has Black and Indigenous ancestors from Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Jamaica. She has not been discriminated against by community members because of her dark skin.22 However, when traveling to San José, she is frequently confronted with racial stereotypes by non-Indigenous Costa Ricans: Then they ask me, “Are you from Nicaragua?” . . . And others indeed, they say . . . “Look, there goes a chola.” But [for] the majority, some of them tell me, “no, this is a Guanacastecan.”23 So, there are various definitions that [people] come up with for you. (Bëkwö) Bëkwö takes advantage of the encounters to explain her origins in her own words: And I tell [them]: “No, but indeed, I have the blood of the people of [Bluefields], because my grandfather was from [Bluefields], from Nicaragua, on my father’s side.” And . . . on my mother’s [side] I define the other [part], that my grandma is [a] descendent of Jamaicans; and my grandfather a legitimate Indigenous man. (Bëkwö) Bëkwö is comfortable with being asked about her origins. She wants others to know “that one proudly feels that [one] is Indigenous” (Bëkwö). Through short talks she strengthens more horizontal relationships and makes herself visible beyond a hegemonic construction of a national imaginary long associated with

Debated existences, claimed histories 159 White supremacy and Europeanness. Her relaxed attitude reminds us of Bernard’s words that “[o]nly humans speak” (103). Bëkwö’s appropriation of the urban space, a day’s travel away from her home, breaks also with the common prejudice by Costa Ricans who consider themselves as White that contemporary Indigenous women’s lives are limited to the domestic sphere of an Indigenous community, supposedly out of sight in the countryside, in one of the Indigenous territories.

Always on the move Additionally, I briefly refer to Doris’s testimony. I met Doris in the Indigenous territory of Talamanca Bribri, where she works as an English teacher during the week. I wanted to learn more about her experiences as a Black Limonese with Indigenous roots, so we agreed to an interview in the town of Limón, where she lives with her family. During our conversation Doris emphasized her Indigenous and Black origins. In her childhood, she remembered, she often visited her relatives in the Indigenous territory of Talamanca, learned about her Indigenous roots and thus never denied “being from there.” As an adult, however, she needed to prove her Indigeneity, because norms changed in the state educational system. Doris agrees with this rule, which states that teachers in Indigenous territories have to be Indigenous, but complains that her origins were investigated without her consent by “some women” in charge (Doris). The background is that in Bribri culture Indigeneity is transmitted from mother to daughter. Doris’s father is a Black Bribri (of Jamaican-European descent from his paternal side and of Bribri descent from his maternal side), while her mother is Afro-Limonese. Also, because Doris’s mother has Black Native ancestors from the United States, what became relevant in her case were the maternal Bribri roots of Doris’s father. But as Doris had no written proof of her paternal Indigenous roots either, only after exhausting paperwork she became recognized as Bribri. The fact that she spent her childhood with her paternal grandmother—and “against the urgency of having English at school”—was finally decisive for giving her “the clan of my grandmother, of my great-grandmother” (Doris). Doris’s Blackness has also been questioned by other Blacks in Limón. In her childhood, she moved with her family to the town of Limón, something she felt was “a culture shock.” Because she came from the southern rural part of the province of Limón, her family was labeled as Indigenous and other Black pupils discriminated against her and her sisters for being “Indians.” She knew that “we have always been Black,” but she and her sisters were discriminated against for the way they dressed and for having “a color like this, non-identifiable . . . neither Black nor White.” “[P]eople saw us, I mean, they said like, ‘What are these?’ So, they always told us that we were ‘Black pañas’ . . . That we were some White Blacks” (Doris).24 Retrospectively, Doris knows that the discrimination was actually a question of religious affinity, as her family did not share the religion that Black families in the town of Limón commonly practiced.

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These biographical insights give an idea of how Doris’s Black Indigeneity/ Indigenous Blackness is shaped by multiple discriminations and belongings in the Greater Caribbean. What captures my attention is Doris’s mobility across the province of Limón. On week-ends she is regularly on the move, when she travels for several hours back and forth along the Caribbean coast, between the rural Indigenous territory and the town of Limón. This constant movement might be Doris’s strategy to resist monolithic ascriptions and binaries. She distances from hegemonic identity politics, whether they are articulated by Blacks, Indigenous or Whites, as it allows her to avoid being fixed to only one geographical and cultural space. Her switching between Creole or Limón English, Standard English, Spanish and some Bribri expresses the same. In this sense, Doris’s spatial, cultural and linguistic mobility can be interpreted as a way of negotiating among Black and Indigenous people, while at the same time benefiting from their multiple bonds in Limón. According to this reading, her diasporic positioning in Limón as part of the Greater Caribbean and the African diaspora might be associated with a cultural expression of resilience rather than of resistance.

Conclusion The analysis of the interracial subjectivities of Emily, Dionisia, Bëkwö and Doris has revealed how they relate to the multiple discriminations they experience as Black Indigenous women in Costa Rica, whether as an art of survival, a permanent tension between self-perception and processes of othering, as “only one root” or a constant movement within its diversity. The four women resist daily processes of othering, dehumanization and epistemicide simply by living their lives. Their quotidian resistance is not reducible to a simplistic notion of subjectivity as ‘inhabiting the opposite side.’ Rather, the analysis delves into the women’s agency in dealing with assigned sites of constructed otherness, considering the interplay of the following factors. Language influences the production of subjectivity and meaning: The women problematized tensions between the speaking subject and the subject being spoken about. They exemplified how this gap is visually expressed when there is “a radical difference between how individuals see themselves and how others define them” (Weedon 14). Race is also constructed through others in an interplay of self-perception and the perception of others—through intersubjective, though often hierarchical and violent relationships. Different shades of skin color and cultural backgrounds to them are relevant markers when construing and referring to racial difference. At the same time, metaphorical language and Native norms of conviviality or kinship (such as notions of brother- and sisterhood beyond biological and clan-like filiations) resemanticize racist/sexist discourses of pigmentocracy, mestizaje and dehumanization, challenging academic knowledge production and its use of language. Subjectivities are related to a “racialization of . . . space” (Hooker 325). Some regions of the country appear “as the only ones” where “the ‘other’ racial[lized people] live,” while other regions stay racially undifferentiated (326). Emily copes

Debated existences, claimed histories 161 with the image of being from Limón (on the Caribbean side of Costa Rica) rather than from the Pacific; Bëkwö is supposed to be Nicaraguan or from Guanacaste (the northern Pacific side), and not from the Indigenous territory of Talamanca Bribri in southern Limón. Their geographic homes are irrelevant to others, as is their Indigeneity. Doris, on the other hand, was questioned concerning her Indigeneity by other Indigenous people and concerning her Blackness by other Blacks. This spatial distribution of race is furthermore sexed and gendered. The question of origin represents a problematic power asymmetry. It is “a mechanism of racism, that warns”—in this case Black Indigenous women—“that they ‘should know where their place is’ ” (Ferreira 150).25 They are not supposed to position themselves at the center of Costa Rican society. Neither the stories of migration, nor the ties of blood and friendships between Black and Indigenous peoples in the Greater Caribbean are seen as part of their subjectivities. All four women resist these restrictions. Emily distances herself from questions about her origins by becoming tough and supposedly invulnerable. Bëkwö does not care about the underlying asymmetry; she rather sees an opportunity to explain her multiethnic roots to others in a friendly way. Similar to Bëkwö, Dionisia and Doris are interested in horizontal, reciprocal relations between Indigenous and nonIndigenous people. Dionisia intervenes in asymmetrical power relations by translating between Black and Indigenous persons, although she stays somehow ambivalent concerning her own personal history. Doris, instead, evades restrictive politics of representation, by moving constantly between places, cultures and languages. Finally, the discussion of their material existence against the background of their discursively produced inexistence led to the question of resistance through resilience. The interviewed women’s need to prove their Indigeneity accelerates the process of perceiving themselves as others. As hooks argues in “Revolutionary ‘Renegades’,” this “burden of proof weighs heavily on the hearts of those who do not have written documentation, who rely on oral testimony passed from generation to generation” (193). For Black Indigenous people and Indigenous Blacks “to be without documentation is to be without a legitimate history” (193). This is not only valid in the context of White society, but also in Indigenous territories. As non-Indigenous people are not allowed to live in Indigenous territories,26 Emily, Doris and others are asked to prove their Indigeneity in order to legitimize their residency in an Indigenous territory. But what if there is no written document that confirms one’s own Indigenous roots?27 Here, Emily’s and Doris’s testimonies do not only point to the necessity of further research, but also to unresolved dilemmas in related politics in both state institutions and Indigenous territories. Constructions of national belonging interfere with social imaginaries and politics of mestizaje (see also Hooker). All four women are Costa Ricans, but their access to citizenship varies. Nevertheless, despite coping with a “legal ambiguity that prevails at the margins [of the State]” (Hernández, Sieder and Sierra 15), Emily, Dionisia, Bëkwö and Doris also subvert this imposed marginality. Similar to many other Black Indigenous women’s diasporic lives around the world, their subjectivities are situated beyond national borders and “transcend . . . the binary

162 Christina Schramm of citizen and foreigner” (El-Tayeb xxxiv).28 In this context, the women’s personal struggles to overcome multiple forms of discrimination should be recognized not as individual concerns, but as macro-social and political ones. Their struggles might be interpreted as expressions of resistance against hegemonic politics of mestizaje as “the locus of power upon which is built the matrix of power relations of stratification systems of race, gender, class and sexuality from the colonial era until nowadays” (Mendoza 230). The “defining function of mestizaje as an interracial and heterosexual relation” is relevant in this context, for mestizaje does not only silence homosexual relations, but also any interracial relations that transgress the politics of mestizaje (231). Its institutionalization is not limited to Costa Rica, but has produced “deeply divided societies” all over the continent (Schramm “Queering Latin American Coloniality” 357). Furthermore, knowing the family’s migratory history helps to renegotiate power relations. The biographies of Emily, Dionisia, Bëkwö and Doris reveal the migration histories of Indigenous Miskitos, Bribris or Borucas and of Black ancestors from Jamaica, Colombia, Panama, Nicaragua or the United States of America—routes that configure the Greater Caribbean as a region of back-andforth movements, of forced migration and imagined returns, of losses and separations. They refer to a diasporic Black community with a shared consciousness of being human in a region with shared Afro-Indigenous pasts and presents that includes Costa Rica’s Pacific coast. Last but not least, this article argues for a transformative understanding of research in which subalternized people are equally important contributors, both on the empirical and theoretical level, and their histories and social imaginaries considered as intellectual resources for solving current problems of the 21st century. Indigenous peoples and people of African descent have pushed critical debates through joint struggles for justice and human rights nationally and internationally. One outcome is the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action (DDPA) from 2001 and—in response to it—the National Policy and Program of Action for a Society Free of Racism, Racial Discrimination and Xenophobia, introduced by Costa Rica in 2014 (DGME). In 2015, Costa Rica modified its constitution to declare itself a multiethnic and pluricultural country.29 Beside these political changes, there are also epistemological challenges that I have problematized in this chapter. In synthesis, and similar to Boaventura de Sousa Santos, I have interwoven different forms of scientific and non-scientific knowledge in its internal and interdependent plurality (Santos 186), related knowledge production with processes of forgetting, repressing and unlearning (185), and acknowledged that any research remains incomplete, is intersubjective (188) and should be (self-)critically questioned (196). Knowledge production as engaged to counter-hegemonic knowledge production alters the modern/colonial order upon which Western societies are built. This decolonizing perspective implies that research or representations should not be limited to what already exists or is rationally explainable, but should focus as well on the (seemingly) non-existent, the mythical (193) and the supposedly unthinkable (182). This further implies a re-imagination of the African diaspora in Central America and

Debated existences, claimed histories 163 a re-conceptualization of disciplines such as Anglophone Caribbean Studies, African Diaspora Studies, Indigenous Studies, Hispanic Central American Studies and Latin American History. One of the questions this article has addressed is why the bonds between Blacks and Indigenous peoples remain so little studied. As I have argued, it is not a coincidence that constructions of Blackness and Indigeneity are studied separately. Indigenous and Black people may be part of this separation, but first and foremost it is an effect of the ways international academia has been shaped by the colonial system of stratification between people of African descent, Indigenous people and others until today. For centuries, writing has had the function to silence the oral histories of Afrodescendants and Indigenous peoples, especially with regard to their mutual ties. Academia thus has a responsibility in producing, sustaining or questioning politics of mestizaje and its relation to the African diaspora. As Lowell Gudmundson and Justin Wolfe argue, since colonization the African diaspora in Central America has been politically and intellectually reduced to a supposed absence. However, it is a fundamental—if not foundational—part of the nation building in the region, with its constructions of national identities and prioritization of contributions by Spaniards and Indigenous peoples (Gudmundson and Wolfe 2). Hence we have to overcome the divide of “two analytical domains, worlds separated in time and place,” in which related research has been trapped: “the colonial past and the coastal Caribbean enclave” (12). The point is that “the analysis of class and mestizaje has been the distinction and limitation of Latin American social history and this has made particularly difficult a discussion between the Anglophone research on the diaspora and the one based in Latin America” (13). For a successful dialogue, Gudmundson and Wolfe suggest that in Anglophone research we therefore need to strengthen the focus on the “ambivalent and very diverse nature of Black identities and experiences in Latin America” (13). Meanwhile, “[t]he specialists who work on the African Diaspora in Central America and most of Latin America . . . need to commit in a wider and more reflexive way to the transnational—and maybe more important, trans-local—flow of people, ideas and resources” (13). The analysis of the four Costa Rican Black Indigenous women’s interracial subjectivities subscribes to this twofold task of research on the African Diaspora in Central and Latin America. The article problematizes different shades of experiences, as well as multiple transnational and trans-local flows. Discourses from the colonial past are linked to diasporic experiences in the present and the women’s subjectivities are discussed in view of their family histories, including labor migration in the former coastal Caribbean enclave. Considering this interwoven multidimensionality of Black Indigenous women’s diasporic lives, a successful translation between the different discourses of knowledge production becomes indispensable. May Anancy,30 the spider and emblematic figure of Afrodescendent culture worldwide, feel invited to share their31 experiences in spinning further stories and transgressive dialogues on the Caribbean and its diasporas.32 In the spirit of Anancy’s practice of freely sharing wisdom around the world, let this analysis now be part of the flow.

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Notes 1 Previous versions of this article have been presented at international conferences at the University of Buenos Aires, the University of Bielefeld and the University of Costa Rica. Special thanks to Emily, Dionisia, Bëkwö and Doris, as well as to Eulalia Bernard for her permission to reproduce part of her poem. Wiebke Beushausen, Julia Roth, Roxana Reyes Rivas, Franklin Perry, Sherry Lynn Prior Klein, Gary Pool and the anonymous readers made careful reviews at different stages of this article, which is much appreciated. All translations from non-English sources are by Christina Schramm. Transcriptions are outlined below (see Fig. 8.1). 2 Eight women I interviewed between 2010 and 2012; five in 2003 and one in 2008; two I interviewed first in 2000. My questions were related to their subjectivities and social imaginaries, their senses of belonging and differences in community, cultural and other social contexts, their personal/family history and their positionings in broader social and historical contexts. The interviews were backed up by participant observation, bibliographic and previous research. The interview evaluation according to Grounded Theory (Strauss and Corbin), Critical Discourse Analysis and ethno-psychoanalytical approaches guaranteed a conceptualization derived from the women’s reflections upon their lives during the intersubjective context of the narrative interview. Conducting this research in Costa Rican academia benefited from its regional and international embeddedness. It is based on theoretical approaches from cultural studies, cultural anthropology, sociology and philosophy, and from academic fields such as post- and decolonial studies, feminist gender/queer studies, Indigenous and African diaspora studies. 3 The National Census “breaks with the myth that the Afro-descendent population lives in its majority in the province of Limón and evidences that it is all over the country” (Campbell Barr 10). Rather than counting “ ‘ethnic minorities’ ” in a supposedly homogeneous White country, as had been done eleven years before, the census now proceeded from the population’s diverse racial-ethnic self-identification. Beyond other categories, “[t]he options Black- [or] Afro-descendant and mulatto(a) [were] added to count the Afro-descendent population of Costa Rica” (9). Consequently, “[t]he number of Afro-descendants in Costa Rica, according to the National Census, increased from 1.9% in the year 2000, to 7.84% in the year 2011” (8). 4 Juliet Hooker’s study focuses on the racialized politics of space and citizenship in Caribbean Nicaragua. 5 With “subalternized” I highlight the constructedness of the subaltern.

Sign ... ((laughing)) never ...... /eh/ ... [people] being

Meaning Shortens a quotation without changing its meaning A non-verbal act Expanded speech Omission Break within a sentence Medium pause author’s aggregation Emphasizing a word, speaking louder

Figure 8.1 Transcription legend (based on transcription rules suggested by Christa Hoffmann Riem (331))

Debated existences, claimed histories 165 6 In Costa Rica, people of African descent were concentrated in a specific location, la Puebla de los Pardos, separated from Spaniards and Indigenous people (Cáceres 90). 7 During the colony, the territories of Central America and Mexico were part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. 8 Rivera refers to the “pyramidal structures of power and symbolic capital” that are constructed by Northern academia and “that bind vertically some Latin American universities, and establish a network of patronage between Indigenous and Afrodescendent intellectuals” (60). 9 While the article does not address all these inquiries, they guide this research. They are an important context in which I analyze the constructedness of Emily’s, Dionisia’s, Bëkwö’s and Doris’s interracial subjectivities. 10 “Indian” is to be read as “Indigenous” or “Native.” 11 This discrimination was in the beginning; later Emily established good friendships with her neighbors. 12 Emily reconfirms this by referring to her children as Black. 13 Eulalia Bernard, first lines of “Dehumanization,” from the poetry book Ciénaga (103, emphases in original). Copyright Eulalia Bernard; reproduced by permission of the author. 14 Bernard’s poem is part of the post-enclave literature in/from Limón and precedes an increasing number of Afro-Costa Rican women writers who “voice the rights and values of the afro-costarican people [sic]” (Bernard 119). See also Mosby. In the region, similar developments have been activated by other Caribbean female writers, who write against their “voicelessness,” that is, their “textual nonrepresentation as well as silence” (Fulani on Boyce Davies’ and Savory Fido’s interpretation of Caribbean women’s voicelessness, 64). 15 Bernard’s question can be related to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s question “Can the subaltern speak?” (270). 16 I refer to Fanon’s expression “bon nègre” (French). For English see Fanon (22). 17 Although Emily does not refer to the African Diaspora in Central America or the Greater Caribbean, a certain sense of belonging is traceable to her repeated mention of her father as a Black Colombian labor immigrant in the province of Puntarenas in Costa Rica. Through her father, Emily had contact with many Afro-descendants from Limón. 18 Here I do not discuss the construction of Dionisia’s Bribri Indigeneity but focus only on her Indigenous Blackness. 19 Costa Ricans call themselves ticos or ticas. 20 The teachers asked the pupils because the girl’s mother spoke only Bribri and no Spanish. 21 Dionisia calls herself “Ditsö,” the Bribri self-definition as corn seed. In Bribri, Dionisia explains, Black people—even if they are unknown—are supposed to be addressed as sisters and brothers, without any undertone of racism. 22 Bëkwö has rather been stigmatized by her female neighbors for engaging in activities identified as masculine. In “‘Desde este otro lado’ . . .” I discuss hegemonic and transgressive constructions of gender and sexuality in Bribri culture. It is a first attempt of a Queer Indigenous Studies approach related to Costa Rica. 23 A chola is a dark-skinned woman from rural Guanacaste, the northwestern province of Costa Rica on the border with Nicaragua. A Guanacastecan is someone who is born (and lives) in the province of Guanacaste; in comparison to chola, it is not a pejorative expression. However, Guanacastecans may be pejoratively called ‘given Nicaraguans’. 24 The term ‘paña’ comes from ‘España’ (Spain) and refers to light-skinned people. In the past it was coined by Afro-Limonese people to refer to “any Central American arrival” to the province of Limón in general (Putnam 15). 25 Grada Ferreira refers to Black women in German society, but similar warnings are also familiar to my interview partners.

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26 In the context of historical colonization and land conflicts, the limits of Indigenous territories are constantly violated by transnational concerns, state interests, or nonIndigenous settlers. ILO Convention No. 169 guarantees autonomy to Indigenous peoples. Only Indigenous people are allowed to live in Indigenous territories and have the right to decide over their resources. But when defending this and other rights, houses of Indigenous families within Indigenous territories might be destroyed and Indigenous leaders might be threatened, brutally beaten or intimidated by Whites. Even though Costa Rican state policies make an attempt to limit illegal settlements or violence by non-Indigenous persons in Indigenous Territories, violence continues. 27 The question of who is Indigenous reveals dilemmas of how ILO Convention No. 169 is to be applied. 28 Fatima El-Tayeb discusses constructions of diaspora in relation to queers of color in Europe. Her understanding is shared by many other people in the Greater Caribbean. 29 Gobierno Costa Rica. See also Schramm “Estado, justicia y libertad.” 30 Carol Britton (5, 12-14). In the following, I refer to two stories: “Anancy and the Sky God” and “Anancy and the Wisdom,” both told by Xavier Murphy from Jamaica. 31 I use ‘their’ to recognize Anancy’s diverse sexes and genders. 32 Anancy may point to Indigenous cosmologies, too, as the circular shape of the spider’s web suggests. I thank Tàyë Kibí for this observation related to Bribri thought. Also Lorena Cabnal (Maya-Xinka feminist from Guatemala) has emphasized the methodological and symbolic importance of the spider’s web when introducing her seminar “Feminisms, Communitarian Feminism and Native Peoples” (San José, October 2013).

Works cited Bernard, Eulalia. Ciénaga. Asesores Editoriales, 2001. Britton González, Carol. Cuentos afrocaribeños de la araña Anancy y sus amigos. Illustrated by Augusto Silva Gómez. Translated by Franklin Perry and Garret Britton. Instituto Costarricense de Enseñanza Radiofónica, 2008. Cáceres, Rina. Negros, mulatos, esclavos y libertos en la Costa Rica del siglo XVII. Instituto Panamericano de Geografía e Historia, 2000. Campbell Barr, Epsy. “Del 1.9% al 7.84% de afrodescendientes en Costa Rica: Un resultado de la incidencia del Centro de Mujeres Afrocostarricenses y de la población afro.” Afrodescendientes en los Censos del Siglo XXI: De la Invisibilidad al Reconocimiento Estadístico, edited by Instituto Afrodescendiente para el Estudio, la Investigación y el Desarrollo, grupo de Trabajo sobre Afrodescendientes en los Censos de las Américas, December 3, 2012, pp. 8–10. Córdova Aguilar, Maira Cristina. Población de origen africano en Oaxaca colonial (1680– 1700). Culturas Populares, CONACULTA, Secretaría de las Culturas y Artes, Gobierno de Oaxaca/Fundación Alfredo Harp Helú Oaxaca, 2012. DDPA. Durban Declaration and Programme of Action 2001. www.un.org/en/durbanreview 2009/pdf/DDPA_full_text.pdf. Accessed November 21, 2016. DGME. Dirección General de Migración y Extranjería de la República de Costa Rica. Leyes y decretos, www.migracion.go.cr/institucion/leyes%20migratorias/otros/PLAN% 20DE%20%20%20%20%20%20ACCION%20PARA%20UNA%20SOCIEDAD%20 LIBRE%20DE%20RACISMO.pdf. Accessed November 21, 2016. El-Tayeb, Fatima. European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe. U of Minnesota P, 2011. Erdheim, Mario, and Maya Nadig. “Ethnopsychoanalyse.” Ethnopsychoanalyse 2: Herrschaft, Anpassung, Widerstand: gewidmet Goldy Parin-Matthèy zum 80. Geburtstag

Debated existences, claimed histories 167 und Paul Parin zum 75. Geburtstag, edited by Eva Maria Blue, Marion Baumgart, Jutta Sippel-Süsse, Cornelia Wegeler, and Roland Apsel. Brandes & Apsel Verlag, 1991, pp. 187–201. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks [Peau noire, masques blancs]. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. Forewords by Ziauddin Sardar and Homi K. Bhabha. 1952. Pluto P, 2008. Ferreira, Grada. “Die Kolonisierung des Selbst: Der Platz des Schwarzen.” Spricht die Subalterne Deutsch?, edited by Hito Steyerl and Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez. Unrast, 2003, pp. 146–65. Fulani, Ifeona. “Caribbean Women Writers and the Politics of Style: A Case for Literary Anancyism.” Small Axe, vol. 9, no. 1, 2005, pp. 64–79. Gobierno Costa Rica. “Costa Rica se declara multiétnica y pluricultural.” Gobierno CR, September 7, 2015, gobierno.cr/costa-rica-se-declara-multietnica-y-pluricultural/. Accessed October 18, 2016. Gudmundson, Lowell, and Justin Wolfe. “Introducción.” La negritud en Centroamérica: Entre raza y raíces, edited by Gudmundson and Wolfe. Editorial Universidad Estatal a Distancia, 2012, pp. 1–32. Hauser, Ursula. “Introducción a la investigación social desde el etnopsicoanálisis.” Entre la violencia y la esperanza. Escritos de una internacionalista. 2nd ed. 2003. Editorial Caminos, 2014, pp. 48–62. Hernández, Rosalva Aída, Rachel Sieder, and María Teresa Sierra. “Introducción.” Justicias indígenas y Estado: Violencias contemporáneas, edited by Hernández, Sieder, and Sierra, FLACSO México. CIESAS, 2013, pp. 13–47. Hoffmann Riem, Christa. Das adoptierte Kind: Familienleben mit doppelter Elternschaft. Wilhelm-Fink-Verlag, 1984. Hooker, Juliet. “La raza y el espacio de la ciudadanía: La Costa de la Mosquitia y el lugar de lo negro y lo indígena en Nicaragua.” La negritud en Centroamérica: Entre raza y raíces, edited by Lowell Gudmundson and Justin Wolfe. Editorial Universidad Estatal a Distancia, 2012, pp. 325–66. hooks, bell. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. South End P, 1991. ——. “Revolutionary ‘Renegades’: Native Americans, African Americans, and Black Indians.” Black Looks: Race and Representation, edited by hooks. South End P, 1992, pp. 179–200. ILO. International Labour Organization. C169 – Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, 1989 (No. 169), www.un-documents.net/c169.htm. Accessed October 19, 2016. Mendoza, Breny. “La desmitologización del mestizaje en Honduras: Evaluando nuevos aportes.” Estudios culturales centroamericanos en el nuevo milenio, edited by Gabriela Baeza Ventura and Marc Zimmerman. Editorial Universidad de Costa Rica, 2009, pp. 215–43. Mosby, Dorothy E. Place, Language, and Identity in Afro-Costa Rican Literature. U of Missouri P, 2003. Putnam, Lara. The Company They Kept: Migrants and The Politics of Gender in Caribbean Costa Rica, 1870–1960. The U of North Carolina P, 2002. Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. Hambre de huelga: Ch’ixinakax Utxiwa y otros textos. La mirada salvaje & Dissa Impresores, 2014. Rojas Conejo, Daniel. Dilema e identidad del pueblo Bribri. Editorial Universidad de Costa Rica, 2009. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. Una epistemología del sur: La reinvención del conocimiento y la emancipación social. Siglo XXI: CLACSO, 2009.

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Schramm, Christina. “Queering Latin American Coloniality and the Cross-Cultural Production of Racialised Sexualities.” Journal of Intercultural Studies, vol. 33, no. 3, 2012, pp. 347–62. ——. “ ‘Desde este otro lado . . .’: Subjetividades e imaginarios sociales de mujeres afrodescendientes e indígenas bribris en Costa Rica.” Unpublished Dissertation, U of Costa Rica, 2013. ——. “Estado, justicia y libertad: Aportes al pensamiento político desde Ditsö Káska y la diáspora africana.” Anuario del Centro de Investigación y Estudios Políticos: OnlineOnly Journal, vol. 5, 2014, pp. 24–49, www.revistas.ucr.ac.cr/index.php/ciep/article/ view/20791/26387. Accessed October 19, 2016. Shome, Raka. “Post-colonial Reflections on the ‘Internationalization’ of Cultural Studies.” Cultural Studies, vol. 23, no. 5–6, 2009, pp. 694–719. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Zed Books, 2006. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Harvard UP, 2003. Steyerl, Hito, and Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez. Introduction. Spricht die Subalterne deutsch? Migration und postkoloniale Kritik, edited by Steyerl and Gutiérrez Rodríguez. Unrast, 2003, pp. 7–16. Strauss, Anselm and Juliet Corbin. Grounded Theory: Grundlagen Qualitativer Sozialforschung. Beltz PVU, 1996. Weedon, Chris. Identity and Culture: Narratives of Difference and Belonging. Open UP, 2004. Personal interviews by Christina Schramm with (pseudonyms): Emily. Personal interview. March 18, 2010. Dionisia. Personal interview. April 8 and 9, 2010. Bëkwö. Personal interview April 6 and 7, 2010. Doris. Personal interview. March 31, 2012.

9

Una Universidad Tomada Resistance performances in the (re)construction of spaces of resistance and contention during the first wave of the 2010–2011 University of Puerto Rico student movement1 Alessandra Rosa

Introduction Prior to delving into this chapter, I would like to present a brief background of the socioeconomic and political context of Puerto Rico that provided the fertile grounds for the 2010–2011 University of Puerto Rico (UPR) student movement. Around 2007, the Puerto Rico Statehood Students Association (PRSSA) opened a chapter at the Río Piedras campus to promote the admission of Puerto Rico as the United States 51st state.2 The PRSSA is known for having helped in the coordination of absentee voting, which assisted in the electoral victory of Luis Fortuño as Governor of Puerto Rico and the government change to Partido Nuevo Progresista (PNP) ruling in 2008. That same year the university administration implemented a 12% increase in tuition and, despite opposition to the hike, students complied by using the prórrogas [payment plans] negotiated in the strike of 2005, as well as the guarantee that no student would see an increase in his/her tuition charges (Abayarde). Since 2009, under Fortuño’s administration, students held many assemblies and massive stoppages to protest the implementation of Law 7, the economic recovery plan for Puerto Rico. The fiscal emergency law not only reduced the public workforce by around 12% and declared null and void all public sector labor contracts for three years, it also reduced the established formula for funding UPR from 9.6% to 8.1% of the government’s General Funds. In other words, Law 7 primarily laid off around 30,000 public employees and cut around $200 million dollars, or 25%, of UPR’s nearly $1 billion dollars annual budget. In addition, later this year a violent confrontation on University Avenue took place, when police officers unexpectedly attacked students for consuming alcohol in the street. A General Student Assembly was held, where students voted to create student action committees for each school as a way to organize themselves and inform others in preparation of what was yet to come. The initial student action committees were Comité de Acción de Ciencias Sociales (CACS), Comité de Acción de

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Figure 9.1 Protest march I

Figure 9.2 Student activists blocking the highway

Estudiantes de Derecho (CAED), Comité de Acción de Humanidades (CAH), Comité de Estudiantes en Defensa de la Educación Pública (CEDEP),3 Comité de Acción de Ciencias Naturales (CACN), and Comité de Acción de Comunicaciones (CAC). In less than a month, the action committees made their debut by joining the one-day national strike led by the unions and opponents to Law 7, with about 250,000 participants. The event captured all the national headlines. During this event, the protesters closed down Highway 52, a major toll road, which led to a stressful standoff with police. Students from the CAED decided to practice civil disobedience and formed a ‘sit-in’ line between the participants and the police as

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Figure 9.3 CAED banner

a way to protest peacefully. Figure 9.2 illustrates one of the photos that went viral in the student activists’ social media, in conjunction with videos documenting their experience during the national strike. The protesters and the police force finally dispersed only after negotiations were held. Former political prisoner Rafael Cancel Miranda was also brought to the site to persuade the students to avoid a violent clash with the police. After the national strike, the student action committees deemed it their responsibility to continue mobilizing as a student network. Thus, the student action committees carried on their activism inside UPR by holding assemblies and manifestations at each of the schools. In conjunction with the Consejo General de Estudiantes (CGE), the student action committees fostered active participation from the entire university community. For example, the CAED hung a banner stating Razones sobran para luchar [There are many reasons to fight] from one of the university’s buildings in protest of the austerity measures being implemented by the government and the university administration. Perdonen los inconvenientes; estamos construyendo una universidad pública. [Excuse the inconveniences; we are constructing a public university.] L@s estudiantes (2010 protest)

La toma de los portones [taking over the gates] It is just before dawn and the campus lights irradiate through the darkness as they do every weekday morning inside the Río Piedras campus, before the normal hustle begins. The campus definitely has an enigmatic allure to it, especially to those who know its particular history. However, the morning of April 21, 2010 is not a routine weekday morning. As the emblematic university clock tower marks

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5:00 A.M., the place becomes witness to another student strike. Members of the student action committees spread the news to meet at two specific locations on campus chiefly through phone calls, text messages, emails, social networking sites, and word of mouth. Rapidly, groups of students show up, interrupting the reverie of the morning flow. Once the two main groups are formed, the initiators coordinate, again via text messages, to congregate on the main street of the campus. Much to the astonishment of the initiators, the number of students who have gathered is more than three times the number expected, and as a collective they begin to vocalize la iupi es nuestra [the UPR is ours]. With the groups united, the students stridently and confidently march to shut down the campus. The air is electric, and the students seem to be fueling this with energy and determination. Some of them decide to encapucharse or cover their faces, and hold shields fashioned from cut-up plastic traffic barrels, just in case they encounter hostility from the security guards. Others decide to chant protests songs such as, ¡Lucha sí, entrega no! [Fight yes, surrender no!], while they close the gates with chains and locks. The students decide to close the main gate last, knowing that there would be a struggle with the security guards. In a couple of hours and after some pushing, shoving, and pepper spray, the students take over the campus from within by locking down its six gates. Only one gate, the security entrance, or gate 6.5, remains open but guarded. Immediately after celebrating having secured the campus, the students organize through their action committees to guard their respective gates. Each action committee is further divided into smaller clusters to construct the barricades utilizing anything they can find, such as desks, pieces of wood, branches, and trashcans, as well as to set up their protest camps and their alacena, or food storage. Now that the campus occupation is completed, a sense of uncertainty circulates, accompanied by the question ¿Y ahora qué? [And now what?]. All in all, the students’ campus occupation went rather smoothly, aside from the confrontation to force the campus security guards to abandon their posts.

Figure 9.4 Campus protest

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Figure 9.5 Barriers

This account demonstrates how, through the use of resistance performances—in particular protest camps, street art/theater acts, and Internet activism—the students initiated and implemented their strike by constructing spaces of resistance and contention in defense of an accessible public higher education of excellence as a fundamental right and not a privilege. It is instructive to highlight the experience of student activists taking over the Río Piedras campus. As Iván Chaar-López stated, “most of the recent literature on the encampments, occupations, and protests of 2011 rarely pay attention or even mention the student strikes of Puerto Rico despite the fact that many of those students had relationships with or were actually involved in OWS [Occupy Wall Street] in New York City” (3).4 This initial strategy of the universidad tomada [the taken university] led to a systemic lock-down of nine more UPR campuses in less than a month. However, the focus here is on the UPR Río Piedras campus and on student activists’ resistance performances in framing their collective identities by constructing spaces of resistance and contention during their occupation of the campus for 62 days. I acknowledge a vast literature regarding the term performance in Performance Studies, beginning with the works of Richard Schechner, Victor Turner, and Dwight Conquergood, as well as performativity in Feminist Studies with the works of Judith Butler, Peggy Phelan, and Rebecca Schneider, to name only a few scholars. However, branching off Joshua Atkinson’s 2010 Resistance Performance Paradigm (RPP), I apply the term performance within the context of Social Movement Studies. As such, it differs from cultural, social, and spectacle performances in its purpose of constructing spaces of resistance through self-conscious acts of dissent. Although Atkinson’s work offers fruitful guidance, I use resistance performance to refer to when an individual (or collective self) is aware of the existing power relations and consciously participates, to different degrees, in public/private acts of dissent for an intended and sometimes unintended audience. In addition, I also intertwine the university administration’s counter-framing of student activists’ collective identity. Building on the analysis of the infrastructure of protest camps by Feigenbaum, Frenzel, and McCurdy and their intent to “capture how protest campers build interrelated, operational structures for daily living”

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(27), I center this piece on student activists’ tactics and strategies in the development and maintenance of their protest camps and Internet activism. I begin by focusing on the layout of their protest camps, followed by how they lived and coordinated events from the camps. Then I look at how they reported events, in particular through Internet activism, from the camps. Through selected events, I demonstrate how student activists’ resistance performances assisted in their establishment of networks nationally and transnationally. By constructing both ‘offline’ and ‘online’ spaces of resistance and contention,5 I argue that student activists’ resistance performances, embodied through their use of protest camps and Internet activism, marked scale-related effects (Earl et al. 425–46) to existing theoretical frameworks on social movements. This means that new theories are not necessarily required, but rather modifications to existing ones (Myers 251–60; Fisher 158–68; Foot and Schneider 222–44; Bennett 109–28; Earl 1). Moreover, the storytelling writing style used is part of my own resistance performance as an activist researcher and advocate for an accessible public higher education of excellence. I designed black boxes to ‘interrupt’ the present text with excerpts from past events of student activism as a way of depicting the dynamic and complicated processes that are inherent in the analysis of the UPR student movement.6 This allows me to not only analyze the events of the most recent strike but also invoke a continuity of time and space in which the past is in the present.

Tactics and strategies: protest camps and Internet activism Student movements are both a product of and subject to the social, historical, political, economic, and media contexts they are embedded in (Feigenbaum, Frenzel, and McCurdy). In order to understand the development of the 2010–2011 UPR student movement, it is therefore necessary to look at the events that led to its occupation of the main campus. Following Jeffrey C. Alexander’s words, the analysis of the 2010–2011 UPR student movement can benefit from an exploration of the questions “what did it mean to those who participated in it, and how did they project those internal meanings to the outside” (x). In this piece, I will analyze the student activists’ resistance performances in framing their collective identities by focusing on their tactics and strategies. I will do so by exposinghow they constructed ‘offline’ and ‘online’ spaces of resistance and contention vis-à-vis the challenges they faced while obtaining control of the campus and the dynamics that occurred bajo la nueva administración [under the new administration]. The decision to lock down the Río Piedras campus did not emerge out of thin air; this possibility materialized after the General Student Council (CGE) held a student assembly on April 13, 2010 to discuss Certification 98, recently approved by the university administration. This certification placed a moratorium on the concession of nuevas exenciones de matrícula, or new tuition waivers,7 requested a justification of existing ones, and standardized the requirements for receiving and maintaining them. However, prior to the assembly, a rumor circulated on the Río Piedras campus about the intention of the certification to eliminate tuition waivers. As a result, around 3,000 students present at the assembly voted to have

University of Puerto Rico student movement 175 a 48-hours stoppage followed by an indefinite strike if the university administration did not negotiate with them about the tuition waivers. The student activists’ initial strategy of holding a stoppage did not obtain the desired response from the university administration and adhering to the decree passed in the assembly, the action committees began to organize for an indefinite strike. One of their tactics was to occupy the campus.

2002 . . . Student activists, members of the Frente Universitario por la Desmilitarización y la Educación (FUDE), occupy the ROTC building in the Mayagüez campus . . . 2005 . . . Student activists, members of the Comité Universitario Contra el Alza (CUCA), close the Río Piedras campus for 20 days protesting a 33% tuition hike . . .

The introductory vignette narrated the success of the student activists’ occupation strategy, leading to the development of their protest camps and barricades. Although the use of protest camps as a strategy of political contention has gained more media attention since 2011, it is not a new phenomenon. Protest camps rose alongside the development of the so-called new social movements in the 1960s, as a place “where people came together to imagine alternative worlds and articulate contentious politics, often in confrontation with the state” (Feigenbaum, Frenzel, and McCurdy 2–3). As a social movement strategy, protest camps worked as a focal point to organize and reinforce the activists’ collective identity. A protest camp has been defined “as a place-based social movement strategy that involves both acts of ongoing protest and acts of social reproduction needed to sustain daily life” (Feigenbaum, Frenzel, and McCurdy 12). It is a space of and for multiple political, economic, and social collective actions. The protest camp serves as an offline resistance strategy in itself and as a laboratory for activists to explore new tactics and experiment with old tactical repertoires (Tarrow). Once the protest camp has been set, activists move on to decide on their internal organization or infrastructure for the sustainability of the protest and their activities.

The layout of the camps When students discussed the tactic of an occupation, they realized that in order for them to secure and keep control of the campus, they needed to divide themselves among the action committees and organize a security committee to do night shifts. When interviewed, Fernando Espinal, a member of CAED and the security committee, explained the importance of organizing los turnos de seguridad [security shifts] to establish a safe environment during their occupation. In subsequent conversations, he also mentioned how they decided on the layout of the six main protest camps according to the school closest to an entrance, so that

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each action committee had a respective gate to guard. Each of the six protest camps had a distinct name to represent the ‘personality’ of the student activists who were in it. The names were the following: Vietnam, La Tribu [The Tribe], Medio Oriente [Middle East], Disney, Beverly Hills, and Sparta. The self-ascribed names of the protest camps are an example of how the student activists’ resistance performance serves to frame their collective identities during the strike, or what they labeled las huelgas dentro de la Huelga [many strikes within the Strike]. The map of the Río Piedras campus, reproduced in Figure 9.6, shows where each protest camp was located and the action committees that lived there. Vietnam was composed of the Humanities action committee and was set at the main gate of the campus, where most of the confrontation happened, hence the name. La Tribu was composed of the Education action committee and was supported by the University High School (UHS) students across the street. Medio Oriente was composed of both the Communication action committee and the Fine Arts action committee, who used their barricades as artwork. Disney was composed of both the Natural Sciences action committee and the Architecture action committee, alluding to their ‘it’s a small world after all’ song attitude. Beverly Hills was composed of the Law School action committee, alluding to the fact that they were eating sushi and paella, and even playing video games during the strike. Sparta was composed of the Social Sciences action committee, alluding to their preference for direct action. The diversity among student activists not only enriched the strike’s appeal to recruit more students but also led to occasional internal divisions while living together. FAC ILID AD E S

D E P O RTIVAS

Expreso

Jesús T. Piñero 2

Cómputos

Ciencias

Disney 3 Arquitectura

Plaza

Facundo Bueso

Musica

Humanidades

Biologia

Teatro Educacion

La Tribu

Figure 9.6 Campus map of protest camps

Decanato Estudiantes

dencia diantil

Resi Torre Norte

Torre

Medio Oriente

Avenida José Gándara

Avenida

r ne

6.5 Naturales

Un Cen ive tro rsit ario

CODE

Ja

Seguridad

1

Vietnam Registrador

Estudios Generales

Servicios Médiocos

Casa del Rector

Biblioteca General

Beverly Hills

Planificación

Bellas Artes

Facilidades Universitarias

José Colso Barbosa

ye Le

Ad m i d nist . pr e es as Em

FM

Plaza

Avenida

Juan Ponce de Léon

So

Sparta

ROTC Artes Industria les

s

Ci en ci as ci al es

Complejo Deportivo

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Living in the camps Despite these divisions, living inside the campus for 62 days helped student activists strengthen their collective identity by experiencing liminality or a sense of being betwixt and between. According to Victor Turner, liminality occurs during the second phase of a ritual process in which the participant, having been separated from the normal structures of society, undergoes a form of “liberation” and redefines his or her identity (90–96). When experienced in a collective, the liminal phase cultivates a sense of communitas or solidarity among its participants. During social movements and in particular during an occupation, activists experience liminal conditions, such as those that are “characterized by freedom, egalitarianism, communion, and creativity” (Yang 383). The student activists’ resistance performances while immersed in liminal conditions aided their establishment of networks by fostering a sense of imagined community (‘us vs. them’)8 that led to two specific binary oppositions: (1) student activists versus authority figures (i.e., the university administration, the local government, and the police), and (2) student activists versus students opposed to the strike. The dynamics of these polarities empowered student activists to develop proposals for a university reform and build blueprints para un Puerto Rico diferente [for a different Puerto Rico].

1973 . . . Students develop proposals and organize teach-ins . . . 2005 . . . Students develop Comité de Estudio de Finanzas Institucionales (CEFI) to analyze economic alternatives to the tuition hike . . .

Figure 9.7 portrays aspects of the polarization within the student body during the campus occupation. The interviewed student activists referred to such divisions as a contrast between brinca verjas (the in-group) and rompe huelgas (the outgroup). This division further served to frame the student activists’ collective identities. Brinca verja alludes to the student activists having to jump the fence of the campus to get in and out, while rompe huelga alludes to the opposing students breaking the picket line. This dichotomy served to reveal the political influence behind the opposing students, or mayoría silente [silent majority], represented by the Frente Pro Universidad Abierta (FUA) and the rompe huelgas’ decision to participate in counter-resistance performances aligned with the political party in power. Alongside the ‘battle’ atmosphere caused by the strike there was a ‘festive’ atmosphere among student activists living inside the campus, which created an exceptionality still difficult to capture (Ducombe 91; Grindon 94–107; Feigenbaum, Frenzel, and McCurdy). An example of the festive atmosphere was the concert ¡Que vivan l@s estudiantes! [Long live the students!], held on April 28, 2010. During this event, many national and international artists voiced their solidarity

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Figure 9.7 Collage of protest action I

with the student activists by either attending the event or sending a personal video compiled by René Pérez Joglar, the leading member of the popular music duo Calle 13. This concert not only served to validate the strike but also motivated student activists to continue their occupation. Each protest camp developed its own set of rules and organized its food storage, sanitation system, cleaning duties, security schedule, and daily agenda. All of the agendas developed by the action committees were shared during their meetings to coordinate the dynamics of their strike. Thus, through the use of horizontal deliberation and alternative media technologies, student activists coordinated and communicated with each other both inside and outside the campus. Figure 9.8 depicts how the students coordinated their daily living inside the campus.

Figure 9.8 Collage of protest action II

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Coordinating the camps In their contemporary form, protest camps have intentionally employed an internal organization from the bottom up that has been recognized as participatory democracy. Participatory democracy refers to a type of governance characterized by decentralization and a consensual horizontal decision-making process (HDM) (Bookchin 3–43; Harcourt 45–92). Horizontal decision-making has enabled large groups of activists to manage their camps by adhering to the notion of power with and not power over (Cornell 13–15; Feigenbaum, Frenzel, and McCurdy). Upon settling in to their protest camps, UPR student activists implemented the spokescouncil or ‘leaderless’ model of decision-making. The student activists’ horizontal organization incorporated their collective identities in the construction of different spaces of resistance and contention. AURA COLON:

. . . No habían líderes. Por ejemplo los casos en el tribunal por eso fue que prosperaron. [La Administración] demandó a las figuras que ellos veían pero se podía demonstrar que lo tumbabas a él, hay otr@ más y hay un montón más detrás de ell@s. Por eso los plenos eran tan largos y tan grandes . . . fue un esfuerzo colectivo y de diálogo . . . . . . There were no leaders. For example, the cases taken to court were unsuccessful. [The Administration] sued the student public figures they saw, but it was proven that if you knocked him/her down, there was another person, and many more after them. That is why the meetings were so long and big . . . it was a collective effort and based on dialogue . . .9

Figure 9.9 Assembly

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First, the student activists held reuniones de base, or base-camp meetings within each of their action committees. In these meetings, student activists developed an agenda of daily activities and possible strategies. Then, each action committee selected a rotating coordinador/a or ‘spokesperson’ to meet with the rest of the coordinadores/as to discuss each committee’s agenda and organize a summary of the issues. The coordinadores/as would then report back to each action committee where a decision would be made. When needed, they held plenos multisectoriales, or multi-sectorial meetings. For example, during one of the plenos, student activists discussed the CGE’s composition and how it did not represent everyone participating in the strike. Hence, they voted to create a negotiating committee with representation from each of the action committees, including members of the CGE, to meet with the university administration. The committee’s role was to negotiate with the university administration, but they could not sign an agreement or make a decision without consulting the action committees. As more campuses joined the student movement, the negotiating committee from Río Piedras campus became the national negotiating committee (CNN), with representation from all of the ten UPR campuses on strike. Despite the CNN’s support by student activists, the university administration refused to meet and negotiate with the CNN because it was not the legal representation of the students, which was the CGE.10

1941 . . . The General Student Council (CGE) is established allowing the students legal representation to voice their opinions and concerns to the UPR Administration . . . 1948 . . . Chancellor Jaime Benítez retaliates against the UPR student strike, by eradicating the CGE . . . 1966 . . . The CGE gets reinstated under the new University Law . . .

In addition, the university administration had requested the assistance of the police force to surround and surveil the campus as a way to ensure ley y orden [law and order]. The police presence served to reinforce the activists’ collective identity, to inspire their creativity, and to garner more support from the public. From different banners hanging around the fence of the campus, new protest songs and chants like ¡Somos estudiantes, no somos criminales! [We are students, not criminals!], numerous street art/theater acts, to their own alternative media outlets, student activists expressed their resistance performances and coordinated their strike. The student activists’ different degrees of artistic participation contrasted sharply with the imminent threat of police repression. As Lowel Fiet indicated, UPR student activists combined different artistic strategies to attract public and media attention (88–97). What had initially begun as a strike to repeal Certification 98, in the process became the right to an accessible public higher education against the government’s neoliberal agenda. Thus, the student activists’ master frame and

University of Puerto Rico student movement 181 resistance performances not only resonated with the public and artists but also captivated massive support from the Asociación Puertorriqueña de Profesores Universitarios (APPU), the Confederación de Asociaciones de Profesores Universitarios (CONAPU), labor unions, and religious groups, to mention only a few. During the interviews, all of the student activists smiled as they remembered with excitement some of the performances that originated during their strike, such as the payasos policías [clown police], the monjas cantando [singing nuns], and the marionetas de Fortuño [puppets of Governor Fortuño], among others. ME:

¿Cómo me describirías las diferentes manifestaciones artísticas durante la huelga? [How would you describe the different artistic manifestations during the strike?]

JOSE “MANUELA”:

En general, utilizamos tantas y tantas estrategias, tan buenas y tan diversas, que para mí cada una tiene su valor . . . Y reflejaron la capacidad que nosotros y nosotras tenemos.11 [In general we used so many strategies, they were good and diverse strategies, that in my opinion each one had its own value . . . And they reflected the capacity that we have.]

As evidenced in José’s statement, it is no surprise that student activists referred to this wave of the strike as the huelga creativa [creative strike] or huelga hippie [hippie strike] due to the diversity of their resistance performances. However, drawn into the spontaneity and the energy of the occupation, one act performed by the student collective Indigestión [Indigestion] did not sit well with the opponents of the strike, in particular with the police force. The event, which took place on April 27, 2010, consisted of students placing dog food and a sign

Figure 9.10 Collage of protest action III

182 Alessandra Rosa

Figure 9.11 Police officers at the campus gate

that said Cuidado con el perro [Beware of the dog] in front of the police officers standing outside the gates. This resistance performance was covered negatively by traditional news media to the extent that two years later, during the interviews, it still stirred resentment among the opponents of the strike because they all mentioned it and said it was a sign of disrespect. POLICE OFFICER X:

. . . Teníamos que hacer turnos de 12 horas, no te podías ir hasta que te sustituyeran . . . a ti te paraban ahí y los estudiantes te gritaban, te escupían y se iban, no todos pero algunos . . . después hasta nos pusieron la comida de perro . . . como puedes exigir respeto si no lo das . . . lo más brutal es que muchos de nosotros estábamos de acuerdo con la huelga pero no como se estaba llevando.12

[We had to do 12 hours shifts, you couldn’t leave until you were replaced . . . you were placed there and the students would yell at you, spit at you, and then leave, not all of them but some . . . then they even placed us dog food . . . how can you expect respect if you are not giving it? . . . the weird thing is that many of us agreed with their strike but not how they were doing it.] At the time, despite the adverse effect of this event, the action committees cleverly used alternative media to coordinate and mobilize thousands of students from the eleven UPR campuses in a massive march held on May 7, 2010. The

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Figure 9.12 Protest march II

route was from the main gate of the Río Piedras campus to the Botanical Gardens, the site of the presidential offices. As the student activists continued their resistance performances, it began to rain and they improvised a new chant that represented their passionate determination: ¡Enchumba’os, enchumba’os, pero nunca arrodilla’os! [We’re soaked, we’re soaked, but we’re not kneeling down!]. Another unforgettable event that student activists mentioned during the interviews was the General Student Assembly held at the Puerto Rican Convention Center on May 13, 2010. Initially, many student activists feared that the assembly convened by the President of the CGE, Gabriel Laborde, was a strategy of the university administration to revoke the strike after reaching some entendidos, or tentative agreements, with the negotiating committee. Nevertheless, the action committees managed again to coordinate and mobilize around 3,000 students to participate in the assembly. Much to the surprise of the university administration, the majority of the students present voted to ratify the strike. Driven with a boost of collective confidence, the action committees organized an impromptu march to the state capitol while chanting: Si ésta es la minoría, ¿dónde está la mayoría? [If this is the minority, where is the majority?]. In retaliation and as a measure to obtain court orders to evict student activists from the campus, Chancellor Ana Guadalupe announced another administrative closure until the end of July. The next day, the police force was mobilized to surround and open the Río Piedras campus by cutting the chains that student activists had placed to lock the gates. In addition, the San Juan police superintendent, José Figueroa Sancha, submitted an order to

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prohibit food, water, and medicine deliveries to the protest camps, while water and electricity were cut off from the campus. Student activists used alternative media, in particular Internet activism, to instantly spread the news about the repressive measures being implemented by the university administration. Through social media sites they reported and disseminated images on YouTube, Facebook, Desde Adentro, and Radio Huelga regarding an incident of police brutality against Luis Torres, father of one of the student activists, who was beaten and arrested while trying to pass food over the fence. The vast diffusion of the news made traditional media cover the events. The immediate coverage of the abusive actions provoked thousands of supporters to break the police blockade by creating a human chain that “hugged” the UPR and tossed food and water over the fence to the student activists.

Reporting from the camps Before the so-called Arab Spring, Spain 15-M, and the Occupy Movement in the United States, UPR student activists used their protest camps as “media hubs, combining the ‘old’ media approach of print production with video-making and a range of social media practices including the use of Facebook, Twitter, and livestream” (Feigenbaum, Frenzel, and McCurdy 104).13 Student activists’ use of Internet activism allowed them to instantly report the daily events and demonstrations that took place inside and outside the campus, provide information about the strike, and also to entertain themselves. Through the floods of comments, photos, videos, articles, and proposals they posted (and that were reposted) online, student activists were able to create a positive public image of themselves, gaining support from a national and international audience. According to Mohamed Ben Moussa, the interactive and iterative character of online newsgathering where links may be shared among social networks, and where citizens can easily assume the role of journalists by posting original text and video content illustrates perhaps most clearly the process by which consumers of common news can form collective oppositional identities and networks crucial to the practice of collective action. During the campus occupation, student activists deployed different alternative media strategies of resistance and contention for the development, maintenance, and modification of their collective identity. Here, I focus on the development of their Estudiantes de la UPR Informan (EUPRI) [UPR Students Inform] Facebook page, their online newspaper Desde Adentro [From the Inside], and their radio station Radio Huelga [Radio Strike], which was livestreamed online. These tactics not only served to inform, recruit, and motivate student activists, but also provided others with information about what was going on directly from the events without being filtered by the traditional media, if they were covered at all. Since 2009, some of the student actions committees utilized Facebook to inform and encourage their students to become actively engaged in the discussions

University of Puerto Rico student movement 185 regarding the effects of the austerity measures implemented by the government. Similarly, the university administration’s press office created a Facebook page on March 24, 2010 called UPR informa [UPR informs] to provide an official page about issues pertaining to the university. In response, Omar Rodríguez created Estudiantes de la UPR Informan (EUPRI) on April 17, 2010 as an alternative initiative to provide information from the students’ perspective under the slogan: ¡Hablemos con la verdad y defendamos la educación pública! [Let’s speak truthfully and defend our public education!]. ARTURO RIOS:

. . . me acuerdo que Omar fue el que creó EUPRI, él tenía una preocupación porque toda la información que salía de las páginas oficiales de la UPR pues no daban la información completa ni expresaban los puntos de vista de los estudiantes en sí . . . Y él trató de aglutinar a distintos estudiantes, especialmente de Río Piedras, para que se llevaran los mensajes y para informar de los acontecimientos que estaban ocurriendo en los distintos momentos. Me parece bien chévere ese ejercicio que hizo él, fue bien importante y le dedicó mucho tiempo . . .14

. . . I remember that Omar created EUPRI because he was worried that all of the information posted on the UPR official pages was either incomplete or did not include the students’ perspectives . . . And he tried to assemble students, especially from Río Piedras, to take the messages and inform of the events that were taking place at different times. I find that what he did was really good, it was very important and he dedicated a lot of time into it . . . Many of EUPRI’s contributors were members or former members of the CGE and received first-hand information. As Arturo stated, its role in the strike as a go-to site for trusted information became palpable to student activists, especially when in less than a year EUPRI had more than 40,000 followers mostly from the San Juan area and from the age group 18–24.

Figure 9.13 Desde Adentro / Student activists’ online newspaper – editorial office poster

186 Alessandra Rosa Once the strike had begun, student activists realized they needed to construct a positive image to break the negative stereotypes associated with the student movement. In view of this, on April 26, 2010 Aura Colón Solá and other student activists organized a press collective and decided to create their own online newspaper, called Desde Adentro [From the Inside], to cover the events from within the barricades.

1947 . . . Students develop their own newspapers: Patria, El Universitario, and La Vanguardia . . .

The collective developed a blog page (www.rojogallito.blogspot.com) and a YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/user/PrensaEstudiantil) in order to provide a space for student activists to express themselves and keep the country informed about their strike defending accessible public higher education. During the occupation, student activists had their own newsroom inside the campus. Having earned its reputation as a credible news source, Desde Adentro (a.k.a. Rojo Gallito) became a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching about journalism and promoting access to information. Inspired by the University of California (UC) student movement, particularly the student occupation that had taken place at UC Berkeley during 2009 as well as Free Radio Berkeley,15 student activists developed another way to facilitate communication and disseminate information during the strike and their occupation. Ricardo Olivero Lora, in collaboration with other student activists, created the first student radio station called Radio Huelga (RH). From the CGE office inside the

Figure 9.14 Radio Huelga / Student activists’ radio station

University of Puerto Rico student movement 187 Río Piedras campus, Radio Huelga connected national and international audiences to their resistance via 1650AM and their livestream webpage on Ustream.16 Its varied agenda depended on the creativity of its student activist collaborators and included news programs, music programs, athletic coverage, and even a radio soap opera, Amor de Barricada [Barricade Love] inspired by gossip from the camps. The collective did not include media professionals nor necessarily possessed “specialized training in media” (Cammaerts, Mattoni, and McCurdy 60); however, what had begun as a radial experiment on May 2, 2010 became an effective alternative media, cited as a primary source by traditional media news coverage. Radio Huelga was essential in gathering, constructing, administering, distributing, and maintaining power to raise consciousness about the strike from the student activists’ perspectives. Its legitimacy became evident on May 20, 2010 by their coverage of a violent confrontation that occurred when student activists held a demonstration at the Sheraton Hotel in San Juan where Governor Luis Fortuño was holding a party fundraising ceremony. RICARDO OLIVERO:

. . . Para RH significó el momento que la comunidad de comunicadores comenzó a respetarnos. Hasta ese momento nos veían como un grupo de chamaquitos jugando con máquinas, todos trataban de decirnos a nosotr@s cómo hacer las cosas. [Nosotr@s] teníamos hasta una consigna: “¡pa’l carajo los especialistas!,” vamos a construir esto de cero metiendo las patas..pero esa noche pasó algo interesante y es que cuando comienza la violencia en el Sheraton, allí no habían medios de prensa inicialmente. Nosotr@s estábamos en una reunión del colectivo de RH y empezamos a recibir las llamadas de los propios huelguistas informándonos de lo que estaba pasando. En ese momento, nosotr@s tomamos una decisión inmediata, decidimos dejar lo que estábamos haciendo, sacamos unas listas, escribimos arrestados y heridos. Establecimos que toda información que diéramos al aire la confirmaríamos por una segunda persona y todo lo que nos dijeran tiene que ser que lo vieron. Así empezamos a dar los informes y sacar a l@s compañeros y compañeras al aire. Porque eso fue la gran ventaja que tuvimos nosotr@s, que cada huelguista era un corresponsal en potencia, así que éramos los primeros que recibíamos la información y los que siempre sabíamos, mediante los actores mismos, lo que estaba ocurriendo . . . y esa noche . . . logramos hacer un excelente trabajo. Sacamos el listado de los agredidos y arrestados, fuimos los primeros que dijimos lo del “taser” de Osito y logramos movilizar al grupo de abogados para que aparecieran en los distintos cuarteles. También identificamos los cuarteles para saber dónde estaban l@s compañer@s presos y se dio algo bien interesante. Como el trabajo nos estaba abrumando, se nos ocurre plantear al aire a los chateros de RH que si nos podían ayudar a conseguir los números de teléfonos de los cuarteles . . . y la gente empezó a darnos esos números de teléfonos por el chat. Así nosotr@s empezamos a llamar directamente a los cuarteles . . . pero el momento cumbre de esa noche, fue cuando de repente leemos el minuto a minuto tanto de Primera Hora y El Nuevo Día y ellos empiezan a citar a RH como la fuente

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Alessandra Rosa de información de ellos: “RH informa que hay tantos heridos.” Toda la información que estábamos generando, ellos la estaban citando a través nuestro. Esa noche fue fundamental para nosotr@s y la tengo muy viva en la memoria . . .17 . . . For RH it meant the moment that the community of communicators began to respect us. Until this moment they would regard us as little kids playing with machines, all of them tried to tell us how to do things . . . but that night, something interesting happened when the violence began at the Sheraton, since there was no other press initially . . . our great advantage: every student activist was a potential journalist and that is how we were the first to receive information and the only ones that knew directly from the actors themselves, what was going on . . . and that night . . . we did an excellent job. We had a list of the people injured and arrested, we were the first to comment about the use of taser on Osito and we mobilized the group of lawyers to the police headquarters where the student activists were arrested . . . but the climax of that night was when we read the minute to minute of both Primera Hora and El Nuevo Día and they cited RH as their information source . . . They were citing all of the information we aired. That night was fundamental for us and I have very vivid memories of it . . .

As Ricardo states, RH was able to instantly report the violent incident between the student activists and the police force. Student activists contacted RH and acted as “citizen journalists” by collecting and narrating on-site information (Bowman and Willis 7–61). As such, RH broadcast direct information on who was injured and arrested, as well as the police headquarters where the arrested were taken to in order to mobilize support groups and lawyers. After this incident, police officers made unprofessional comments on their Facebook pages about being happy about caerle a palos, or beating up student activists. In response, student activists took screen photos of the officers’ pages and disseminated them online. In less than a day, the images went viral and traditional media had to cover the news as well, ending in the police officers giving public apologies. The student activists’ use of alternative media assisted in their construction of spaces of resistance and contention by complementing their (re)appropriation of a physical public space, the university, with a virtual one (Gerbaudo 68–70).

: Una Victoria Efímera [short-lived victory] UPR student activists’ tactics and strategies provided the time and space to creatively engage in resistance performances to construct local, corporeal, and virtual spaces of resistance and contention during their strike. The development of protest camps, street art/theater acts, and Internet activism, allowed student activists to frame and report through alternative media about events taking place inside and outside the campus. Their voice became a primary vessel through which they challenged the existing power dynamics. They also developed strategies for interacting with traditional media to determine the elements that would be

University of Puerto Rico student movement 189

Figure 9.15 National negotiating committee (CNN) after the negotiation

covered to gain public interest through media representation of their protest camp life (Feigenbaum, Frenzel, and McCurdy). Both protest camps and street art/theater acts not only embodied a geographical space of resistance and contention during the strike, but also became part of their resistance performance in themselves by disrupting the daily activity of the campus. By experiencing liminality and creating history together, student activists strengthened their collective identities and established networks of support both nationally and internationally. As a result, on June 16, 2010, after five days of court-mandated mediation with the retired judge Pedro López Oliver, the university administration (i.e., the Board of Trustees) voted nine to four in favor of an agreement with the CNN. The negotiation agreed for Certification 98 to be amended, no reprisals to any of the student activists, and for the planned fee to be evaluated by a committee. The student activists interviewed referred to this agreement, although it was short-lived,18 as a ¡Victoria para la historia! [Victory for history!]. In this piece, I examined how UPR student activists’ resistance performances framed their collective identities by constructing both offline and online spaces of resistance and contention during their occupation of the Río Piedras campus. I also interweaved the university administration’s use of counter-resistance performances through the police force, opposing students, and traditional media to counterpoise the student activists’ collective identity and demands, as well as reiterate and exercise their power. Through selected events, I demonstrated how student activists’ resistance performances not only aided the establishment of national and transnational networks in support of an accessible public higher education of excellence, but also confirmed that another Puerto Rico is possible. In accordance with Daniel Nina, Puerto Ricans can finally say that we had “Nuestra Primavera Boricua del 2010 . . . podemos hablar que hemos tenido nuestro Mayo” (63) [Our Boricua Spring of 2010 . . . we can say that we had our May].

190 Alessandra Rosa As of yet there is no thorough published analysis of the 2010–2011 UPR student strike, its implications, and how the university community currently perceives it. By elaborating on the concept of resistance performance, I illustrated how both traditional and alternative media (re)presentations of student activism can develop, maintain, adjust, or change the students’ collective identity/-ies. My work not only makes Puerto Rico visible in the research concerning social movements, student activism, and Internet activism, but also provides resistance performance as a concept to describe various degrees of participation in current social movements. Resistance performance is useful for analyzing the entanglements that emerge with collective identities and actions as a continuum between offline and online spaces of resistance. The degrees of participation in resistance performances can range from not crossing the picket line and posting an online status to physically mobilizing as a collective and occupying a place. Through these acts, student activists raised awareness, facilitated the organization of events, discussed different tactics and strategies or collective actions, and established networks of trust and reliance. Throughout my fieldwork, I found that these acts depended on many internal and external factors, such as the perceived level of urgency and crisis, the emotions aroused and maintained (e.g., hope, anger, indignation), the level of engagement with the cause, a sense of responsibility and duty, if you are member

Figure 9.16 Universidad Tomada / Occupied university banner

University of Puerto Rico student movement 191 of an active network or have a friend already participating, how much risk is involved (in violent/non-violent acts), the role of parents (who may give/deny permission, or the activists are parents themselves), accessibility to transportation, money, disability, studying and/or working abroad, and creativity. By analyzing UPR student activists’ resistance performances during the first wave of their strike, I have demonstrated in this piece how this concept serves to move forward social movement theories and Internet activism by analyzing different degrees of participation in the construction of spaces of resistance and contention.19 Just like the so-called Arab Spring, the 2010–2011 UPR student movement has had, and will continue to have, a resounding social and cultural impact in Puerto Rico, although it did not succeed as a political revolution. In exposing how student activists constructed and (re)constructed offline and online spaces of resistance and contention during their strike, I challenge the myths surrounding youth apathy towards political engagement and the general stereotype in Puerto Rico of student activists as pelús, revoltosos, y socialistas que no quieren estudiar [hairy socialist rebels that do not want to study].20 Therefore, the UPR student activism’s success should not be measured by the sum of demands granted, but by the sense of community achieved and the establishment of networks that continue to create resistance and change.

Notes 1 This article and the data presented are part of the author’s dissertation. To gather the data, the author utilized a mixed method-approach, which consisted of participant observations during the strike, as well as archival research, in-depth interviews, and surveys done in 2012. 2 Some of the other UPR campuses that also have a PRSSA chapter are Mayagüez, Bayamon, Humacao, Arecibo, Carolina, Ponce, and Utuado. 3 CEDEP’s name was later changed to Comité de Acción de Educación (CAE). 4 Through Internet activism UPR student activists were able to develop and establish national and international solidarity networks. 5 Offline spaces of resistance refer to activism that takes place ‘in the streets’, while online spaces of resistance refer to activism that takes place through the Internet. 6 In her book Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War, Grace Cho utilized this style of writing in order to create an unconventional non-linear text which she described as a traumatized text. Although I do not describe my text as traumatized, I use this style in order to create an unconventional non-linear text as well. 7 Tuition waivers are based on a merit system. At UPR, tuition waivers are given to students who are student athletes, student musicians, those in the top 5% grade point average of their schools, and those who have a parent or spouse working at the university. 8 The allusion of Benedict Anderson’s concept of “imagined communities” was apparent during the campus occupation by student activists’ use of slogans such as: La UPR es un pais [The UPR is a country]. 9 Data gathered from my interview with Aura Colón on August 28, 2012. Aura is one of the student activists who created Desde Adentro, an online newspaper to report from within the campus occupation. 10 It is important to note that this was the first time the CGE played a secondary role in the negotiations with the university administration during a student strike.

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11 Data gathered from my interview with the student and LGBT activist José “Manuela” García on February 7, 2013. 12 Data gathered from my interview with Police officer X on January 31, 2013. 13 It is important to note that the UPR student strike’s absence in the United States mainstream media sheds light on the current relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States. Being a territory of the United States, Puerto Rico is not necessarily included in studies of social movements in Latin America, yet precisely because of its colonial status (i.e., commonwealth) it is not necessarily included in the studies of social movements in the United States either. Thus, my study not only fills the gap but also inserts the UPR student movement within the international student movement network against neoliberal governments that view education as a privilege. 14 Data gathered from my interview with the student activist and CNN member Arturo Ríos on September 24, 2012. 15 The UC student demonstrations came after many austerity measures were implemented to their university system, such as tuition and fee hikes, staff cuts, and layoffs. The response of the UC administration was to use the police force to dismantle the protests, which resulted in violent clashes between student activists and police officers. For more information about Free Radio Berkeley, log in to www.freeradio.org. 16 Radio Huelga’s slogan was ¡Conéctate a la Resistencia! [Connect to the Resistance!], inviting audiences to support their strike for an accessible public higher education of excellence by tuning into www.ustream.tv/channel/radiohuelga. 17 Data gathered from my interview with the student activist and one of the founders of Radio Huelga Ricardo Olivero on September 6, 2012. 18 On June 21, 2010, just days after the agreement was signed, the government appointed four new members to the UPR Board of Trustees. This allowed the board to breach the previous agreement and impose a tuition fee. In response, student activists began to organize the possible revival of the strike. 19 In my dissertation, I also focus on the second wave or revival of the strike when the police force had the campus under siege. 20 Data gathered from newspaper Primera Hora, which is owned by Grupo Ferré-Rangel, the same owners as of El Nuevo Día. www.primerahora.com/entretenimiento/farandula/ nota/musicosuniversitariosrealizaronunasonoramanifestacion-388345/.

Works cited Abayarde, Rojo. “Breve historia de las luchas estudiantiles y laborales en la Universidad de Puerto Rico: Segunda parte.” Nacionales, 2011 http://abayarderojo.org/index.php/ breve-historia-de-las-luchas-estudiantiles-y-laborales-en-la-universidad-de-puerto-rico— parte-ii/. Accessed June 2011. Atkinson, Joshua. Alternative Media and Politics of Resistance: A Communication Perspective. Peter Lang, 2010. Alexander, Jeffrey C. Performative Revolution in Egypt: An Essay in Cultural Power. Bloomsbury Academic, 2011. Benedict, Anderson. Imagined Communities. Verso, 2006. Ben Moussa, Mohammed. “Online Mobilization in Times of Conflict: A Framing-Analysis Perspective.” Arab Media and Society, no. 17, 2013, www.arabmediasociety.com/? article=817. Accessed October 2016. Bennett, W. Lance. “Communicating Global Activism: Strengths and Vulnerabilities of Networked Politics.” Cyberprotest: New Media, Citizens and Social Movements, edited by Wim Van De Donk, Brian D. Loader, Paul G. Nixon, and Dieter Rucht. Routledge, 2004, pp. 109–28.

University of Puerto Rico student movement 193 Bookchin, Murray. Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: Unbridgeable Chasm. AK P, 1995. Bowman, Shayne, and Chris Willis. “We Media: How Audiences Are Shaping the Future of News and Information.” Hypergene, 2003, www.hypergene.net/wemedia/download/ we_media.pdf. Accessed November 21, 2016. Cammaerts, Bart, Alice Mattoni, and Patrick McCurdy. Mediation and Protest Movements. U of Chicago P, 2013. Chaar-López, Iván. “Student Strikes in Puerto Rico: A Rupture for the Common?” Unpublished Paper. Cho, Grace. Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War. U of Minnesota P, 2008. Cornell, Andrew. Oppose and Propose: Lessons from Movement for a New Society. AK P, 2011. Ducombe, Stephen. Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy. New P, 2007. Earl, Jennifer. “Where Have all the Protests Gone? Online.” Washington Post, February 4, 2007, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/02/AR2007020201467. html. Accessed June 2014. ——., Katrina Kimport, Greg Prieto, Carly Rush and Kimberly Reynoso. “Changing the World One Webpage at a Time: Conceptualizing and Explaining Internet Activism.” Mobilization: An International Journal, vol. 15, no. 6, 2010: pp. 425–46. Feigenbaum, Anna, Fabian Frenzel, and Patrick McCurdy. Protest Camps. Zed Books, 2013. Fiet, Lowell. “Espectáculo, Performance Teatro: La Huelga Estudiantil de 2010 en la Universidad de Puerto Rico.” 2010, www.casa.cult.cu/publicaciones/revistaconjunto/ 159/lowell.pdf. Accessed June 2014. Fisher, Dana. “Rumoring Theory and the Internet: A Framework for Analyzing the Grass Roots.” Social Science Computer Review, vol. 16, no. 2, 1998, pp. 158–68. Foot, Kristen, and Steven Schneider. “Online Action in Campaign 2000: An Exploratory Analysis of the U.S. Political Web Sphere.” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, vol. 46, no. 2, 2002, pp. 222–44. Gerbaudo, Paolo. Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism. Pluto P, 2012. Grindon, Gavin. “The Breath of the Possible.” Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations, Collective Theorization, edited by S. Shukaitis, D. Graeber, and E. Biddle. AK P, 2007, pp. 94–108. Harcourt, Bernard E. “Political Disobedience.” Occupy: Three Inquiries in Disobedience, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell, Bernard E. Harcourt, and Michael Taussig. U of Chicago P, 2013, pp. 45–92. Myers, Daniel. “Communication Technology and Social Movements: Contributions of Computer Networks to Activism.” Social Science Computer Review, vol. 12, no. 2, 1994, pp. 251–60. Nina, Daniel. El 18 Brumario de Luis Fortuño. Pasillo del Sur, 2010. Tarrow, Sidney. Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics. 2nd ed. Cambridge UP, 1998. Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure. Aldine Pub, 1969. Yang, Guobin. “The Liminal Effects of Social Movements: Red Guards and the Transformation of Identity.” Social Forum, vol. 15, no. 3, 2000, pp. 379–406.

10 Troubling our intersections A Caribbean feminist methodology as resistance approach Andrea N. Baldwin and Marva Cossy

Introduction This chapter advocates a type of feminist scholarship that resists normative ways of doing feminism in academia and instead seeks what Audre Lorde wrote about in 1984 as “consciousness absent from consideration” (111), that is, knowledge produced outside intellectual tradition and by those removed from the hallowed halls of academia. To do so, as Caribbean feminists we must devise methods to engage with other knowledge that can act as a focal point for change in the way feminism is practiced, and can help to resist normativity within Caribbean feminism. In this regard, we are interested in social media, particularly blogs, which are often used as a form of activism. Over the past few years, we have noticed an increase in social media usage in the Caribbean, with users addressing a wide array of subjects ranging from changes in the popular culture to serious societal concerns. Blogs and other social media sites are providing spaces for discussion and activism as well as solutions for those who want to resist oppression. Given such changes in methods of communicating, organizing, and advocating, we ask the following questions: Does our understanding of feminist methodology as part of a culture of resistance bear out in our knowledge production? Have feminists sufficiently investigated the usefulness of digital media? Can we benefit from incorporating it into our feminist work of resistance? If so, is it reflected in our research questions and methods? If not, why? In this chapter, we posit that social media produces a collective knowledge base that can enhance feminist participation and advance several legitimate reasons and advantages for utilizing social media to produce research that mirrors our everchanging Caribbean societies. The purpose is not to propose social media as a feminist tool to undermine or replace other tools, but to advance the ways in which feminist scholarship itself, as a form of resistance, is produced, transmitted, and pursued by complementing and transforming other modes. It is new, exciting, and all encompassing, but will demand feminists to resist normative ways of conducting feminist research and use “our personal visions [to] help lay the groundwork for political action” (Lorde 160). Those of us who are “poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older—[and who] know that survival is not an academic skill” (Lorde 112) must engage, in the spaces of their choices.

Troubling our intersections 195 To demonstrate how social media could be integrated as a part of feminist research methodology for feminist resistance and to increase feminist collaboration within and eventually outside of the region, we performed a road-mapping exercise. Using this method, we combined information already known about feminist methodology and social media use with the perceived drivers of change. This allowed us to glance into the future to determine whether we could develop and adopt a feminist methodology which utilizes social media (Ahlqvist et al. 5). We therefore posit that road-maps will allow us to monitor the progress and to compile an inventory of possibilities related to social media’s impact on feminist methodology, as well as stimulate more in-depth investigations. We also present an example of how blogging can help feminist academics to conduct research and gather information to develop a form of Caribbean feminist theorizing that is more collaborative and engaging of those living in the region and in other countries in the Global South. We, however, acknowledge that cyberharassment, online trolls, and stalking drive women away from online communities and mute their voices (Goldberg). We also recognize the limits to online access existing in the Caribbean, where socio-economic factors, location and, in some places, government regulations, restrict people’s regular access to the Internet as well as freedom to comment. We explore how social media can be used as a feminist methodological tool to regularly and systematically engage non-academics in the region so they can participate in shaping feminist scholarship, framing the issues, the research methods, and the interpretation of findings. In acknowledging the limits to Internet access as a barrier, we emphasize that as a part of this feminist culture of resistance we need to advocate for increased access to tools to facilitate social media, including training in media literacy. It is essential that engagement also include all who advocate for a cause that coincides with the feminist agenda in the region.

Feminist epistemology, feminist research, and resistance Feminist epistemology is the understanding of how gender and other social positionalities influence our concepts of knowledge and practices of inquiry and justification (Anderson 51). It reveals questions and seeks to overcome Eurocentric assumptions about knowledge and its production. Accordingly, feminists—in resisting androcentric ways of producing knowledge—have revised traditional methods of gathering and analyzing empirical evidence to create new knowledge and theorizing (Harding 6). Feminist research therefore came into being as a culture of resistance, that is, as a result of actions involving consciousness, collective action, and direct challenges to structures of power (Rubin 245). More specifically, feminist research works against dominating, hierarchical, exclusive forms of knowledge and epistemology. However, feminist research and methodology as resistance is complicated. According to Hollander and Einwohner, resistance is socially constructed and “defined not only by resisters’ perceptions of their own behavior, but also by targets’ and/or others’ recognition of and reaction to this behavior”

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(548). There is also the central role of power in resistance and the possibility that resistance can eventually lead to domination (Foucault 95). This complicates our understanding and discussion of resistance because “even while resisting power [we] . . . may simultaneously support structures of domination that necessitate resistance in the first place” (Hollander and Einwohner 549). In addition, because we live in a world made up of multiple and complex systems of oppression and hierarchies, one can simultaneously be “powerful and powerless within different systems” (Hollander and Einwohner 550). The above-mentioned complications with resistance became evident within feminism with the institutionalization of feminist studies in the academies of the so-called Global North and with mainstream, mostly white middle-class Western liberal feminists demanding equality to and similar rights as men. In doing so, feminist epistemology reflected predominantly the white standpoint, as it used a universal category of women while making ethnocentric claims. Consequently, these claims represent a minority of women, i.e., white middle-class Western women, and have therefore resulted in the negation, as opposed to proper interrogation, of a majority of women who reside around the globe (Baldwin, “Feminist Aliens” 22). The presumption of solidarity, “a pretense to a homogeneity of experience covered by the word sisterhood that does not exist” (Lorde 116), has led to the practice of exclusion. Therefore, the epistemological foundation of feminism “reflects the authority and standpoints of those who have power to control knowledge production and dictates to, but also silences those who are not scientists” (Yeatman 189). It is therefore evident that even while questioning traditional assumptions, “academic feminism has yet to break away from the philosophical and theoretical heritage it has so powerfully questioned” (Lazreg 82). White/Western feminists especially have been slow to investigate their own premises and have been called out by feminists of color, in and from the so-called Global South, as well as queer and other feminists for being a part of the “global hegemony of Western scholarship—i.e., the production, publication, distribution and consumption of information and ideas” (Mohanty 336) which reproduces binaries and recreates academic margins (Baldwin, “Feminist Aliens” 18). Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins, for example, advocates for research that emphasizes the personal nature and emancipatory potential of research based on the researcher’s shared subjectivity with research participants and the use of reflexivity and participatory methods (Collins 258). In using research practices that foreground the importance of experience and mirror the “complexity of social life, calling up unique methodological demands” (McCall 1772), feminist research methodology can return to its roots as a culture of resistance. Some Caribbean feminists also resist categorization by Western feminists. They point out that differences among women in the Caribbean exist, and advocate for a broader feminist discourse which acknowledges the diverse identity categories of the women present in the region. Their research also demonstrates how our differences “can be a mechanism for showing interconnectedness” (Reddock 208). For example, Consuelo Lopez Springfield examines in detail the wide variety of

Troubling our intersections 197 Caribbean women’s experiences while also detailing the ways in which feminist perspectives in the Caribbean differ from Western approaches. Caribbean feminist Eudine Barriteau advocates theory that revises “all past generalizations of Caribbean women” (“Postmodernist Feminist” 17). With reference to her earlier work, Barriteau shares her dissatisfaction with stale imported theoretical constructs which perpetuate gender discrimination. In Confronting Power, Theorizing Gender, Barriteau proposes that we expose “the perverse operations of relations of power in gendered discourses and practices” and interrogate tensions in feminist scholarship and practice in the Caribbean (5). Rhoda Reddock acknowledges that Caribbean feminist scholars have over the years been able to develop theory that accounts for difference. She, however, states that this difference is both real and constructed (207) and that in “conceptualizing a theory of difference for the Caribbean . . . we need to isolate the ways in which the constructed differences have contributed to how we have conceptualized ourselves” (208). This point is particularly important because as Caribbean feminist scholars resist constructions from the outside, we also need to be critical of our own theories in order to, as Reddock puts it, “not be simply [coming] to terms with the other but rather to understand the other within ourselves as we have in many ways been defined in opposition and in relation to each other” (208). In so doing, Caribbean academic feminists must be wary of attempts to professionalize feminism and of confining it too strictly to academic conventions (Peake and de Souza 114). In other words, in our theorizing, we as Caribbean feminist scholars must constantly engage in a troubling of the intersections of feminist epistemology both within and outside the Caribbean.

A feminist methodology of resistance According to Harding and Norberg, feminists have long been concerned “about whether and how customary approaches to knowledge production promote or obstruct the development of more democratic social relations” (2009). Feminist methodology therefore is about the “adoption of research principles and practices that are both intellectually alert to and sensitive about what disadvantaged groups want to know . . . [and are] politically and ethically more accountable” (Harding and Norberg 2011). It insists that knowledge must be elicited and analyzed in a way that can be used by women to alter oppressive and exploitative conditions in their societies. It therefore recognizes that women’s “reality [and] their varieties of experience must be an unconditional datum” (Smith 93) and allows for the opportunity not only to gather information for knowledge itself but also for those who are providing the information (Oakley 41). In order to understand the way human beings behave in a given situation, one must understand how they define and make sense of that situation (Foddy 215). We must also understand how lives are governed by “institutions, conceptual schemes, and their texts” (Harding and Norberg 2011). Therefore, according to Harding, “feminist researchers [can] use just about any and all of the methods . . . that traditional androcentric researchers have used . . . [but] precisely how they carry out these methods of evidence

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gathering is often strikingly different” (2). The emphasis here is on using methods which can best answer particular research questions, but always using them in ways that are consistent with broad feminist goals, values and ideology (Jayaratne and Stewart 91). This requires adopting certain strategies that are also consistent with feminist objectives. To use these strategies one must reject “the assumption that maintaining a strict separation between researcher and research subject produces a more valid, objective account” (Cook and Fonow 9). For example, Makeda Silvera in her study Silenced states that in interviewing Jamaican domestic workers in Toronto, she found existing sociological research methods to be insufficient to uncover the experiences of the women with whom she talked (ix). For years, feminists in the Caribbean have designed their evidence-gathering instruments with such exactitude as to ensure that they are interactive, engage those who they are researching as participants, elicit relevant information and support analysis that can help alter oppressive and exploitative conditions in the region. For example, because of the region’s diverse racial makeup, Caribbean feminists, long before the concept of intersectionality as coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw became a fashionable (and often emptied) concept in academia, accounted for the intersections of race/ethnicity, gender, class, ability and religion as a means of including women’s varied experiences (Reddock 199; Mohammed 6; Baksh-Soodeen 22). However, as the society transforms, so too should our methodology. Feminist research in the Caribbean has made remarkable attempts to do so. This can be seen with the emergence of cyberfeminism as a new and vibrant strand of feminism in the Caribbean which we contend can improve feminist research techniques.

Caribbean cyberfeminism The term cyberfeminism was coined by Sadie Plant, director of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at the University of Warwick, “to describe the work of feminists interested in theorizing, critiquing, and exploiting the Internet, cyberspace, and new-media technologies in general” (Consalvo 1). Donna Haraway, in her “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” conceptualizes the part human, part machine cyborg, theorizing a future where technology proficient and politically aware women use technology to subvert systems of oppression. Haraway’s vision that cyborgs would be able to transcend differences tied to the body at that time did not consider how racial, gender, and transnational inequalities could be reproduced online (Daniels 105). However, one can find several online feminists or cyberfeminist communities that do exactly that, such as subRosa, a “reproducible cyberfeminist cell of cultural researchers committed to combining art, activism, and politics to explore and critique the effects of the intersections of the new information and biotechnologies on women’s bodies, lives, and work” (subRosa). subRosa originates from Pennsylvania in the United States, but there are also several online spaces that allow for feminist expression and activism in the Caribbean. These include Code Red for Gender Justice, “a feminist activist

Troubling our intersections 199 collective of Caribbean women, men and everyone else between or beyond the binary” that has its roots within students’ organizations and uses “an innovative mix of the traditional and creative” methods as a “key online source for daily updates and aggregation of Caribbean news and links related to feminist, gender and sexuality issues” (Feminist Conversations).1 Another social media site focused on social justice and feminist issues in the Caribbean is Walking into Walls, a collective with the aim to “raise . . . awareness about violence against women and girls; interrogate Caribbean cultural norms that maintain violence against women and girls; generate critical discussion . . . aimed at ending such violence.” Further examples are Groundation Grenada, a social action collective focusing “on the use of creative media to assess the needs of our communities, raise consciousness and act to create positive radical growth,” as well as Womantra, a community of Caribbean feminists that work for gender justice across borders. Also worthy of mention is Negra Cubana Tenía Que Ser – “It had to be a black woman,” the blog of Cuban journalist and feminist Sandra Abd’Allah-Álvarez Ramírez, whose topics include racial discrimination in Cuba, the media representation and the arts of Afro-Cuban women, the impact of the use of social networks in activism for sexual and reproductive rights of people with non-heteronormative gender identities and sexual orientations, women’s use of information communication technology, racial variables in censuses in Cuba, and women in hip hop (Abd’Allah-Álvarez Ramírez).2 These spaces bring together a mix of online users who oftentimes transgress societal barriers of race, class and education levels to ventilate feminist issues and agitate for change as they join in online debates. The question, though, is how feminist academics in the region utilize these spaces in their knowledge production processes and in a way that engages users in those spaces as knowledge producers. This question has become relevant as it appears that there are some inherent deficiencies which exist within the profession of feminist research and development that create a divide between feminist academics and grassroots feminists, young feminists and older feminists, and feminists and people in the region who do not label themselves as feminist but engage publicly on issues that feminism also addresses. There is also the critique of feminist scholars and academics being separate from the grassroots, the people, the activists; and that theory and scholarship is abstract and has no real impact on Caribbean people. In addition, for those wanting to be involved with feminists during events, there appears to be a disconnection. For example, the One Billion Rising event held on Valentine’s Day 2013 was part of a global initiative adopted by mainstream feminist organizations and academics in the region. It was supposed to bring together persons advocating the end of violence against women, but according to a social media report, in some Caribbean countries only “those women . . . (with) big jobs” participated (Baldwin, “One Billion Rising”). This indicates the perception that feminist activities and dialogue are reserved for the “professional feminists”—the intellectuals—and are pitched at a certain level, therefore events which could have a significant impact on the society do not penetrate beyond those

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who are already aware of and are advocating for certain issues (Baldwin, “One Billion Rising”). For feminist researchers this separation produces objectification (Oakley 49). Diane Wolf argues that not only feminist scholars and researchers, but also the research process itself has the potential to result in power differences “in terms of who defines the research project . . . and the relationship between the researcher and the researched . . . and her data collection processes” (2). Hence we need to think “more deeply about how the research process itself is reproducing hierarchies—academic feminist versus activists and elite grassroots women versus other grassroots women—and creating the same kind of divides” that we should be working against (Peake and de Souza 113). Indeed, we need to have more flexibility about questions concerning what are suitable feminist methods and address how this divide perpetuates the lack of engagement of those women who are not academics and who do not engage in academic research because they “lack training in even the most basic of statistical analyses,” but who work with each other “to produce reliable and valid data” (Peake and de Souza 115–16). The diagrams below attempt to illustrate what we perceive as the regional state of relationships within and around the feminist community (Figure 10.1), as well as how these relationships ought to be (Figure 10.2). It is the first part of our roadmapping exercise. Figure 10.1 should not be taken as absolute but regarded as a general overview of the broken relationships among those who we consider important players in advancing the feminist agenda. We know that there is a growing number of young feminist academics involved in grassroots organizing and in the virtual communities across the region.3 However, while their work is

Regional Feminist Academics

Regional Grassroots Feminists

Virtual and other Social Activists & Local Community

Figure 10.1 Feminism as a top-down approach: working ‘on’ the local and grassroots levels instead of working ‘with’ them

Troubling our intersections 201

Local Community

Regional Feminist Academics

International Feminists Collaborative Efforts

Regional Grassroots Feminist

Virtual and other Social Activists

Figure 10.2 Feminism as collaborative and engaging

fundamental to further development, such engagement in the region is not yet on a large scale and in some instances the feminist engagement is not occurring consistently or strategically. We posit that current Caribbean feminist methods and strategies are not entirely reflective and engaging of our societies, as our organizing strategies and approaches are becoming normative, and in some ways marginalizing. This situation needs to be resisted. We need “to think more carefully about the research we do in terms of using it to construct more democratic practices of engagement and knowledge production” between all communities (Peake and de Souza 119). The point is that feminist theory and feminist methods of creating knowledge do not have to be created and designed exclusively in an academic setting and be subject to one type of peer review. Just as feminist theory attempts to resist and transcend the bonds of androcentric research methods, we can also resist becoming normative by attempting to bridge the gap between those who are perceived as knowledge producers and others in society. Understanding this means that we should be willing to re-evaluate existing epistemological, theoretical and methodological approaches to feminist scholarship in the region. We must do so to generate relevant and sustainable policies and practices that engage all facets of our society, the rest of the developing world and the diaspora; a feminist scholarship that is multidisciplinary and recognizes and appreciates differences; and that encourages engagement with alternative ways of creating knowledge. One such way to do so is to engage with the virtual community via social media.

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Social media: a potent force in feminist resistance Kaplan and Haenlin define social media as “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0 and that allow the creation and exchange of User Generated Content (UGC)” (61). This simple definition includes two key terms, Web 2.0 and UGC. Web 2.0 is a platform that allows the Internet to be used in a fashion “where content and applications are no longer created and published by individuals, but instead are continuously modified by all users in a participatory and collaborative fashion” (61). However, not every piece of content developed through participation and collaboration using the Internet can be considered social media. Such content according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development should meet the following three conditions: • • •

Public requirement: be published on a publicly accessible website or a social networking site accessible to a selected group of people; Creative effort: users must add their own value to the work or create their own work; Creation outside of professional routines and practices: it often does not have an institutional or a commercial market context; it may be produced by nonprofessionals without profit or remuneration. Motivating factors include connecting with peers, achieving a certain level of fame and the desire to express oneself (Wunsch-Vincent and Vickery 8).

This paper highlights the third condition, as it evaluates the contribution of “new voices” to the feminist dialogue. It also recognizes that academics including feminists use social media by sharing, creating, and distributing information, in essence blurring the distinction between the producers and consumers of information. That condition allows one to draw some inferences on the quality of UGC by noting the non-professional nature of the dialogue. Thus, social media may be free of academic jargon and greatly influenced by practical experience and personal context, making it more appealing to a wide audience and more approachable from a language perspective. Therefore it encourages the wider involvement of women in their varied experiences and more recorded expression of their resistance and protest against certain conditions, policies, and traditions that foster and implement inequality. In fact, social media provides a virtual soapbox for networks of communities, sometimes under (perceived) anonymity that allows for information generation and problem solving “by tapping into unique and rare expertise” and “gaining diverse insights and perspectives through discussion” (Bertot, Jaeger and Hansen 30). These multiplicities of users in their crisscrossing networks have the potential and perhaps are at the forefront of setting the agenda for public discourse within their interest groups. According to Ahlqvist et al. (3) social media applications

Troubling our intersections 203 have resulted in disruptions of traditional methods where social media channels are used as spaces for self-expression and grassroots activism. We note, though, that these channels are not democratically open or accessible and that a three-layered digital divide exists which puts limits on online engagement. These divides include a divergence in Internet access between developed and developing nations, in Internet access and use between classes and sections within a particular society, as well as differences in the nature and quality of use of the Internet and digital resources among users (Nayar 9). Traditionally, the press—both electronic and print mass media—has assumed a Fourth Estate role, holding “other institutions to account by reporting on their activities,” and in essence being an “influential independent force in liberal, pluralist democracies” (Newman, Dutton and Blank 15). Under this assumed responsibility, traditional media decided what should be highlighted, discussed, and viewed as important to national development. Academia borrows from this concept inasmuch as it selects its offering from within itself in part influenced by perceived needs of the community, which arguably are fed through traditional media. Social media offers a new way of selecting information, opinions and determining those needs where the end users are also providers of content (Newman, Dutton, and Blank 15). In essence, it pushes a new construct, the scaffolding upon which civic and academic society can build (Howard and Hussain 48). In fact, judging from the interaction and embracing of social media vis-à-vis traditional mass media, social media has the potential to redirect the flow of information gathering and agenda-setting methodologies. However, with regards to agenda setting, a potential drawback may stem from end users fighting to attract traffic and therefore choosing topics which they perceive as currently appealing. These choices may reflect what is already presented by the mass media and it may appear as if there is no expansion of the agenda-setting role to the communities. However, studies have found that traditional media’s agenda-setting power is no “longer universal or singular within citizen media outlets” as instead, the independent blog platform was “redistributing power between traditional media and citizen media” and traditional media agenda setting was “just one force among many competing influences” (Meraz 701). “The independent blog networks are utilizing the blog tool to allow citizens more influence and power in setting news agendas” (Meraz 701). Taking the above into consideration, content generated by end users will be self-reflective and social media brings once silent voices to the fore through a variety of platforms that create virtual soap-boxes to suit end users’ interests, maneuverability, age groups, income levels, needs, and geographic locations based on the availability of infrastructure. Platforms include social bookmarking, wikis, and blogs. Most people use at least two of these, especially bloggers who recognize an element of interdependence of these platforms and the importance of utilizing a mix to achieve their desired results.

204 Andrea N. Baldwin and Marva Cossy However, social media faces challenges which limit its potential. One of these is the digital divide which continues to be a constraint to the full democratization of information spread, accessibility and the expression of views across and within borders, ultimately affecting whether user-generated information is capturing an acceptable level of these end users. The divide must not only be seen within the context of accessibility of the communication network based on the communication infrastructure, but accessibility that focuses on education and income levels, as well as a minimum threshold of capability to use technology. Thus, the technological, social, economic, institutional, and legal drivers of user-generated content are all important considerations. In the Caribbean, social media has the potential, if harnessed, for political engagement “to enhance the quality of democratic culture and politics in the region” (Broome and Adugu 16). However, Broome and Adugu argue that within the region, this has not been the case given “a prohibitive ecology of regulatory and legislative policies, a nullifying media information infrastructure, the impact of a technological ecology, the lack of an institutional apparatus for corrective changes after activism, a culture of path dependency and a lack of civic and digital literacy” (16–17). Blogging Blogging, one of the social media platforms, has grown in popularity throughout the Caribbean and Africa, with feminist blogs like Code Red for Gender Justice attracting interest in a variety of topics posted on individual or group websites called blogs. These allow for self-expression through the posting of dated entries by the blogger (owner of the site) and the posting of reactions by the public. This collaboration can fuel debate that resists patriarchal power structures and has the potential of influencing governmental policy changes and, we argue, academic/ feminist discourse and theory, as well. The barriers of entry to this method are relatively low, as companies such as WordPress offer free blog space along with a range of technical support and regular tips on how to improve content with regards to visual and quality appeal. Bloggers, however, face challenges such as sites requiring regular updates to generate reaction from visitors/members, and improvements geared towards attracting traffic. The latter is made more complicated as the number of blogs and other social media offerings increases, putting demands on members’ time and threatening information fatigue among the public who face a daily avalanche of social media output. In addition, legal issues related to intellectual property and false information are relevant concerns of bloggers as they review the contributions of nonadministrator users. Moreover, governments and other state agencies in the Caribbean are becoming more watchful of the content on social media, and while this may be seen as a plus, allowing users’ output to creep into policy, it can constrain the flow of opinions and knowledge if it leads to self-censorship or new laws that limit self-expression (Griffen).

Troubling our intersections 205 The use of social media to improve our methods We have created a road-map of how social media could be integrated as a part of feminist research methodology to increase feminist collaboration within and eventually outside the region, and to “stir changes beyond the virtual sphere” (Ahlqvist et al. 3). We realize that utilizing social media may end the dichotomous element in the practice of feminist research and feminism in the region in that it “forms new kinds of user roles based on peer-to-peer activities. We also recognize that social media produces a collective knowledge base that can enhance feminist participation,” which creates some challenges that need to be addressed (Ahlqvist et al. 3). To further examine the possibility of using social media as a part of feminist methodology, our road-mapping exercise uses an example of a social media platform as our methodological tool. This work is in the early stages of research, several issues are unexplored and many questions unanswered. Consequently, this paper is an introduction of our ideas to the academy.

Road-mapping the use of social media in feminist research According to Ahlqvist et al., “road-maps are extended looks at the future of a chosen field(s) of inquiry; are composed of the collective knowledge and imagination of the drivers of change in a particular field; they communicate visions, stimulate investigations, monitor progress and form an inventory of possibilities of a particular field” (3). Road-mapping is an approach used mainly in business to align “technology and commercial perspectives, balancing market ‘pull’ and technology ‘push’ ” (Ahlqvist et al. 5). We see road-maps as suitable for examining how social media can be incorporated into feminist methodology, since they allow us to monitor the progress in the area under investigation by applying known information to perceived drivers of change. By doing so, roadmapping helps us to communicate projected outcomes and make adjustments to ensure a particular outcome, or make recommendations regarding a course of action based on a projected outcome. As such, we propose road-mapping to be an appropriate method to help determine the extent to which we can employ social media as a feminist methodology and predict what must be done to achieve its potential at the micro- and macro- levels. Researching the potential social media impact on feminism The following diagram (Figure 10.3), which we refer to as the synopsis of the meta-road-map, has been constructed by emphasizing two criteria. First, we wanted to combine examinations of feminism and technological issues in relation to an explicitly stated vision of the future—that is, to utilize social media as a feminist methodological tool. The idea is that the groups identified have a strong likelihood to produce the desired outcomes based on specific road-maps of each group identified. The meta-road-map describes potential relations among these

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Social Media Impact on Feminism (Social Media as a Feminist Methodological Tool)

Sub-Road-Map 1 Feminist Academy

Sub-Road-Map 2 Feminist Grassroots

Sub-Road-Map 3 Local Society

Sub-Road-Map 4 Developing World Feminism

Sub-Road Map 5 Virtual Activism

Sub-Road Map 6 MDGs

Specific Theme – More Inclusive Research Methods

Figure 10.3 Synopsis of the meta-road-map

groups, all deemed relevant to a future development of a feminist methodology using social media. A road-map will be created for each group, and each roadmap will in turn feed into the meta-road-map. The second criterion was to characterize the paths and possibilities of social media development within each group according to several themes outlined in sub-road-map 1. The road-maps for each theme should be approached as strategic pictures for creating deeper understanding of, and setting agendas for, the utilization of social media applications in these areas. It must be noted that these road-maps are not intended to be deterministic portrayals of the futures, i.e. we do not assume in advance that any of the visions or road-map explorations will be realized as such. In this chapter, we focus specifically on sub-road-map 1 (highlighted in Figure 10.3) and the specific theme of making social media a part of feminist methodology more inclusive. To develop the road-map we examined the most important transformations we would like to see in feminist methodology: which road-map levels—that is, what drivers, bottlenecks, enabling technologies, user needs, and role of communities—are affected by these transformations, and in what kinds of temporal sequences (present, mid-term, future)? What we are proposing is the use of social media to be employed within feminist methodology to improve the way research is conducted so that it is more inclusive and far-reaching. Using the road-mapping technique, this paper demonstrates how social media and the virtual social space/forum can be utilized toward the development of Caribbean feminist theorizing as well as collaborative theorizing with other developing countries. We also examine its role in addressing some of the issues which continue to plague feminist methodology, including the divide between those researched and researchers, the use and structure of research instruments and language which is not universal, the structure of the peer review process, and the perception of feminist studies as a top-down ‘girls club.’ Specifically, we propose that social media can help overcome four problems that feminism in the region is perceived to experience:

Troubling our intersections 207 • • • •

The divide between feminist academy and the grassroots; The general divide between Caribbean people and the feminist academy; The limited engagement between feminists in the ‘developing’ world; Reaching the Millennium Development Goal as regards gender.

In addition to the road-map, we will also be detailing the experience we have had in managing our blog Feminist Aliens, which seeks to engage the virtual community, particularly feminists in the Caribbean and the rest of the developing world, on gender and developing world issues. Since its start in 2013, we have explored several topics including those focusing on teaching gender studies in a women’s prison, the activism of black feminism, migration, and sexism in sport. Feminist road-mapping It is to be noted that our road-map coverage should be read as ideal types of transformations. In order to be realized in some societal or organizational contexts they would require a pervasive infrastructure of Information Communications Technology (ICT), a critical mass of engaged users and contributors, and an open, transparent,and horizontal communication culture. Nevertheless, we consider it important to map out the potential effects in order to widen our intellectual and practical horizons on these issues. In addition, we are still in the process of researching and collecting information and anticipate that, as the process continues, more information will be added. Drivers The most important present driver for this particular theme is the desire for recognition by feminist academics. This need for recognition and to remain or become relevant can also lead to the development of new research methods that utilize social media. Other drivers are tied to the changing nature of societal participation that is triggered by the emergence of social media enabled user communities. Societal participation, as we define it here, refers to the growing possibilities to participate, that is, to communicate, comment, and elaborate ideas. Bottlenecks Trust is seen as the key bottleneck in the present social media domain. Generally, in order to utilize social media applications, one should trust the presented information and the members of the respective communities. Trust is also linked to identity management: users need to be sure that their identities are not abused or contorted. Legislation may be a critical bottleneck that blocks the application of innovations and the sharing of information freely. There is also the issue of spam and viruses as well as questions related to privacy and fear of personal information abuse like identity theft and stalking.

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Table 10.1 Sub-road-map 1 – feminist academy, theme 1 – more inclusive research methods Social Media Impact on Feminism: Sub-Road-Map 1 – Feminist Academy Theme 1 – More Inclusive Research Methods Drivers

• The need for recognition – to remain or become relevant in the field • Growing use and knowledge of social media • The ability to combine various social medias

Bottlenecks

• • • • • • • • • • • •

Enabling Technologies

• Further increase in societal participation in social media • Greater access to online technologies • Reduce costs of internet technologies • Greater virtual activism by ordinary citizens • Increase in cyber feminist blogging

Rigidity of the peer review system Resistance to change Trust Information overload Blogging fatigue Legislation Spam and viruses Personal information abuse Information verification Access Generating interest Fragmentation

• Smart phones • Laptops • Various social media platforms, e.g. Blogs, Wikis, social networks • Portable data storage and data mining capabilities

V

I

S

• Future technological inventions and improvements

O

N

User Needs

• Social media platforms and interaction with the communities of interest for collaboration • Personalized sharing interfaces • Visibility and privacy control mechanisms • Multiple devices with networking capability • A structure or proposal on how to go about research using social media

Role of Feminist Academia

• Move from traditional research to a combination of traditional and experimental research using social media • Engage in online communities • Develop activities and projects and ask for feedback using social media • Engage the multiple communities with multiple perspectives • Work in collaboration to find out what are the pertinent issues which need to be addressed Present

Mid-term

I

Long-term

Troubling our intersections 209 From working on our blog, we also noted other bottlenecks such as blogging fatigue, fragmentation, and information verification. The virtual world contains several social media sites that purport to represent the issues which we addressed, and against whom we ‘compete’ for readership; therefore we are constantly searching for ways to present appealing blog posts and pages. We have found that most of our blog visitors preferred shorter, punchy stories with images and videos, but are less enthusiastic about jargon-filled posts. To remain relevant and increase our readership and interaction we found that we have to churn out interesting or agenda-setting ‘virtual articles’ rapidly and consistently. This has led to blogging fatigue and increased emotional, intellectual, and physical pressure as we aim for accuracy, relevance, and timeliness. Achieving those ideals, however, does not guarantee collaboration between the blog editors-cum-researchers, and our visitors/members, neither does it result in an improvement in the quality and quantity of comments. What we found helped to drive traffic to the blog was pairing it with other social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter, which stirred interest towards our much longer articles after we posted ‘teasers’ on these platforms. While we are yet to rigorously investigate the cause for this, we believe that the popularity of Facebook and Twitter may be linked to their shortened form of presentation, the use of pictures and their appeal to the younger generation, who are said to be more drawn to social media than the older generation. Enabling technologies The most important enabling technologies of social media are blogs, wikis, and discussion platforms; web technologies supporting simple methods of feedback, such as rating and commenting, are already utilized widely. Many social media applications utilize data mining, like social network analysis, sentiment analysis, and analysis of content in services. Data mining is common as a means of interpreting the massive amounts of information circulating in communities. In the future, it is anticipated that mobile devices will play a greater enabling role due to improved usability, screens, and longer battery life, which will result in a deeper level of connectivity. This is good news given the increasing number of people who own such devices, especially phones and tablets, for it speaks to a narrowing of the digital divide and heightens the opportunity for constant collaboration, which increases combinatory and substance-based political approaches and participation in empowerment. Such empowerment is reflexive, that is, it is usually based on some substance or issue as well as on temporary coalitions that engage in dialogue on the topic (Beck et al. 207). User needs Currently social media provides tools for most users, including the differently abled, to communicate and to exchange opinions and experiences. User needs will differ depending on the focus of the research. Controlling one’s visibility and

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privacy are critical user needs when working online. The need to contextualize and localize information is also important. Also, device-orientation will decrease substantially and the need to control visibility and privacy will increase. Role of feminist academia The role of feminist academia in the use of social media as a methodology will be to create and become involved in virtual communities. Currently, communities are often formed informally over time when people connect with others of similar interests and ambitions. Members shift towards the core if they have long-term interests in the community’s principal focus. It is pivotal to apply communities as feedback and reviewing pools, but also as trust-based networks to back up research, development and innovation. It should be noted that social media generally accentuates the substance orientation, immediateness and spontaneity of political activity, which could also be the substance of feminist research and could be a catalyst for societal participation. It therefore has the potential of returning feminism to its political roots, removing the—real or perceived–notion that it has become academia-centered. As mentioned earlier, an important bottleneck is trust. This may be reflected in attitudes towards the use of social media in research-information gathering, agenda setting, and peer review activities. Feminist academics are likely to be cautious regarding social media as a threat to the integrity of their research; therefore, it can be argued that adoption of these tools requires a specific transparency tolerance from feminist academia. The fact is that virtual communities are an easy way to reach people, to discover their issues and organize relevant and all-embracing dialogues.

Conclusion Our research has helped us to recognize the theoretical potential of social media as a methodological tool, underlining its ability to widen knowledge production and to be more inclusive of all intersections in our cultural and historical context. Social media can therefore inform and contribute to a more inclusive practice of feminist research and academic work in the region. It can help to trouble the intersections of feminist epistemology, in the Caribbean and beyond, and, consequently, inform future research that might in turn inform policy and affect community interaction and change. The possibilities are varied and so are the constraints, including the geographical, economic, cultural, and technical ones and those related to competence and physical ability. These constraints may serve as bottlenecks to the possibilities for research offered by social media. However, to further understand the possibilities of social media as a methodological tool we will need to conduct empirical investigation on the identified drivers. Our next step is to conduct interviews with administrators of Caribbean blogs which address feminist issues to learn more about their motivations, social media

Troubling our intersections 211 techniques and perceived social impacts. We recognize that our bias as academics and as researchers and our proximity to the knowledge production process has the potential to result in the same actions which we attribute to feminist researchers generally (Harding and Norberg 2012). That is, due to the symbiotic nature of media and community, we run the risk of framing some of the issues for the social media communities we intend to analyze, hence feeding off of an already set agenda instead of allowing the community to frame the issues which they want to discuss. We intend to move forward, conscious of these issues and the need to bring balance to our future research.

Notes 1 2 3

Their projects include “Uses of the Erotic Poetry Workshop” and an ongoing “Gender in Caribbean Advertising” project (Feminist Conversations). On cyberfeminism and feminist blogs in Cuba, see also Sandra Abd’Allah-Álvarez Ramírez’s contribution to this volume. The administrator of the blog Code Red is a temporary lecturer at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus. Others include Cuban Sandra Abd’Allah-Álvarez Ramírez, who studied Psychology at the University of Havana (1996) and holds a master’s degree in Gender Studies (2008) as well as a degree in Gender and Communication from the International Institute of Journalism José Martí. Trinidadian Stephanie Leitch, co-director of Womantra, led the February 2016 march calling for the removal of the then Mayor of Port-of-Spain for his statements in response to the murder of Japanese steel pan player Asami Nagakiya. These and other Caribbean feminist scholars are engaging in online feminist work that directly advances social justice in the Caribbean.

Works cited Abd’Allah-Álvarez Ramírez, Sandra. Negra Cubana Tenía Que Ser. negracubanateniaq ueser.com. Accessed November 21, 2016. Ahlqvist, Toni, Asta Bäck, Sirkka Heinonen, and Minna Halonen. “Road-mapping the Societal Transformation Potential of Social Media.” Foresight, vol. 12, no. 5, 2010, pp. 3–26. Anderson, Elizabeth. “Feminist Epistemology: An Interpretation and a Defense.” Hypatia, vol. 10, no. 3, 1995, pp. 50–84. ——. “Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science.” The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (Fall 2015 Edition), edited by Edward N. Zalta, plato.stanford.edu/ archives/fall2015/entries/feminism-epistemology/. Accessed November 5, 2016. Baksh-Soodeen, Rawwida. “Is There an International Feminism?” Alternative Approach, vol. 24, 1993, pp. 22–32. Baldwin, Andrea. N. Investigating Power in the Anglophone Caribbean Middle Class: Ideologies and Love as Power – Barbados as a Case Study. Dissertation, U of the West Indies Cave Hill, 2012. ——. “Feminist Aliens, Memoirs from the Margins: A Caribbean ‘Feminist’s’ Experience in Western Feminism.” Theoretical Practice, vol. 4, no. 10, 2013, pp. 17–40. ——. “One Billion Rising: Solidarity or segregation?” Feminist Aliens, February 25, 2013. Barriteau Foster, V. Eudine. “The Construct of a Postmodernist Feminist Theory for Caribbean Social Science Research.” Social and Economic Studies, vol. 41, no. 2, 1992, pp. 1–43.

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Barriteau, Eudine. “Confronting Power, Theorizing Gender in the Commonwealth Caribbean.” Confronting Power, Theorizing Gender: Interdisciplinary Perspectives in the Caribbean, edited by Barriteau. U of the West Indies P, 2003, pp. 1–24. Beck, Ulrich, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash. Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Polity P, 1994. Bertot, John C., Paul T. Jaeger, and Derek Hansen. “The Impact of Polices on Government Social Media Usage: Issues, Challenges, and Recommendations.” Government Information Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 1, 2012, pp. 30–40. Broome, Pearson, and Emmanuel Adugu. “Whither Social Media for Digital Activism: the Case of the Caribbean.” British Journal of Education, Society and Behavioural Science, vol. 10, no. 3, 2015, pp. 1–21. Sciencedomain, doi:10.9734/BJESBS/2015/18733. Accessed November 5, 2016. Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Secretariat. “CARICOM ICT Statistics and Indicators, 2000-2012.” CARICOM, 2014, caricom.org/store/caricom-ict-statistics-and-indicators2000–2012. Accessed November 5, 2016. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Routledge, 2000. Consalvo, Mia. “Cyberfeminism.” Encyclopedia of New Media, edited by Steve Jones, SAGE, 2002, pp. 109–10. SAGE Reference Online, study.sagepub.com/sites/default/ files/Ch17_Cyberfeminism.pdf. Accessed November 5, 2016. Cook, Judith A., and Mary Margaret Fonow. “Knowledge and Women’s Interests: Issues of Epistemology and Methodology in Feminist Sociological Research.” Sociological Inquiry, vol. 56, no. 1, 1986, pp. 2–29. Wiley Online Library, doi:10.1111/j.1475682X.1986.tb00073.x. Accessed November 5, 2016. Dowrich-Phillips, Laura. “Women Seek Mayor Tim Kee’s Removal.” Loop Trinidad and Tobago, February 16, 2016, www.looptt.com/content/women-march-tim-kees-officeprotest. Accessed November 5, 2016. Daniels, Jessie. “Rethinking Cyberfeminism(s): Race, Gender, and Embodiment.” Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 1–2, 2009, pp. 101–124. Feminist Conversations on Caribbean Life. Code Red for Gender Justice, redforgender. wordpress.com/about/. Accessed November 5, 2016. Foddy, William. Constructing Questions for Interviews and Questionnaires: Theory and Practice and Social Research. Cambridge UP, 1993. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Translated by Robert Hurley, vol. 1. Random House, 1998. Goldberg, Michelle. “Feminist Writers Are So Besieged by Online Abuse that Some Have Begun to Retire.” Washington Post, February 20, 2015, www.washingtonpost.com/ opinions/online-feminists-increasingly-ask-are-the-psychic-costs-too-much-to-bear/ 2015/02/19/3dc4ca6c-b7dd-11e4-a200-c008a01a6692_story.html. Accessed November 5, 2016. Griffen, Scott. “Grenada Electronic Defamation Bill now Law, despite Government Promise.” International Press Institute, January 27? 2014, ontheline.freemedia.at/ grenada-electronic-defamation-bill-now-law-despite-government-promise/. Accessed November 5, 2016. Groundation Grenada. Groundation Grenada, 2016, groundationgrenada.com/. Accessed November 5, 2016. Haraway, Donna. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” Socialist Review, no. 80, 1985, pp. 65–108.

Troubling our intersections 213 Harding, Sandra. “Introduction: Is There a Feminist Method?” Feminism and Methodology, edited by Sandra Harding. Indiana UP, 1987, pp. 1–14. ——, and Kathryn Norberg. “New Feminist Approaches to Social Science Methodologies: An Introduction.” Signs, vol. 30, no. 4, 2005, pp. 2009–2015. Hollander, Jocelyn A., and Rachel L. Einwohner. “Conceptualizing Resistance.” Sociological Forum, vol. 19, no. 4, 2004, pp. 533–54. Howard, Philip N., and Muzammil M. Hussain. “The Role of Digital Media.” Journal of Democracy, vol. 22, no. 3, 2011, pp. 35–48. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/jod.2011.0041. Accessed November 5, 2016. Jayaratne, Toby Epstein, and Abigail J. Stewart. “Quantitative and Qualitative Methods in the Social Sciences.” Beyond Methodology: Feminist Scholarship as Lived Research, edited by Mary Margaret Fonow and Judith A. Cook. Indiana UP, 1991, pp. 85–106. Kaplan, Andreas M., and Michael Haenlein. “Users of the World, Unite! The Challenges and Opportunities of Social Media.” Business Horizons, vol. 53, no. 1, 2010, pp. 59–68. Lazreg, Marnia. “Feminism and Difference: the Perils of Writing as a Woman on Women in Algeria.” Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 1, 1988, pp. 81–107. Lopez Springfield, Consuelo. Daughters of Caliban: Caribbean Women in the Twentieth Century. Indiana UP, 1997. Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing P, 1984. McCall, Leslie. “The Complexity of Intersectionality.” Signs, vol. 30, no. 3, 2005, pp. 1771–800. Meraz, Sharon. “Is There an Elite Hold? Traditional Media to Social Media Agenda Setting Influence in Blog Networks.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol. 14, no. 3, 2009, pp. 682–707. Wiley Online Library, doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2009.01458.x. Accessed November 5, 2016. Mohammed, Patricia. “Towards Indigenous Feminist Theorizing in the Caribbean.” Feminist Review, no. 59, 1998, pp. 6–33. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Boundary 2, vol. 12, no. 3, 1984, pp. 333–58. Nayar, Pramod K. “An Introduction to New Media and Cyberculture.” Web. November 27, 2015. Also available in Nayar, Pramod K. An Introduction to New Media and Cyberculture. Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Newman, Nic, William H. Dutton, and Grant Blank. “Social Media in the Changing Ecology of News: The Fourth and Fifth Estate in Britain.” International Journal of Internet Science, vol. 7, no. 1, 2012, pp. 6–22. ——. “Social Media in the Changing Ecology of News Production and Consumption: The Case in Britain.” International Journal of Internet Science, vol. 7, no. 1, 2012, pp. 6–22, www.ijis.net/ijis7_1/ijis7_1_newman_et_al_v1.pdf. Accessed November 5, 2016. Oakley, Ann. Subject Women. Martin Robertson, 1981. Peake, Linda, and Karen de Souza. “Feminist Academic and Activist Praxis in Service of the Transnational.” Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis, edited by Richa Nagar and Amanda Lock Swarr. SUNY P, 2010, pp. 105–23. Reddock, Rhoda. “Conceptualizing ‘Difference’ in Caribbean Feminist Theory.” New Caribbean Thought: A Reader, edited by Brian Meeks and Folke Lindahl. U of the West Indies P, 2001, pp. 196–209. Rubin, Jeffrey W. “Defining Resistance: Contested Interpretations of Everyday Acts.” Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, vol. 15, 1995 pp. 237–60. Silvera, Makeda. Silenced: Makeda Silvera Talks with Working Class Caribbean Women about their Lives and Struggles as Domestic Workers in Canada. Sister Vision, 1989.

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Smith, R.T. Kinship and Class in the West Indies: A Genealogical Study of Jamaica and Guyana. Cambridge UP, 1988. subRosa. http://cyberfeminism.net/about/manifesto/. Accessed November 5, 2016. Walking into Walls. www.facebook.com/WalkingIntoWalls/. Accessed November 5, 2016. Womantra. womantratt.wix.com/home#!blog/c1c8y. Accessed November 21, 2016. Wunsch-Vincent, Sacha, and Graham Vickery. “Participative Web-user Created Content: Web 2.0, Wikis, and Social Networking.” Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Working Party on the Information Economy. OECD/OCDE 2007. OECD Publishing, 2007. OECD Library, doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264037472-en. Accessed November 5, 2016. Yeatman, Anna. Postmodern Revisionings of the Political. Routledge, 1994.

11 Practices of resistance and cyberfeminism in Cuba Sandra Abd’Allah-Álvarez Ramírez

Introduction One of the latest expressions of feminism in Cuba is women’s growing interest in the access and subversive use of information and communication technology (ICT). On the one hand, the emergence and development of ICT has challenged women to be highly creative in developing new forms of relation between themselves and the technology. On the other hand, feminism, as a school of thought and a social movement, has had similar implications for the development of the critical attitudes of women who mistrust the strict norms of consumption as well as practices and relations prescribed by patriarchy. In other words, the creative feminist appropriation of these technologies in the digital realm, while offering new meanings and significations, makes visible the paradigm of equality for women that is known as cyberfeminism. The term was coined by Josephine Strarrs, Juliane Pierce, Francesca da Rimini, and Virginia Barrat, members of the Australian group VNS Matrix, with the publication of the “Cyberfeminist Manifesto of the 21st Century” in 1991 (Strarrs et al.), inspired by Donna Haraway’s concept of the cyborg as a liberatory figure.1 Since then, cyberfeminists have envisioned the subversion of patriarchal dominance and women’s subordination. At the same time, cyberfeminists have revealed the divides in terms of the utilization of ICT in relation to aspects such as gender, race, geopolitical location, and class.2 Moreover, artistic-creative projects are being carried out (inspired by Art.net) alongside the integration of women in comfortable nets, far out from sexism and misogyny, resulting in the struggle against gender violence. Even if the term cyberfeminism has no unequivocal definition, it is obvious that it serves as an umbrella term for a whole range of women’s experiences in relation to technology and communication as well as digital art and other manifestations that use the Internet. These experiences speak of practices of resistance that in many ways express mistrust in the established notion that women and technology do not go well together. As a blogger, I align myself with cyberfeminism in all its variations. In fact, for me personally, it has been the reason that made me want to ‘dominate’ the new technologies beyond being just a user of them. That is why, in 2006, I launched

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my blog Negra cubana tenía que ser (it had to be a Black Cuban woman) and dedicated myself to learning about other content and roles related to the Internet— not only as author, but also as webmaster or in the areas of SEO (search engine optimization) and social networks.

The challenge of getting online in Cuba Cuban society draws from a remarkable technological tradition, which becomes apparent in the use of ICT with a social purpose, particularly in the fields of health and education. Likewise, the Internet has augmented the number of alternative voices which have blown up the traditional paradigms of power—on an island where it is a daily struggle to get connection to the Internet. According to the Internet World Stats (IWS) for June 2014, the Internet access index in Cuba was at 28% (IWS) [2016: 33.6%, note by the translator]. In 2014, out of the total population of 11,047,251 persons, 3,090,796 were Internet users. The island is inhabited by 18 % of the Caribbean region’s population and has the second lowest Internet access index after Haiti. In 2015, the estimated population of the Caribbean was 42,108,083, of which 17,655,462 used the Internet according to the data of the same year. The Internet access index for the entire Caribbean was 41.9 % in 2015 [2016: 43.7%, note by the translator]. There were 9,721,980 Facebook [2016: 10,972, note by the translator] users in the region, which equals an Internet access index of 23.1 % (IWS). There are several reasons for the low connectivity rate in Cuba. Initially, access to the Internet was highly regulated by the government. Only in determined sectors, such as the committee of journalists who work in official media, was the creation and the use of blogs encouraged and granted. Outside these circles, the blogs were demonized and not well esteemed, and many were considered as counter-revolutionary or dissident. According to author and feminist blogger Yasmín Silvia Portales Machado, the first wave of blogs that were operated from Cuba emerged in 2005 and were created by journalists who received the official order to do so. Official employment in media and communication in Cuba has the advantage to provide an Internet connection at home. However, these mentioned blogs reproduced the ways in which things had traditionally been done in the print media. This fact provided evidence that the peculiarities of the Web 2.0 were not understood, since the mentality of print media was applied to the digital, an environment heretofore quite unknown. The result was a remarkable lack of creativity, spontaneity and freshness in the incipient Cuban blogosphere. Moreover, the high degree of interactivity of the Web 2.0 and the direct user responses to the postings (for example through commentaries) were not fully considered. Thus, in many spaces, a one-directional flow of communication was established, which in some cases meant censorship. Arguably, these two aspects, amongst others, led to the result that some of the blogs were not able to survive the first year of existence. Beyond these particularities, they expressed the incompetence of the blogs’ operators to deal with the cyber environment.

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On the other hand, the practice called “blog to blogs” became very common, which refers to blogs that were dedicated strictly to reproducing what was already posted in other blogs. As Milena Recio makes clear: “A blog that is constructed from fragments of other texts taken from other authors does not have the same blogger sex appeal as the ones based on the entries of their operator, telling everyday things and commenting on them.” The situation today is different (Recio; Portales Machado). Despite the issue of connection conditions in the country, many Cubans have found a niche for the expression of their multiple interests, with the result that the once professional net has been converted into another public expression of civil society. Among the interests expressed online are also those of the so-called minority groups whose members make use of this platform. One could for example mention the blogs of the project Arcoiris (Rainbow), the platform Voces Cubanas (Cuban Voices), or the blog Afromodernidades (Afromodernities). The Cuban blogosphere, Elaine Díaz and Yudivian Almeida argue, “starts incorporating discourses that claim sexual freedom, respect for gender identities and the condemnation of all forms of racism as part of an emerging engagement in a public sphere of discussion by the social actors who are usually ignored.” Meanwhile, journalist Sara Más Farías notes that “the networks of journalists also do function differently with respect to the journalistic initiatives or information agencies with a gender focus, or which are based on an affiliation to feminism.” To this Recio adds: “Some are nets of exchange; others are projects of communication and cannot be considered from the same point of departure.” In June 2015, Wi-Fi-zones were established in Cuba—or, rather, spaces where it is possible to connect to the Internet from mobile devices.3 A number of 35 zones of wireless connection were established in the country. By November 2015, Cuba had 55 wireless access points, all liable to fees and situated either in hotels or designated public zones in the open. One hour of connection costs 2.50 CUC.4 To date, there are no known studies that measure the impact this new possibility of Internet access has on activism in Cuba. However, this opportunity has revolutionized the field of communication on the island, since common citizens can access the Internet without limitations at most of these sites without having to use the connection at the workplace, where access had hitherto been more frequent, and which continues to be one of the basic means of access.5 Nevertheless, due to the high costs and the comparatively uncomfortable conditions of connection, it seems that the recent opening of the Internet in Cuba does not yet impact directly on activism, at least not on cyberfeminism and the open denunciation of gender violence. In fact, it is assumed that the majority of people who go online dedicate most of their time to communicating with their families abroad via the application IMO that is providing free video calls and chats. Moreover, the most highly frequented social network seems to be Facebook. However, both of these assumptions have not yet been verified by empirical data.

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Cuban women on the rise . . . also on the web Their indisputable integration in the contemporary society of the island and the country’s work force has confronted Cuban women with some challenges, but more importantly with enduring gains. As we have seen, the conditions for Internet access are not ideal in Cuba; however, there are groups of Cuban women, predominantly journalists and communicators (professionals who have been enjoying cost-free and sometimes unregulated Internet access from their workplaces and sometimes even from their homes for a longer time), but also activists, who have used the web to express their concerns about different topics based on their own experiences as women. The study of Aguaya et al. reveals that about one third of Cuban bloggers are women, which reaffirms the factual incorporation of Cuban women into the Internet. The authors emphasize that “the result is no surprise, since Cuban women already enjoy much superior nominal rights than the majority of their peers in Iberoamerica, and high social and economic participation. Moreover, women have been pioneers of the Cuban blogosphere” (qtd. in Portales Machado). Consequently, various blogs and digital spaces propose the full integration of Cuban women in the mentioned environment, which has not ceased to be marked by its own particularities: the difficulties concerning the access to the Internet on the island have resulted in the fact that the majority of feminist voices of the ‘blogosphere’ are highly qualified professionals from the fields of culture, communication, journalism, science, and technology, or university students as part of the fields privileged by the government through social access to the web. (Portales Machado) Furthermore, in the same way as it happens in the (offline) public sphere in Cuba, when going online it is up to the women, too, to speak about and on behalf of themselves. In the blogs written by Cuban women, their own life stories flourish, whether they are marked by a feminist deconstruction of their meanings or not. On my blog Negra cubana tenía que ser I have written about sexual diversity and the choice of topics in blogging. I have argued that it is very unlikely to find a post on parenthood, family relations, or on questions related to femininity among the entries generated by Cuban male bloggers. While the women comment on all sexual preferences, men tend to talk only about their homosexual experience. While women voice their opinion about family and social problems, men concentrate on their sexual rights. Women debate male homosexuality and the use of condoms, but men do not mention lesbians or talk about abortion (Abd’AllahÁlvarez Ramírez). Although only a while ago it was almost impossible to address and deal with topics such as women’s subordination in Cuban society and the related struggle for their rights (Recio), today some blogs put the patriarchal system under scrutiny by examining the problems strongly associated with traditional paradigms of gender relations.

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Yes, ciberfeminism in Cuba But which spaces are we talking about? Yasmín Silvia Portales Machado identifies at least 88 blogs run by women in Cuba that show a certain accentuation of women’s issues and some sort of gender agenda. She sorts these bogs into four different categories: 1) blogs emphasizing women’s contribution in their work places; 2) blogs debating sexual or reproductive health and family conflicts; 3) blogs giving testimony to everyday life in the country; and, 4), spaces of selfconscious feminism, openly expressing this commitment (Portales). In the following, I focus exclusively on the blogs that belong to the last category. The writers and/or users of these blogs not only self-identify openly and publicly as feminists, but they also consider the Internet a valid space for constructing a just social order for women. These blogs are: • • • •

•

• •

Letra con género (letter with gender) by Isabel Moya (letracongenero. bitacoras.com) Inés Maria Martiatu. Literatura afrocubana (Afro-Cuban literature) by Inés M. Martiatu (inesmartiatu.blogspot.com) Mi vida es un fino equilibrio (My life is a thin balance) by Yasmín Silvia Portales Machado (yasminsportales.wordpress.com) Género y cultura (Gender and culture), edited by Helen Hernández Hormilla and operated by the coordination group of the program Género y Cultura (generoycultura.wordpress.com) Afrocubanas (Afro-Cuban women), edited by Inés M. Martiatu and operated by the collective of Afro-Cuban women Afrocubanas (afrocubanas.wordpress. com) NaranjeARTE: Yo digo NO a la violencia (Become Orange: I say NO to violence) (naranjearte.wordpress.com) Asamblea feminista (Feminist assembly), edited by Helen Hernández Hormilla, Zaida Capote Cruz, and Lirians Gordillo Piña (asambleafeminista. wordpress.com)

Cyberfeminism implies the subversion of masculine domination through the creative use of ICT and the analysis of its impact on women. In Cuba, expressions of this kind have been concentrating on using the Internet as a practical tool— which is a characteristic also of other Latin American cyberfeminisms (Flores). The following sections introduce the aforementioned blogs, foregrounding their principal particularities and taking a closer look at the feminist agenda of some of them. Letra con género (letracongenero.bitacoras.com/) The author of this first feminist Cuban blog, Isabel Maya Richard, is a well-known Cuban intellectual, journalist, and director of the publishing house Editorial de la Mujer. Letra con género, was founded in 2005 with only two posts. Nevertheless, this blog has been a pioneer in paving the way for the opening of other spaces,

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which has been its fundamental contribution.6 Currently, this blog is not accessible. It is possible that it has been deleted due to its inactivity. Inés Maria Martiatu, Literatura afrocubana (inesmartiatu.blogspot.com) This blog is one of the oldest ones edited by a woman on the island. The first post appeared in December 2006 and its creation has inspired me to create the blog Negracubana tenía que ser. The author, Inés Marúa Martiatu (Lalita), was a productive essayist, fiction author, and editor. Her 16 published books speak about her important work for the remembrance and visibility of the Black intelligentsia’s contribution to the national culture. Lalita’s professional interests ranged from theater and music to Cuban history, a diversity that is reflected in the sections of her personal blog. Inés María Martiatu dedicated herself to Black feminism and Afro-Feminismo, and she analyzed the artistic and cultural facts in all her contributions based on these feminisms as main references. During the last years she has developed a very new thesis recognizing the prime contribution of Afro-Cuban women to feminist thinking and activism. Although she was without access to the Internet for four years, Inés María operated this blog with the help of various women from inside and outside Cuba, until she started dedicating herself to the creation of the book and the blog Afrocubanas, on which I will elaborate in the following. Mi vida es un fino equilibrio (yasminsportales.wordpress.com) In May 2015, Yasmín Silvia Portales Machado moved the blog she had created in 2005 from Blogspot to Wordpress. The name of the blog is now the phrase with which she used to describe her blog when it was still located on Blogspot: Mi vida es un fino equilibrio. En 2310 y 8225 is another blog that Yasmín Silvia Portales Machado has been writing and operating since 2007. Already the headline reveals her principal political intention as a queer (Marxist) feminist: “[t]o live in Cuba and be queer has been a matter of choice. My life is a thin balance between the exercise of maternity, feminism, and critical Marxism” (Portales Machado, En 2310 y 8225). Before writing her personal blog, Portales Machado has operated other spaces such as Palabras robadas (stolen words), where she posts homoerotic (science fiction and other) narratives. Her blogs En 2310 y 8225 and the current Mi vida es un fino equilibrio provide evidence of this blogger’s interest in neighboring fields such as sexual diversity and philosophy. One of her entries “Pulsar en negativo” (literally: Beating negatively) is in my opinion one of the most subversive statements on maternity that has been written in Cuba. The author explicitly addresses tabooed topics such as the ambiguous experience of motherhood, which are highly provocative in a society that praises mothers as saints and advocates for full dedication of mothers to their children: “I think it all comes down to the fact that I have been living three months without an orgasm, they pinched my

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belly and now I’m sharing the room with an alien that doesn’t speak my language and for which I’m totally responsible . . .” For Yasmín Silvia Portales Machado the two fundamental elements of cyberfeminism are “the feminist exercise of valorizing everyday life” and the employment of new technologies “as a space for the articulation of political activism” (Portales Machado, qtd. in Más Farías). “Doing more with less” is this blogger’s premise. Facing the missing direct Internet connection, she makes the best use of electronic mail for the distribution of her ideas and personal opinions. “For many it is an outdated tool, but for the digital community in Cuba, it is a basic way of communication” (Portales Machado, qtd. in Más Farías). And it is through this means that she updates her blogs, confronted with the impossibility of accessing them directly. However, as identity processes are quite difficult and at times inexplicable, when asked if she is a cyberfeminist, this blogger replies as follows: Cyberfeminist? No. I’m a Marxist feminist, I believe that discriminations (based on race, religion, capability, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity and so on) are (in the beginning intuitive) mechanisms of the dominant class in order to maintain their power. I think that it is about dismantling the material control over the means of production and the social models that justify exclusion all at once, or the cat bites its own tail. I relate critically to the discourses on the use of technology (that it has no ideology, that it is natural for men and so on), but I’m far from being an active user of technology. For me this is what it is: capable of analyzing a code in order to modify it in a way that it responds to my interests; capable at least to solve my own problems with the PC . . . Of course, I reflect on women’s presence on the internet, but it’s a derivation from the Marxist feminist obsession with the social use of technology . . . I take the perspective that the internet is another expression of the ‘public space’ and we have to make our presence visible, women’s contribution (in content, form, pure technology), and the mechanisms through which we intend to keep out the sexism that is pre-existing in the physical public space. I’m a Marxist feminist who looks attentively at cyberspace. Nothing else. After closely following her evolution as a blogger from 2007 until today, I nevertheless have no doubt that the blogger constitutes a cyberfeminist also due to her creative use of ICT. This is further emphasized when observing that her other blog, Palabras robadas, has become an expression of artistic cyberfeminism, in this case writing. What is more, it is worth mentioning that she positions herself according to her sexual and gender identity in order to express her criticism about other issues. Género y cultura (generoycultura.wordpress.com) This is a blog of a certain peculiarity, since it was born out of the program Género y Cultura, which brought together various individuals, institutions and NGOs

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during the consolidation of a space of reflection and debate called “Mirar desde la sospecha” (Looking from suspicion).7 Coordinated by the critic Danae C. Diéguez and the journalists Helen Hernández Hormilla and Lirians Gordillo Piña, “Mirar desde la sospecha” for two years provided monthly debates that promoted the analysis of problems related to gender in the artistic and cultural realm. The commitment to incorporate this critique in the reflection on arts and literature has been one of the constant concerns. The blog, of which Helen Hernández Hormilla has been in charge, proposes a “Feminist View at Cuban Culture” in its headline. It has functioned as a digital stage for the motivations and reflections that took place in the principal debates which summed up each session of “Mirar desde la sospecha.” Likewise, the dates for each meeting have been uploaded, as well as comments about certain artistic-cultural realities in the country. Since April 2012 this blog has not been updated. As a virtual space linked to a non-virtual one, with the conclusion of the first part of “Mirar desde la sospecha,” the blog is currently in stand-by mode until the project will be continued. Afrocubanas (afrocubanas.wordpress.com) Black women intellectuals and artists. Among them are authors, photographers, historians, storytellers, plastic artists, university professors, journalists, poets, rappers, and editors. On the basis of their experiences as afro-descendants, these women contribute to and diversify this digital space, a site on which they publish their writings, promote their works and where, eventually, their contributions to Cuban culture are made visible and are visualized. Without being a feminist collective, but uniting at its core Cuban women of diverse interests, Afrocubanas provides an example of women coming together for a common good. The joint interest was the personal project by Inés María Martiatu. The blog crystalizes the necessity of having a plural, but individually distinguishable discourse, departing from the challenges related to racial discrimination. It is a collective blog edited with the help of various Cuban and foreign women; its existence is strongly linked to the anti-racist militancy in the public sphere. The death of Inés María Martiatu impacted on the updating of the blog, the maintenance of which bloggers Alberto Abreu and myself took care. Currently, this space is not being updated. In my view, the 2011 publication of the book Afrocubanas. Historia, pensamiento y prácticas culturales is inseparably linked to the existence of this blog. The impact of both projects (the blog and the book) has led to the formation of a group of afro-descendant women in order to fight against sexism and racial discrimination. This is how Afrocubanas has come into existence; the group of activists, artists, and intellectuals, currently under the guidance of Daisy Rubiera, have in 2017 published a new book, and they carry out community work.8 NaranjeARTE (naranjearte.wordpress.com) In the blog’s contact tab, the authors, who identify themselves as three young students of journalism but do not reveal their names, express: “[i]f you are for

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non-violence and a culture of peace, if you belong to the artistic world, are intellectual, dedicate yourself to communication, or if you simply have an opinion about the abuse of women and girls, join this blog operated by Cuban students of journalism” (NaranjeARTE). This defines what the blog is about and what its topics of interest are. It is the only of the mentioned blogs backed by an organization, if one takes into account that it is part of the United Nations campaign ÚNETE against violence against women and girls that was launched by UN General Secretary Ban Ki-Moon in 2008.9 The blog reports about the main activities of the mentioned campaign in the country, such as the “Festival de la no-violencia,” theater workshops, concerts and film screenings addressing the respective topics (NaranjeARTE). As the authors themselves put it, “para vestirnos de naranja,” (in order to dress ourselves in orange), these activities against gender violence appear as a sort of performance. Asamblea feminista (asambleafeminista.wordpress.com) To get out of “the room of one’s own” (Helen Hernández Hormilla, Capote Cruz, and Gordillo Piña) is the confessed claim of Lirians Gordillo, and Zaida Capote in Asamblea feminista. Arguably, this blog currently contributes most to feminism as a source of knowledge in Cuba. The three Cuban intellectuals who run the blog take the nation as a pretext. They claim: Beyond our professional spaces in the media, cultural criticism and research, we want to take a stand against the persistence of gender inequalities in our country, against the diverse manifestations of machista violence, and focus on the social and cultural contributions of women and persons with nonheteronormative sexualities. We want to contribute, finally, to dismantling patriarchy and its mutations in order to, through a respectful debate, further the construction of a reality without discriminations or sexisms. (Hérnandez Hormilla, Capote Cruz and Gordillo Piña) Moreover, Asamblea feminista. Debates feministas desde la Cuba de hoy is an “autonomous and spontaneous” (Hernández Hormilla, Capote Cruz, and Gordillo Piña) blog and distinguishes itself through its Caribbean identity and the island position, representing a more collective notion of activism than imagined in Virgina Woolf’s highly individual image of the woman writer, and also claiming a specific “Caribbean” space for feminist reflection: We want an autonomous and spontaneous blog, a sort of ROOM OF OUR OWN with neither walls nor doors, but with keys in order to protect ourselves: a Caribbean room with lots of colors and heat, without gale-force winds but always a good sea breeze. We share a DISQUIETING/NONCONFORMING and SPIRITED energy that does not negate reflection and reasoning. (Hérnandez Hormilla, Capote Cruz, and Gordillo Piña)

224 Sandra Abd’Allah-Álvarez Ramírez As this quote illustrates, the operators of this blog do not dismiss temperament or emotions, which have been systematically positioned as opposed to analysis and critique. Instead, they appropriate both and put them at the disposition of feminist reflection and thinking.

Outlook With regard to the limited attention that various current topics receive in (official) Cuban communication media, blogs become important reference points for the recognition of cyberfeminist activism in Cuba. The main referent of the cyberfeminist proposals in Cuba is the topic of culture. All of the mentioned women engaging in blogs are related to the arts, communication, and literature, and use the web for feminist activism. Thereby, the most common topics are principally those linked to the field of culture. Out of the seven examined cases, three can be ascribed to cyberfeminist practices that favor the use of the Internet as a tool for the diffusion of feminist ideas and the work of feminist groups on the Internet. This category comprises Letra con género, Género y cultura and Inés Maria Martiatu. Literatura afrocubana. In the case of the collective blog Afrocubanas, a digital project has had great impact on the offline relations of those composing it, followed by the publication of the book Afrocubanas. Historia, pensamiento y prácticas culturales, and by the creation of the working group of Afro-Cuban women. The blogs Asamblea feminista and Mi vida es un fino equilibrio in turn can be considered the most radically orthodox feminist expressions examined here. Both spaces privilege the digital space for their feminist struggle. Of all the discussed blogs, the one written by Yasmín Silvia Portales Machado is the only one departing from the author’s own sexual and gender identity in order to present a progressive discourse in which feminism takes center stage. In sum, the Cuban feminist blogs contribute to establishing an alternative public sphere of discourse, representation, political organization, and critique. They are important correctives to the limited range of official and institutional positions on the island, thus resisting persistent colonial, racialized and en-gendered exclusions as well as limiting universalizations that eclipse such hierarchies. In their manifold ways, through their contributions and interventions, the bloggers are diversifying the variety of voices and positions that enrich Cuban society, but also address persistent and revived forms of exclusion and expression from a gender perspective. Blogs have been particularly influential for the formation of a discourse by afrodescendant feminists who not only challenge the sexist oppression they are facing in Cuban society, but also the multiple forms of racist and (hetero)sexist discrimination. Translated from Spanish by Julia Roth

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Notes 1

2

3 4 5 6 7

8 9

British cultural theorist Sadie Plant used the term cyberfeminism in the same year, see her book Zeros + Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture. For an elaborate and critical acclaim of cyberfeminism see the contribution by Baldwin and Cossy in this volume. See e.g. the subRosa project for a critical feminist perspective concerning the access to and design of ICT for women from different locations, as well as regarding the inequalities of race and class in cyberspace. For a postcolonial perspective on cyberspace, see e.g. Nayar. The number is rapidly growing. Tourist sites list many more Wi-Fi spots for 2017, see e.g. www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Travel-g147270-c202146/Cuba:Caribbean:Places.With. Wifi.In.Cuba.html (accessed September 15, 2017). Approx. three US dollars; the average monthly wage for Cubans who have no access to the tourism industry or self-employment is 30–40 US dollars. To my knowledge, only the medium created by Yoani Sánchez, 14ymedio.com, is being censured in Cuba. Negracubana was inspired by this blog. “Mirar desde la sospecha” was supported by the UNEAC (Unión Nacional de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba; Cuban Union of Writers and Artists) and the group ‘Grupo de Reflexión Solidaridad Oscar Arnulfo Romero’ (OAR), with the help of the Royal Embassy of Norway in Cuba, the Cultural Council of the Spanish Embassy in Cuba, and the Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo (Spanish Agency for International Cooperation for Development, AECID). Daisy Rubiera Castillo, Oilda Hevia Laner (eds.). Emergiendo del silencio: Mujeres negras en la historia de Cuba. Havana: Nuevo Milenio 2017. “Todo empezó cuando la Facultad nos envió a apoyar a la Oficina de la Coordinadora Residente del Sistema de las Naciones Unidas en Cuba en la cobertura de las acciones de la Campaña ÚNETE, durante los 16 Días de Activismo (del 25 de noviembre al 10 de diciembre) del 2013. Después volvimos a unirnos y el resultado es este, nuestro primer blog dedicado a aquellos artistas que se suman a la No violencia contra las mujeres y las niñas” (https://naranjearte.wordpress.com/campana-unete/). The United Nations’ campaign against gender violence against women and girls was initiated in 2008, when UN General Secretary Ban Ki-Moon invited civil societies and governments to put an end to all forms of gender violence. The “Campaña Naranja” (Orange Campaign) calls for dressing in orange every 25th of May in order to call attention to gender violence around the world. In Cuba, the “Día de Naranja” is accompanied by weeklong activities against gender violence (see www.un.org/es/women/endviolence/ orangeday.shtml).

Works cited Abd’Allah-Álvarez Ramírez, Sandra. “Qué dicen nuestros blogs sobre diversidad sexual?” Negra Cubana Tenía Que Ser, February 15, 2011, negracubanateniaqueser.com/2011/ 02/15/¿que-dicen-nuestros-blogs-sobre-genero-y-diversidad-sexual/. Accessed November 5, 2016. Afrocubanas. afrocubanas.wordpress.com. Accessed November 21, 2016. Almeida, Yudivian, Elaine Díaz. “Certezas e incertidumbres. Igualdad de género en la ‘blogosfera’ cubana.” TELOS, no. 92, 2012, telos.fundaciontelefonica.com/DYC/ TELOS/NMEROSANTERIORES/Nmeros80103/DetalleAnteriores_92TELOS_DOSSI ER4/seccion=1268&idioma=es_ES&id=2012071612050003&activo=6.do. Accessed November 5, 2016.

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Anuario Estadístico de Cuba 2010, Oficina Nacional de Estadística e Información Edición, La Habana, 2011. Flores, Cindy Gabriela. “Ciberfeminismo y Arte en Latinoamérica: fusión pendiente.” Cyberfeminista.org, ciberfeminista.org/arte_ciberfem.html. Accessed November 5, 2016. Género y cultura. generoycultura.wordpress.com. Accessed November 21, 2016. Hernández Hormilla, Helen. “Cuba: Feminismo abierto al ciberespacio. Biblioteca virtual de género.” SEMLAC: Servicio de Noticias de la Mujer de Latinoamérica y el Caribe, June 4, 2012, redsemlac.net/index.php/component/k2/item/1387-cuba-feminismo-abiertoal-ciberespacio. Accessed November 5, 2016. —. Zaida Capote Cruz, and Lirians Gordillo Piña. Asamblea feminista. Debates feministas desde la Cuba de hoy. asambleafeminista.wordpress.com. Accessed August 15, 2017. Internet World Stats (IWS). Available at: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm. Accessed November 5, 2016. Martiatu, Inés Maria. Inés Maria Martiatu, Literatura afrocubana. inesmartiatu.blogspot. com. Accessed November 21, 2016. Más Farías, Sara. “Cuba: Género y feminismo en la web 2.0.” Biblioteca virtual de género, 2012, www.ensap.sld.cu/bvgenero/sites/files/12_SEMlac_MS_CGF.pdf. Accessed November 5, 2016. Moya, Isabel. Letra con género. letracongenero.bitacoras.com/. Accessed November 21, 2016. NaranjeARTE. naranjearte.wordpress.com. Accessed November 21, 2016. Nayar, Pramod K. Nayar (ed.). The New Media and Cyberculture Anthology. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. ––––. An Introduction to New Media and Cybercultures. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell 2010. Recio, Milena. “Cuba 2.0: Género y diversidad en primera persona.” Género y Comunicación, vol. 13, 2011, pp. 135–62. Asociación Española de Mujeres Profesionales de los Medios de Comunicación (AMECO). Plant, Sadie. Zeros + Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture. New York: Doubleday, 1997. Portales Machado, Yasmín Silvia. “Voces femeninas en la blogosfera cubana. Cambió algo más que el soporte?” (Inédito). Available at Cubaliteraria.cu, May 27, 2013, www.cubaliteraria.cu/articulo.php?idarticulo=16009&idseccion=25. Accessed November 5, 2016. ––––. Mi vida es un fino equilibrio. yasminsportales.wordpress.com. Accessed November 21, 2016. ––––. En 2310 y 8225. yasminsilvia.blogspot.de. Accessed November 21, 2016. ––––. Palabras robadas. palabraspulsares.blogspot.de. Accessed November 21, 2016. Rubiera Castillo, Daisy and Oilda Hevia Laner (eds.). Emergiendo del silencio: Mujeres negras en la historia de Cuba. Havana: Nuevo Milenio 2017. Rubiera Castillo, Daisy and Martiatu Terry, Inés Maria. Afrocubanas. Historia, pensamiento y prácticas culturales. Havana: Ciencias Sociales, 2011. Strarrs, Josephine, Juliane Pierce, Francesca da Rimini, and Virginia Barrat. “Manifiesto ciberfeminista para el siglo XXI.” Blog de Lkstro, lkstro.com/manifiesto-ciberfeministapara-el-siglo-xxi/. Accessed November 5, 2016.

12 Racism vs. socialism in Cuba A misplaced conflict (notes on/against internal colonialism)1 Roberto Zurbano Torres

To Maritza López McBean and all the girls from the Neighborhood Afrodescendant Network Red Barrial Afrodescendiente in deep Havana

I do not write from the scholarly field, but from the area of social activism that occupies only a small space in Cuban society, and from which some intellectuals and artists are pronouncing ourselves. We are putting our conceptual tools at the service of communities, organizations and leaders of the anti-racist activism of which we constitute an active part. In this regard, we are interested in developing more historical, conceptual, and politically pragmatic texts as our contribution to how we think of ourselves as a critical, reflective and proposing part of the Regional Articulation of African Descendants from Latin America and the Caribbean (ARAC). The latter is a continental network with global perspectives of Black anti-racist intellectuals and leaders from Cuba and the Latin American Black Movement, exchanging challenges and knowledge as well as specific analyses of the progress or regression of anti-racist struggle in our respective countries and regions from diverse positions and common interests. We assume an outlook from the progressivist Latin American and Caribbean left, convinced that anti-racism is an anti-capitalist, decolonizing and anti-imperialist force whose greatest aim is the full equality of the Black population and alliances with other anti-discriminatory struggles of the citizenry that dignify human beings of all races, sexes, classes, religions, and cultures.

Cuban Marxism and the coloniality of power The processes of colonial dominance are complex phenomena. In the Caribbean, they are characterized by diversity, but also by the subaltern imprints through which subjects, islands, and nations were shaped by slavery, plantation economies, and the racist ideology that has been encouraged since the 16th century. Such imprints did not disappear even with the formal decolonization process that was initiated in this region during the 1960s, which was a starting point for the progressive dismantling of colonial (economic, political, ideological, and cultural) structures. Such colonial structures established a series of social practices in our

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peripheral societies, where domination enforced, legalized, and naturalized racial subordination—first of the enslaved Blacks, then of the semi-enslaved Asians, and subsequently of all non-European populations and their offspring. Those subjects newly and formally freed from the colonial structure did not immediately relinquish the subaltern cultural space that partially configured their ideological base. The mindset did not radically change, but it gradually addressed the main conflicts and limitations of the former colonies; thus, the formerly oppressed subjects began to carry out critical and self-critical actions and reflections about colonialism, its structures, the challenges involving independence, and the economic and social alternatives to be chosen. Even though anti- and decolonial thinking in the Caribbean arose much earlier than the decolonization process, it was not until the 1960s that it achieved a certain systematization and enabled a multiple gaze onto our realities, from the very beginning vindicating the popular sectors: workers, Blacks, and women, in that order. This way of thinking was expressed in English, Spanish, and French through novels, verses, plays, and essays. A good deal of this reflexive gaze stems from Marxism, which produced founding texts that became classics within Caribbean thought during the 20th century. Cuba shared the wider Caribbean’s colonial and neocolonial patterns until 1959. Before that, it was only different due to its geographical dimension and the long-standing fascination that the island provoked in the imperial imaginary of the United States. A radical break in Caribbean history occurred when the people’s democratic Revolution erupted, which within two years proclaimed its socialist character. Disparate historiographical, political, literary, and sociological texts were generated that explained the meaning of the Cuban Revolution, its radical alternative to North American imperialism, and its political choice. For the first time, socialism was established outside Europe, in a Caribbean nation where slavery had left its indelible mark: racism. A mixed society, where Black, ‘Mulatto,’ and White, from that time on and with different trajectories, would begin to build a history of social transformation. While racial questions had been systematically approached during the Republican period between 1902 and 1959, they briefly continued during the 1960s and fell into a long silence during the decades of the 1970s and the 1980s. It is only in the middle of the 1990s that the racial debate re-emerged intermittently in Cuba; its presence stabilized by numerous investigations, courses, conferences, essays, and books during the first decade of the 21st century, which demonstrates the need to approach the subject not only in relation to identity, but also regarding the emphasis with which racial problematics pervade the great discussions of contemporary Cuban society. In the last decade, tens of Cuban journals have engaged in revisiting the so-called ‘Black question’ in its diversity, with an emphasis on religiousness, arts and the presence of what has been called Cuban neo-racism,2 characterized by new forms of devaluation and exclusion of Black individuals, their organizations, cultures, and spaces that, in a conscious or unconscious manner, have been naturalized and visualized in Cuba during the last decades with startling impunity.

Racism vs. socialism in Cuba 229 This neo-racism is a searing social reality that is gaining force in the midst of other inequalities and conflicts of 21st century Cuban society. Discussions generated by said situation have an excessive moral emphasis and, occasionally, are justified from a psychological approach, but they fail to explain the actual social causes. Other reflections insist too much on the cultural history of the subject and de-contextualize the analysis of its transnational and geopolitical coordinates as a tacit result of the coloniality of power conceptualized by Aníbal Quijano (“Colonialidad” and “Coloniality”), in which racism is explained in other epistemological dimensions and together with other oppressions such as capitalism, patriarchy, and imperialism.3 Such forms of domination, established in what Immanuel Wallerstein has called the modern world-system (Wallerstein 1974), are evidenced through different times, cultures, and political structures. Thus, domination—in forms such as capitalism, racism, patriarchy, and imperialism— arises under any political system, directly or indirectly, since they are a part of global structures of power that express themselves, subtly or openly, in very diverse and (sometimes) perverse ways, as is customary in socialist Cuba regarding the racial subject. In order to approach the racial problematics in Cuba, we have to start from its enslaver history—a key time in the modern world system—from where the racial ideology that pervaded the so-called Mediatized Republic, born in 1902, and lasting until the arrival of the Revolution (1959), emerged. Racism was a natural fact in Cuba that pervaded social classes, sustained the dominant White hegemony, and resulted in an efficient mechanism for its practices of domination and exclusion. To a large extent the January Revolution destroyed the economic and social structure that was causing this racial oppression, although not in its deep ideological and cultural structures. Since its first years, this is the reason why there was criticism from important Black intellectuals such as Juan René Betancourt, Sixto Gastón Agüero, Walterio Carbonell, and Carlos Moore, who warned against the racist inheritance that the Revolution received; they described it according to their various approaches and demanded the Revolution undertake immediate action to uproot this reactionary ideology that had been planted in Cuban culture long before the birth of the nation itself. After Cuba abandoned its United States neocolonial status, it early on assumed the condition of a socialist country and, from April 1960 onwards, its most outstanding thinkers (politicians, ideologists, scholars, and others) embraced Marxism as their main source of theory, in a controversial application of what some scholars have called Cuban Marxism. For the latter, the role of social class encompasses and overcomes that of race, a matter due to which Cuban racial problematics, although acutely identified by Fidel Castro himself in two public interventions during 1959, would not subsequently be assumed as priority tasks for the new government. It goes without saying that, at that time, the great universalist measures of the Revolution resulted in significant improvements for the majority of the Black and ‘mulatto’ population, both of them marginalized by poverty, illiteracy, insalubrity, and secular racism that, with such measures, are reduced to their minimum expression, thus inserting said population in the radical

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transformation undertaken after 1959. The rejection of any kind of discrimination was included as part of the daily revolutionary practice. Therefore, it was unthinkable that racial discrimination, defined and fought as a bourgeois remnant, would return with the strength and impunity with which it was reinstalled in the island during the 1990s. One of the main writers on coloniality, Aníbal Quijano, does not hesitate in qualifying race as “the most efficient tool for social domination invented in the last 550000 years” (“Qué tal raza”). Behind this statement, there is a lucid explanation of the cultural and political meaning of racism and its legacies. In the Cuban intellectual field, approaches to coloniality unfortunately do not constitute common theoretical or epistemological references, with scholars frequently willing to assume the academic fashions from centers of power. But this does not happen by chance, it is merely a result of the strong Eurocentric matrix that configures the curricular systems of education in Cuba, where it is exceptional to find the richness of our diversity reflected, particularly regarding the Afrodescendants, their history and social contributions. They are the great absentees in education and media and, when they are approached, they are faced with distortions and very reductive schemes. To approach this conflict, particularly the increase in prejudice, racial discrimination, and the return of racism, I intend to support my arguments with epistemological and critical contributions and suggestions by scholars, mainly Latin American, who are founders of a theoretical field that describes, assesses and dismounts the concept they define as coloniality of power (see Quijano, “Colonialidad” and “Coloniality”) in which the idea of race turns out to be central for analysis. Starting from this concept, critical re-adjustments, derivations and new proposals have been developed that configure decolonial studies or the decolonial turn, as it is called by the authors themselves, which offers worthy approaches that I try to understand and apply, critically and enthusiastically, to the Cuban case. For a socialist country, to think of colonial traps and even coloniality itself is going too far in order to review our current ideological life. Perhaps the singularity of being the only socialist country in the hemisphere has led us to think that we escaped from the solid geopolitical structure of coloniality, thanks to our daring and inevitable conversion to socialism. This does not cease to be a reason of utmost importance that makes us different from the other countries in the Caribbean and Latin America; however, we should not forget that our socialism has been peripheral, underdeveloped, and economically dependent, without disregarding the internal limitations with which we have reached half a century of socialism in the Caribbean. Among those limitations or strategic incapability, we should point to internal colonialism as one of the sources of serious and diverse economic and ideological conflicts in our country during the socialist period. I want to focus the following pages on this latter point in order to explain the way in which the official policy of Cuban socialism has behaved towards insular racism, firstly developing its own ideological blindness to the survival and renewal of racism, secondly provoking a long silence on the subject and, finally, not

Racism vs. socialism in Cuba 231 assuming (explicitly or implicitly) any racial policy or strategy (direct or indirect) to confront the presence of racism on the island. The absence of a political debate involving several authorities (social, scientific, political) explaining, critically assuming, and proposing solutions to racism—which never fully disappeared, but is hidden between the folds of disciplinary silence—strengthened and promoted the mutation of old racial ideas that currently comfortably re-insert themselves into society, engendering a new racism in a new society. That is to say, neo-racism is the alarm and expression of the new context in which Cuban socialism readjusts itself and, at the same time, one of its greatest challenges. In order to adapt the phrase internal colonialism to explain the Cuban case, I must make a confession to the reader, which will not be overlooked by those familiar with studies on the subject. This concerns the place of the statement and theoretical proposal, which features an extensive bibliography on racial subjects: the United States academy and the abundance of studies it has generated in almost half a century, as a result of Black or African American studies and its historical precedents in U.S. Pan-Africanism or Black nationalism, as well as texts by important leaders of various anti-racist currents in the 19th and 20th centuries in the United States. Although said texts accumulate a significant knowledge of racial struggles and a high level of theorization, in the present text I prefer using theories and terms generated in Latin America and the Caribbean by equally important scholars that have developed worthy theses with which we can discuss racial conflicts in our region from other perspectives. This is the double goal of these pages which assume decolonial thought along with the concept of internal colonialism, particularly the definition contributed by Pablo González Casanova in 1963 and updated in 2006, explaining: In a concrete definition of the internal colonialism category, so significant for the new struggle of peoples, it is required to point out: firstly, that internal colonialism occurs in the economic, political, social, and cultural spheres; secondly, how it has evolved along the history of the nation-state and capitalism; thirdly, how it is related to emerging alternatives, systemic and anti-systemic, particularly those concerning “the resistance” and the “construction of autonomies” within the nation-state, as well as the creation of links (or their absence) with national and international movements and forces of democracy, liberation and socialism. (409, our translation) In this re-definition of the term developed by the Mexican Marxist intellectual, I apply the third clarification, where there is a tacit recognition of socialism as a possible context from which internal colonialism can be fought against, in order to take advantage of its contradiction. Hence, my interest here is to de-idealize the hegemonic practices of socialism as a political system and to consider the possibility that, from within and despite its emancipatory efforts, socialism also generates its own internal colonialism, promotes a colonial space inside its structures, which specific groups are oppressed in or excluded from (consciously

232 Roberto Zurbano Torres or not). This phenomenon expresses, firstly, the need to decolonize socialism, its structures and sociocultural practices; and, secondly, the need to assume and question how in the ideological life of our peripheral socialism, a socialist subject and colonial mentality are produced, which are manifested daily in various Cuban organizations where important decisions were and are taken.4 In the present text I refer, in particular—since there may be others—to the internal colonialism generated and practiced within the country itself, against the historical and current legal and human demands of one group in particular: Black Cubans. Although this is a social group as heterogeneous as the others, pervaded by vectors of class, gender, sexuality, rural or urban location, etc., I describe them here as persons who have suffered or suffer, withstand, recognize or remain silent regarding any kind of racial discrimination (private or public, direct or symbolic, labor, media, police, religious, cultural or of any other kind) which, either denounced or not—although generally not denounced—denigrates, humiliates and offends the dignity and rights of the person and the racial group that person belongs to. If we take into account that racism is a cultural distinction which Cuban society has been producing since its beginning, and which in the last fifty years has not usually been expressed in a frontal manner, but slyly and indirectly, we will understand why it becomes difficult for us to identify, disarticulate, or denounce racist aggression in Cuba. Such difficulty does not reduce the effect of aggression; on the contrary, it hides it when repressing every possibility of denouncement, since the Black Cuban frequently evades his possibility of being a critical subject who opposes said repression and finds various ways of fighting it. The sophistication of racist aggression usually disarms or prevents a response from the discriminated. This reaction, typical of interracial relations in Cuba, has installed itself in public spaces and organizations through silence or ideological indifference that conceal and accept such incidents, which are customary and not so exceptional. Thus, we observe and share naturally the considerable catalogue of racist phrases, gestures and actions that are heard and seen on the street, at work and study centers, in the media as well as educational and cultural institutions. In such spaces, racism grows in an ideological vacuum and is a silent body that is very difficult to bring to speech. It is curious that this silence does not come from the pre-revolutionary stage, in which several organizations, publications, and public forums were used by citizens, organizations, Black, ‘mulatto,’ and White leaders and intellectuals to debate racism. At that time, there was no Cuban intellectual of repute who would remain silent regarding the racial problematics of the nation. It is regrettable that in the last half century this practice has only occurred by exception and with the related risk and compromise. For a Cuban citizen of the last half century on the island, it is not very difficult to recognize that during the Revolution years there was a Soviet style of internal colonialism in Cuba, since the people took account of it and attacked it in a long catalogue of jokes and criticism that have remained until current times. Said internal colonialism began after Cuba’s subscription to the socialist world. It was

Racism vs. socialism in Cuba 233 not identified with the Manichean idea of Cuba as a military satellite of the old Soviet Union, but with a much more complex idea explaining the devious manner in which part of the country’s academic and ideological thought put itself at the service of the normative presuppositions of a political-economic block that supported and shared the anti-capitalist project of the Revolution. It is then that this type of colonialism was born, and my aim is to highlight it in the national and international analysis of the rejection, silence, and incomprehension that the racial problematics, particularly racism, received in the Cuban political agenda of the Revolution. The socio-historical context in which Cuba inserts itself in the socialist world and its articulation with racism is best explained through three ideological dimensions/contradictions that are indirectly related.

First ideological dimension of Cuba’s articulation with racism Soviet-style orthodox Marxism impregnated the dynamics of several Cuban organizations, and despite encountering strong resistance, it imposed itself successfully by the end of the 1960s as the dominant rule in the daily life of various academic, economic, military, cultural, and other organizations. In educational policy, it had the effect of reducing the teaching of Marxism into a caricature and forceps that even reached college levels. Although it also found strong opposition, the dominant orthodox rule expanded and was internalized in the Cuban socio-political mentality of the time, causing us to suffer socialist internal colonialism for several decades. For the dogmatic Marxism imposed in Cuba at the end of the 1960s and up until the 1990s, the race category was disregarded and the anti-racist demand was stigmatized; both were accused of dividing the working class and undermining national unity against imperialism. Class and class struggle were key concepts of that dogmatic Marxism that lived with its back to the ethnic conflicts in the old USSR and Cuba, consequently also avoiding the racial problematics that took place beyond the workplace. The excluding outlook of this Eurocentric and orthodox Marxism had already been questioned in the Caribbean and Latin America by such important figures as José Carlos Mariátegui, C.L.R. James, or Aimé Césaire, to just mention three Marxist voices of different tendencies. In 1924, the Fourth Communist International approved the Thesis on the Black Question, the text of which includes the statement “[t]he international struggle of the black race is a struggle against capitalism and imperialism. The black movement must be organized based on this struggle.”5 Perhaps the first Cuban contribution to the ‘Racism versus Marxism’-discussion stems from Sandalio Junco,6 a forgotten Cuban communist union leader who, during the Latin America Workers Union Conference (Montevideo, 1929), presented his extraordinary paper “The Black Race Problem and the Proletarian Movement” that had a strong impact beyond that forum. This and other data of the time indicate that Cuban communists early on placed racial discrimination on their agenda, and although they not always found the best solutions, they were characterized by counting a high quantity of Black persons from all social classes among their members, particularly the proletariat and Black middle class of that

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time. Even at the last stage of the People’s Socialist Party (Partido Socialista Popular) before 1959, the General Secretary was Blas Roca, a ‘mulatto’ worker from the eastern region. During the revolutionary stage, this Eurocentric orthodox Marxism prevented the discussion of the ideological and cultural reasons of Cuban anti-Black racism and its causes. Even though it is true that we could not expect it to support racial struggles in socialism, it could at least have taken better advantage of anti-capitalist reserves of the anti-racist struggle, as did Cuban communists before 1959. Through this tight summary of the genealogy of the ‘Racism versus Marxism’ conflict on the island, it is hard to know for sure why the Revolution did not incorporate the anti-racist inheritance of Cuban Marxism prior to 1959, its legacy of racial awareness and the anti-racist struggle it went through since marronage, conspiracies, the uprisings of the enslaved endowment and their participation in the three independence wars of the 19th century. In the following century, the Revolution also failed to incorporate the Colored Independent Party, Cuban syndicalism, and the Cuban Black press, which had been established in the middle of the 19th century and disappeared in 1960 along with the Colored Associations. Was this not sufficient?

Second ideological dimension Cuba’s articulation with racism In the ideological confrontation between Cuba and the United States during the 1960s, one element is usually overlooked, namely the recent victory of the Black Civil Rights Movement in that country. Fidel Castro cleverly added the anticapitalist political capital of this movement to the Cuban Revolution. The high point of this alliance is the meeting between Fidel himself and Malcolm X at Teresa Hotel in Harlem, where the Cuban leader lodged during his visit to New York in 1960. Thereafter, many African Americans who were invited to congresses, for medical treatment, or even for long-term stays, came to the island and, in exceptional cases, they are still living in Cuba. The conflict between the radical African American vision of racism and the moderate racial vision of Cubans brought some misunderstandings and ruptures that are not the subject of this text, but which illustrate the manner in which the alliances, dialogues and contacts with different tendencies of the United States Black movement took place during the revolutionary stage. Nonetheless, the differences and possible similarities of racism in one or the other country have not been assessed sufficiently beyond the political questioning. The other side of this coin is the racist and counter-revolutionary discourse assumed by—mostly White and middle class—Cubans who left for Miami during the first years of the Revolution, who attacked the new government from there. Such political polarization explains how the revolutionary government thought of racism only as a problem of the capitalist society and, at the same time, confirmed it as an ideology of the Revolution’s enemies.7 It was not possible then to notice the nuances of a counter-revolutionary racism and revolutionary racism, reduced to the private, family or group space, but active in the underside of Cuban ideological life.

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Third ideological dimension of Cuba’s articulation with racism The treatment given in the old Soviet Union to ethnic and racial conflicts in its vast territory could also be catalogued as internal colonialism or cultural imperialism, since from the Russian Soviet Socialist Federative Republic, the linguistic, ideological, and cultural—not only administrative—standards were imposed to the other fourteen republics, which were obliged to adopt the Russian ethos as a superior model. These inter-ethnic debates reached Cuba in a very subdued way, although they were informed and reproduced by Soviet collaborators from diverse republics who worked on the island for several years. What happened after inserting our world into the socialist block? Losses and gains are still to be assessed; among them, a Sovietization process that intensely marked Cuban life. During those years, many Cuban students and academics travelled to the Soviet Union for classes and academic degrees; it was frequent to find graduates and doctors that came back brandishing extemporaneous ideas and forcing the application of those Leninist Marxist dogmas onto our Caribbean reality and history. Tens of examples describe how said dogmas were imposed, how cultural Sovietization was institutionalized, and how ideological blindness rejected discussing several social problematics as important as the racial ones. Those who insisted on such problematics were accused of being counterrevolutionary by the Socialist internal colonialism that, like every colonialism, also came to be racist, arrogant, and exclusionary. Such ideas did not fall in November 1989 with the Berlin wall, but still influence Cuban academic and social thought, albeit with an increasing denouncement and self-criticism by those who hold such ideas, which have been reduced to the collective unconscious of a thought forced to deal with said dogmatism for several decades. These three dimensions have significant weight, which has a crucial impact if we think that the socialist option of the revolutionary government was the only one. The others were failing, again, due to the American imperialist agenda, more aggressive each time after the military failure it suffered on the Cuban coast during the Playa Giron invasion at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. After that event, the dispute between the Cuban and the United States governments did not decrease in tension. The ideological life of the island has been based on that tension for more than half a century, but it has not been able to prevent social advancement in various spheres of the country. The re-birth of racism in 21st century Cuba must be explained from the context of that tension, especially when we confirm the absence of a racial policy, the scarce public awareness of racist dangers, and the insufficient insertion of racial problematics in the design of Cuban official policy. This discussion has been postponed several times, was not addressed publicly during the Cuban Revolution and, therefore, still does not generate suitable strategies, but instead creates a problem where several creative and exemplary solutions might be generated for the region. This problem is taking place in front of another conflict that is also neglected and which, re-adapting the ideas of W.E.B. Du Bois (27), I call the double revolutionary consciousness of the Black

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in Cuba: it consists of a politically existential drama affecting many Cuban Blacks, whose revolutionary militancy suffers constant ethical, ideological, and even political breaks when identifying or themselves suffering the effects of the almost customary gestures, jokes, humiliations, and other markedly racist exclusionary operations from organizations and persons proven to be revolutionary, and even Communist, against Black persons, their bodies, culture, religion, communities, opportunities, organizations, and discourses. Beyond readings and conceptualizations, I have found out through interviews, conversations, and family life experiences that there is a simpler, and perhaps also more organic, explanation in the case of this Black revolutionary individual, who has consciously and enthusiastically participated in the Cuban political process. It is the Black revolutionary’s full confidence that revolutionary forces will definitively eradicate every form of racism. That confidence generated passionate dedication, blind faith and, above all, deep gratitude to the Revolution; it is based on personal gratitude, but also collective gratitude because of their previous condition of Black and poor which was, for many, synonymous. This reflection is not an ironic, masochistic, or dramatic passage, since what I have just written down is verified in the life of three generations of Cuban Blacks that have lived the Revolution as a duty and a hope; said gratitude is historically conscious. It also explains the patience with which they have withstood successive racist actions within the Revolution. Yet, after several decades, this gratitude has become a retaining wall for increasing anti-racist demands and is being manipulated by the opportunists of the day. Evading such a delicate matter dooms the participation of the Black individual in socialism to the usual role of subordination and alienation assumed in previous political-economic systems. The question this time is that the racial consciousness of that Black individual of socialism does not have to be overwhelmed by his own political consciousness, but the latter also incorporates the demands of his racial situation. It happens that the tension between both identities is generated by a relation of power, where a racial (White) hegemony exerts a hidden psychosocial pressure over a Black individual who de-racialized his social struggle space when, at the beginning of the Revolution, he saw himself on the road to equality. However, this long-standing White hegemony of harsh social practices was never put into question, but was incorporated as such into the emancipatory discourse that constructed equality for everybody. Only that it did so from the unacknowledged advantage of its White privilege, inherited and renewed without questioning. This old relationship of power is also cultural, which means that it is incorporated in the daily practices of the various racial groups and will not disappear by itself or through the social changes of a brief historical period until we challenge it sufficiently. This asymmetry must be willfully questioned and dismounted in political discourse, as well as discussed and systematically reduced in the public space, if the goal is an emancipatory process. However, this has not happened yet. Perhaps the opportunity that was lost more than forty years ago may be taken advantage of within the current review of these problems.

Racism vs. socialism in Cuba 237 In these pages, I assume a vision of racism coming from the structural analysis developed by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, who, from a materialist explanation of the subject, explains: The actors who are in higher positions—the dominant race—develop a series of social practices—or, rather, a racial praxis—and an ideology to maintain the advantages derived from their racial classification. This means that they develop a structure in order to reproduce their systemic advantages. Therefore, racism is not based on the ideas that some individuals have about others, but on the social building raised over racial inequality. (Bonilla-Silva 650-51, our translation) Destroying that social building is a process that began in Cuba in 1959, but that has only developed partially, ambiguously, and slowly. We lack the social debate, suitable tools, and racial policy or strategy to destroy those racist structures, which are not only political or economic, but also ideological and cultural, such as those that continue to be reproduced in education, mass media, and legislation, to mention only three random examples. It prevents raising our social building on more organic and practical bases, as well as more committed to the racial equality we need. However, such shortcomings do not erase the huge social transformation that the Cuban Revolution still means, but places it before a field of new emancipatory possibilities if, in view of the new contexts, we better define the urgencies, challenges, and prospective solutions regarding racism in the island.

Different notions of racism With this purpose, I want to define the main scenarios from which the different classes and Cuban social and racial groups assume their epistemological, political, and ideological positions on racism. What were the racial expectations, their discourses, their policies? What has justified their shortcomings, silence, and repressions? How are such concerns, acceptances, rejections, or proposals expressed? I will describe the context in which these questions are pertinent and in which their answers overcome the Black/White or discriminator/discriminated binaries through a pragmatic view of racial dynamics, allowing the recognition of how social actors contribute to accepting, reproducing, disguising, or rejecting racism. The first scenario explains the racial question as a problematic of the bourgeois past overcome by the Revolution with the universalists’ measures of the 1960s, which opened opportunities for all Cubans. It assumes racial oppression as a form of exploitation in previous societies. It believes that when society changes, the conditions promoting racism are lost and the latter disappears. In the new society, race would only serve to divide the working class and undermine national unity. Racial struggles and policies are unfounded and are promoted by the Revolution’s enemies. This line of thinking demobilizes the struggle against racial

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discrimination, overlooking the historical disadvantages with which Blacks arrive at the Revolution. In more extreme cases, it tends to disqualify and repress the critics of racism. It is based on a historicist academicism that approaches racial issues of the past without articulating them with contemporary social processes. This position states the disappearance of racism in a socialist society and rejects the possibility of a debate on the subject by identifying these ideas with a subversive or counter-revolutionary exercise. Said trend is located essentially in the main institutions of the Cuban State (the party, the government, education, legislation, mass media, foreign policy, etc.). The second scenario comprises racism as an ideology of racial superiority, with organizations and mechanisms to exert racial oppression in the entire society. It speaks of an individual racism that each person assumes according to his or her prejudices and culture, for which education is proposed as one of the factors that would eliminate it. It resorts to investigations in order to document racist practices that may be institutionalized, and to fight racialization in structures or organizations. It launches moral denouncements and appeals to conscientize and to promote the access of Blacks to these organizations. It also acknowledges the White hierarchy and domination in important spheres of the country and, although it does not approach the construction of new White privileges in new contexts, it has updated the considerations about inequalities, differences, and diversity on the island. It accepts affirmative actions, although it promotes them with reserve. It encourages the racial debate from the state organizations, but without converting it into social struggles or onto the banners of civil organizations. This trend is located in some academic spaces, such as universities, research centers, cultural and religious organizations, specialized publications, and other circuits of knowledge legitimation—as well as in timely political interventions by Fidel and Raul Castro, whom I do not include in the previous scenario because their criteria are more open and, curiously, have not become racial policies.8 The third scenario identifies racism not only as inheritance, but also as a problem that was hidden under the universalist gains of the Revolution, which is the reason why its ideological and cultural background was not discussed. It demands public policies assuming a differentiated social treatment of communities and social groups with historical disadvantages, such as a large Black population. It proposes a debate on the ways in which racism survives and grows within a socialist society. It believes in political struggles and affirmative actions, and highlights the pertinence of the anti-racist struggle among other anti-discriminatory struggles. It also promotes social and political activism as well as the creation of anti-racist organizations in civil society. It assumes racism to be a form of global domination and prepares an agenda of problems and proposals. It constructs subjects of resistance and liberation, who also fight against other forms of discrimination within and beyond the island. This scenario is more recent, but also more diverse and dynamic, since it groups civil society organizations of anti-discriminatory persuasion with different political identities, and includes digital spaces that function as mouthpieces for people or organizations in the emerging Cuban Black public sphere.9

Racism vs. socialism in Cuba 239 Although these three scenarios make up the main modes of understanding racial conflicts in Cuba, they will remain disconnected from the country’s daily political life as long as they barely express themselves publicly in the press, in schools, political and mass organizations, or other circuits of socialization. It could be said that racial discrimination and racism in Cuba are handled as rumors, misunderstandings, and manipulations of the enemy, or other erroneous or improper perceptions that inhibit, mislead, and prevent the taking of sides by the masses when facing this phenomenon. However, these perceptions during the last decade have been questioned and corrected by the people’s outlook, especially in popular music, hip-hop, Afro-Cuban religiousness, movies, theater, plastic arts, and the latest Cuban literature, particularly the essay genre. From said cultural and religious practices, the ways of perceiving racism are being decolonized and begin to recognize the scenarios in which debates about and proposals regarding such issues can take place. In this regard, the powerful contribution of information technologies (digital magazines, electronic newsletters, web sites, and blogs) has to be noted, as they have constructed spaces for dissemination, discussion of and updates on this subject, thus constituting effective spaces that give visibility and legitimacy to antiracist activism, its debates and protagonists (see e.g. Chapter 11). In these three scenarios we will also find individuals of any race, gender, class, and profession; and it is possible that some of them place themselves in more than one of these spaces, turning the outlook richer or contradictory, but also more susceptible to the disagreements that this reality generates. If we choose a scenario or possible combination of scenarios and place them in dialogue about any area of the reality or about the future of this matter, we would indeed face the racial debate that nowadays should take place in Cuba. It indicates that one of these scenarios or trends dominates the debate and seeks (or rejects) to multiply, racialize, politicize, or silence the trend. The tensions causing disconnection or hollow confrontation among the three scenarios increasingly fragment and distort a critical vision committed to the Cuban racial debate, its actual emergence, its diverse problematics and immediate solutions. Also, the political potential in each of these scenarios has not been taken advantage of, thus preventing new outlooks as well as possible lines of work that may exert an activism adhering to anti-racist institutional strategies or present the need for empowering communities or legalizing anti-racist organizations that may accompany the state’s racial policy, exactly as it has happened with other anti-discriminatory exercises in the country. In his famous essay “Las ideas fuera de lugar,” the Brazilian thinker Roberto Schwarz calls this disparity between a political system which, on the one hand, disregards the citizen rights of a social group and, on the other hand, shows the most libertarian ideas embodied by the political-intellectual class of the same system an ideological comedy. The emergence of racism in Cuba points to the absence of a racial policy or strategy, considering it inadequate, and identifies the incomprehension of the state’s ideological apparatus towards the Black population’s demands as political absurdness. The latter is not only a racial demand, which can only be explained from the absence of a history of social marginalization in Cuba, and the historical disadvantages and current consequences

240 Roberto Zurbano Torres thereof; but, in addition, said demands are also for justice, citizen equality, and freedom, i.e. the same as the Revolution endeavored since its birth in 1959.10 Such citizen demand is not out of place; it is an organic and fair demand from a social group that has made a huge contribution to the great political and social causes of the Revolution. This group aims to supplement the effect produced by the universalist measures of the 1960s with a series of new, differentiated, and equitable affirmative measures. However, the late response of the Cuban state has created a misplaced conflict, an incompatibility that might denaturalize the emancipatory assumptions of the Cuban social process and might be manipulated by its political enemies. It is not enough to brandish the socialist vocabulary of equality, solidarity, and justice if these ideas do not get adjusted to the new demands of a context marked by economic, legal, and political transformations that legally privilege some groups above others, giving space to inequality and marginalization of more vulnerable social groups, among which Blacks are over-represented. In another sense, the late Venezuelan American thinker Fernando Coronil explained this phenomenon as a contradiction particular to the political discourse of the left in Latin America, which he called a double historical discourse that arises, he says, “from the tension between temporal narratives in the short and long terms” (Coronil 24). This conceptual tool allows us to disarm the current passions and political resistance about the matter, as it explains the arising of this double historical discourse in Cuba to be generated by the tension between a narrative of social emancipation featured by the revolutionary government that, in the short term, promoted the necessary changes to eliminate racism and an antiracist narrative that, in the long term, insists on fighting old and new forms of insufficiently approached racial discrimination. This latter narrative is being featured mainly by sectors of the civil society, horizontally articulated away from the most institutionalized spaces in the country. Both narratives are currently confronted in the Cuban political field of the 21st century through the respective demands and accusations, which are generating new discussions, militancy, organizations, and political discourses around the racial subject and its conflicts, polarizing such a debate to certain extremes.11 This misplaced conflict or double historical discourse will begin to be resolved when the revolutionary state tunes the libertarian assumptions of both narratives above ideological prejudices and reluctances and false political competitions from one and the other side, for which the state’s disqualification of civilly organized anti-racist forces will have to be moderated, become a dialogue, and stop insisting on the disqualification and internal division of such forces. The state, its organizations, and civil society must face the new challenges together: from recognition of racism, its spaces, main characters, and mechanisms of reproduction, to the ways of solving the asymmetries that a new distribution of wealth, racially differentiated, will generate, and that the new forms of capitalism, just introduced in the country, will finish establishing. Many Cuban organizations (cultural, political, and other) hold a homogeneous and closed vision of our culture and society, and this obsolete vision functions, in

Racism vs. socialism in Cuba 241 turn, disconnected from an extra-organizational life whose economic, generational, technological, and daily dynamics become increasingly removed from the old nationalist, a-critical and undemocratic codes that still survive. In this environment, some organizations do not consciously assume the contributions that an identityoriented or diverse outlook can and should offer to their organizational dynamics, and end up minimizing the role played by the Black individual within them. The same could be said of women, young people, homosexuals, disabled people, etc. But, from a racial perspective, I notice, without alarmism, a specific operation that urges debating more than denouncing: this has to do with the emergence of Whitewashing instances or machineries that reject, subordinate, invisibilize, distort, or reduce Black agency (often as protagonists) within the Cuban society. These silent machineries work in any state or private space of 21st century Cuban society, especially in those organizations where the majority—more than 70%—of its directorate or group is comprised of White persons, among whom prejudices, silence, or ignorance about Black persons or culture prevail. Such organizations develop a preference for Eurocentric issues, as manifest in cultural programs, publications, lack of dialogue, and inferiorizing treatment of some cultures and their protagonists. If one or several executives share the same racist ideas, they can mask it either through preferences or privileges, or with subtle rejections or silence. The sophisticated racist machinery will start rolling from the power of decision—and impunity—of these executives, without questioning the violation of the anti-discriminatory principles of this organization; (not to dismiss the fact that some of these executives may be Black or ‘mulatto’ and, at the same time, racist). This happens often in the Cuban entrepreneurial world and is more evident in the tourism sector, but appears to be more subtle in sectors of culture and the new economy, where these predatory machines grow, operated by persons and organizations whose thinking recycles old cultural forms of oppression. Their labor is invisible and, perhaps, irreversible, due to the damage caused to selfesteem, social conscience, and forms of life (or life beyond the expected) of those sacked or inferiorized. These are ideological operations of great subtlety, characterized by a patronizing treatment of the individuals they oppress. It also offers rewards, punishment, or silence insofar as racist actions and arguments are accepted or rejected by the Black individuals themselves, who are trapped between the scarce options for implementation, their lack of racial and historical consciousness, and their scarce emancipatory or critical possibilities. The coloniality of power in Cuba has three powerful accomplices, which are neo-conservatism, internal colonialism, and neo-racism, of which there is no public questioning. Cuban personalities, organizations, and institutions lose critical capacity right in the middle of an economic crisis where labor legislation, redistribution of resources, and insertion of capitalist formulas are re-defining the new context of Cuban socialism. The lack of space for criticism, legal structures, and citizen organizations that may effectively question the new realities results in an ethical and legal vacuum in the face of increasing racism and other dangers. On these civic gaps, a New Racist Economy—I wish to be wrong—will be

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legitimized, whose openly discriminatory structures will begin the countdown of the Revolution’s emancipatory ideals. In view of this alarming social situation, some anti-racist organizations and groups are beginning to rise on the island, which configure an incipient, diverse, and active movement. The Cuban anti-racist emergence denies all the justifications on which silence and repression were based and which, even now, cause the necessary critical dialogues about an inequality that amounts to other social consequences to be cancelled and postponed. The emergence of an anti-racist agenda expresses new emancipatory and citizen demands before the delayed state response, but also constructs new spaces for debate, offers organizational responses, public actions, and work proposals that pick up novel experiences in the Cuban social interweaving, where the (excessive) verticality of the state has always decided on the subjects for discussion, the forms of political consensus, and even the forms of citizen mobilization. These are also new spaces of critical participation as a reaction to new (or renewed) inequalities, on which the socialist state is called to re-legitimize itself before its citizens. In view of the governmental counter-sense, the anti-racist counter-discourse places in media res its denouncement of racism, accompanied by current analyses and proposals to reach equality. But this counter-discourse also puts the political opportunism with which the privileged classes—some of recent arrival and others not so much—defend and reproduce their mechanisms of economic domination, which have been racially defined since the origin of financial and symbolic capitals, on display for everyone. These are the forces that currently define the Cuban racial debate, since behind the latter there is not only a legitimating and scenic play of the Cuban racial transformations, but also the economic ones, the rearrangements of hegemonic power, and the ideological travesties that are taking place. Into said discussions, the Black individual has entered only as subaltern and not as an active subject of those political and socio-economic changes. Needless to say, some intellectuals are beginning to identify themselves with the new legal privileged and their capitals when offering legitimacy to their excluding practices and disguising the concurrent domination. Through that road, they show their indolence to the heartbreaking nature of the racial conflict by developing historicist entertainments, sequestering the subject in sophisticated rhetorical games or in new types of colonial interventions and charitable actions within vulnerable communities, where a Black majority watches and listens to them like Jesus to the temple merchants. The time will come when their false commitments will be uncovered! There is a worthy and increasing Black intellectuality in Cuba that, in the last lustrum, has assumed racial consciousness and recognizes itself as part of a critical and self-critical identity discourse, pervaded by many other subjectivities as conflictive as the racial one. In their works we can observe a dialogue—still too tense—with a still dominant Eurocentric culture, but also one that is being questioned as to its epistemological, ideological, patriarchal, racist, and nationalist assumptions, by other subjectivities that denude and enrich Cuban humanities in the 21st century. This consists of the deepening of particular individuals, not

Racism vs. socialism in Cuba 243 only Blacks, but also homosexuals, females, diasporic, marginalized, marginal, and young people, revolutionary, non-revolutionary, counter-revolutionary, and disenchanted, who turn the Cuban space and its most recent transformations into the scenario of their reasons, contradictions, and destinies. A reflective correlate accompanies this significant literary production through a critical and essayistic production that is displayed in the numerous magazines within the island and also abroad. Social activism and citizen platforms grow, demanding and adapting the discourses and requirements of a diversity that transforms society and expands the frontiers of citizenship, but is still watched by a nationalism that owes the debt of the described dogmatism and the wearout generated by the political and economic aggression of the United States against Cuba. The new Cuban anti-racist organizations have arrived, before politics and the academy, at a conclusion that is not at all simple: it is urgent to construct and apply an educational and political project whose main objectives are focused on restoring the damaged self-esteem of Black people. We refer to the Blacks living in meager conditions, holding the worst jobs and being alienated for too long, unable to tell the racist experiences suffered within and outside their communities, willing to transform this social situation but also afraid of being identified as an opposition critical of the Revolution. It is a politically highly sensitive task, since it is required to restore an ideological intertwining, which implies raising the scant racial self-esteem, as well as recovering race as a socially transcendent value in a society historically marked by racism, defining inclusive strategies stimulated by an anti-discriminatory policy that overflows the racial aspect, placing it along with other differences and waging a joint battle against the inequalities produced by such differences. The blindness of Cuban society’s critical thinking to the increasing racialization of economic formulas and sectors (tourism, private companies, and public-private partnerships, etc.) is accelerating the process of social re-stratification and racial structuring, although these are not the only expressions of increasing racism.12 Many other causes and consequences exist. We still need to know, from assumptions more respectful towards our diversity, how racial emplacement is proposing to articulate and exchange its demands and projects; considering that we lack the necessary consensus between the critical tendencies of racism and dialogues or alliances with other anti-discriminatory forces. Promoting the internal fights between said tendencies or accepting the fragmentation of other forces that suffer oppression or inequalities would be diverting (or stopping) our libertarian steps. This would also allow us to be provoked or entertained by the reactionary forces surviving in Cuban discriminatory mentalities and structures. The transformations of contemporary Cuban society require a local outlook that is in tune with the global outlook of the most pressing subjects, and the assumption that coloniality demystifies the national/international binarism behind which the neoliberal globalization hides its ambitions for worldwide dominance, trapping us in the old nationalist discourses. It is urgent for the identity-based struggles and social movements to be legitimized in their social condition and, simultaneously, in their global location. The recognition of several insertion levels (local, national,

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regional, global) of social struggles, in this case anti-racist struggles, promotes an internationalist solidarity and valuable exchange of experiences that enriches local agendas in comparing their losses and gains in the region, while critically appropriating global contributions. Likewise, this dynamic allows developing global syntheses and concepts from more concrete realities, multiplying the capacity for questions and answers, similarities and differences from which the world is thought—without dogmas, limits, or prejudices towards the creation of a resistance to all forms of contemporary domination that is also diverse, plural, national, and transnational. To recognize the political meaning that anti-racism has today, even for a socialist country, offers advantages and necessary alliances in the face of new local and global contexts. Assessing these would allow recognizing us as part of a yet incomplete, but transforming social project, due to its capacity to identify and take advantage of the best contributions from an emancipatory struggle that is increasingly radicalized today, as is also happening in several other countries in the hemisphere. It is important to understand this struggle in countries like Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, and Venezuela as an important part of social movements which resist globalized oppressions and as very active subjects in the new organizational political forms transforming the Latin American societies of the new century, despite the fact that they are still observed with reserve and cold distance by an inopportune, Eurocentric, colonized, and deeply committed Marxism. Starting from the political acknowledgment of anti-racism as a conscious enemy of the coloniality of power and as an ally in the systemic fight against patriarchy, capitalism, and imperialism, the emergence of an anti-racist agenda from Cuba would be possible. It would be an agenda that comprises the three previously described scenarios, as well as various actors, scopes, limits, and proposals in a politically conscious exercise in which, with respect and public responsibility, said actors recognize themselves as part of a dialogue in which they exchange political will, life stories, community experiences, research results, social diagnostics, economic resources, affirmative actions, pedagogical and cultural projects, and internationalist actions that could be configured, after consensus and specific definition of urgencies, priorities, and needs, in a new type of racial policy. It is a possible dream for a socialism that attempts to renew itself and enrich its historical project of human emancipation. Roberto Zurbano Torres Downtown Havana, Cuba, November 2014. Translated from Spanish by Luisa Ellermeier

Notes 1 An earlier Spanish version of this article, “Racismo vs. Socialismo en Cuba: un conflicto fuera de lugar (apuntes sobre/contra el colonialismo interno),” appeared in the open access journal Meridional - Revista Chilena de Estudios Latinoamericanos, no. 4, 2015, pp. 11–40, meridional.uchile.cl/index.php/MRD/article/viewFile/36529/ 38148.

Racism vs. socialism in Cuba 245 2 I describe neo-racism as “a phenomenon that combines gestures, phrases, critique and comments which degrade the (Black) racial condition of individuals, groups, projects, works, and institutions, whether Cuban or not. This description would neither be complete nor a novelty if we neglect the social and political environment in which these racist facts take place in today’s Cuba: a country that had a people’s democratic Revolution, which offered equality, opportunities and rights to all its citizens, which built a socialist society with an emancipatory ideal accompanied by justice, national dignity, and human solidarity. A country with an internationalist tradition, which supported the independence struggles of several Third World countries, particularly in Africa, where the end of Apartheid in South Africa should also be acknowledged as a result of the participation of the Cuban troops in Angola that were formed by a high percentage of Black and mestizo soldiers. Furthermore, Cuba is the same anti-imperialist country where ideological assumptions are declared essentially anti-capitalist, antiracist and humanitarian, but where a racist joke continues to be accepted, shared and cheered, even by some Black persons” (Zurbano 4). 3 Agustín Laó-Montes makes an operative description of the concept of coloniality of power, specifying types of domination and representing it as the “intertwining of the four domination regimes—racism, capitalism, patriarchy, and imperialism—and the intersection between the different identity forms (race, class, gender, and sexuality), culture and knowledge, as well as between the different economic politics—exploitation and capital accumulation—and the political and geopolitical community forms— nation-states and modern empires—associated with them” (Laó-Montes 286). 4 It is worth clarifying that when we talk about the economic-commercial relations that Cuba maintained with the Soviet Union or other developed socialist countries, the exchange conditions were, in those times, favorable to Cuba. Hence, I will not insist on the economic aspect, because in this regard the typical asymmetries of the colonial and neocolonial exchange did not happen. 5 Ricardo Melgar Bao places the time when Marxism articulated the modern demands and struggles of Afrodescendants in the Caribbean and Latin America between 1919 and 1934, when, as he states: “In that time, the left was the one to encourage new debates about Black identity, oppression and racism; the one to support the recognition and struggles of Black workers; the one to put on the political agenda the controversial thesis of the Black nation’s self-determination” (Melgar Bao). (It should be noted that this author calls the Blacks of the Caribbean and Latin America our Afro-Americans). 6 Sandalio Junco was a prominent union leader and Cuban Marxist who, according to Ana Cairo, “shared exile with Julio Antonio Mella in Mexico. He was sent to study in Moscow. At his return, he founded the Bolshevik-Leninist Cuban Party in September 1933, the Cuban branch of Trotskyist organization” (Cairo 246). 7 Carlos Moore was considered an enemy of the Revolution and a CIA agent after publishing his article “Le Peuple Noir a-t-il sa Place dans La Révolution Cubaine?” (“Do Black people have a place in the Cuban Revolution?”) in the journal Présence Africaine (Vol. 24, no. 52, 1964). It was a challenging text that summoned the Cuban government, calling it racist. The article was translated into different languages and had a wide international circulation, causing a debate in which prominent Black figures approved or disapproved of it. Personalities such as León G. Damas, C.R.L James, John Henrik Clarke, and René Depestre were against the article, while several Black intellectuals supported Moore, such as Stokely Carmichael, Aimé Césaire, Cheikh Anta Diop, Malcolm X, Jacques Rabemananjara, Abdias Nascimento, Maya Angelou, Alex Haley, and Rex Nettleford, among others. The Cuban response was prepared by René Depestre, a Haitian communist poet who, at that time, lived in Cuba; his article was published by the same journal Présence Africaine (vol. 28, no. 56, 1965) and was also published in Havana under the title “Letter from Cuba about Bad Faith Imperialism” in the Casa de las Américas Magazine (no. 34, January–February 1966). It is the only reference published in Cuba about the incident and about its author, who has developed

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a vast work about the racial issues in the world in general and in Cuba in particular. Such work requires a measured analysis of his mistakes, achievements, and obsessions, because since that article in 1964 to date—i.e. for fifty years!—Carlos Moore has been a benchmark reference within the international debate about racism in Cuba, despite the fact that, in all these years, he only briefly visited Cuba twice. Due to his large literary input, the intensity of his attacks against the Revolution and the visibility of his actions, closely linked to powerful media circuits opposed the Cuban Revolution, this personality deserves a critical study that is beyond the aim of the present text. See Fidel Castro’s much discussed speech known both as the “University Speech” and under the title “They cannot destroy this revolution, but our flaws and inequalities can,” which was held on November 17th in 2005 in the main auditorium at Havana University, on the 60th anniversary of his start date in this studies center. During the last fifteen years, several anti-racist organizations, commissions, and citizen platforms have emerged, such as the Blackness Brotherhood, the project Color Cubano, the Juan Gualberto Gómez Racial Integration Movement, the Citizens Committee for Racial Integration, the Citizen Observatory against Discrimination, the Afrocuban Foundation, the Afrocubanas Project, the José Antonio Aponte Commission, the Afrodescendant Regional Structure, the Racial Unity Alliance, and the Afrodescendant Neighborhoods Network, among others. Some of these organizations have their own websites, and many of their leaders maintain blogs and electronic newsletters through which they carry out a tremendous promotion labor of their anti-racist goals and actions. Some of these newsletters are “From La Ceiba,” “Critical Observatory,” and “Aponte,” together with the blogs “Afromodernidades,” “Negra cubana tenía que ser,” “Afrocubanas,” “El palenque,” and “Afrocubaweb,” among some others which also take on identity issues, including racial matters. Such organizations are often considered controversial and suspicious, but they express a wide ideological spectrum and, in some cases, a strong political polarization. It is worth recalling that the demands of the Independent Party of Color (Partido Independiente de Color, 1908-1912) were not, for the most part, racial demands, but demands for the benefit of all the poor, the workers, and Cuban citizens. In spite of that, they were massacred by their former colleagues of the Liberation Army. Without establishing analogies with a process that occurred more than a century ago and within different political contexts, the point to make is that the look to the current moment should not consider any repressive solutions, but instead dialogic and assertive ones. Coronil himself winks reassuringly at us when he also explains: “[w]hat I want to highlight here is not the sincerity or insincerity of beliefs, nor their relation to practices, but the specific structural relations that enable the coexistence of conflicting beliefs and practices, while not necessarily implying bad faith or deceitfulness” (24). These reasons do not clarify, among other exclusionary practices and realities, the outrageous absence of Black characters in Cuban television, the still rare Black presence among the top management levels of the country, nor the decrease of Black students in Cuban universities, to mention only three evident and indisputable phenomena that have recently been studied.

Works cited Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. “(Qué es el racismo) Hacia una interpretación estructural.” Debates sobre ciudadanía y política raciales en las Américas negras, edited by Caridad Mosquera Rossero-Labbé, Agustín Laó-Montes, and Cesar Rodríguez Garavito. Collection Lecturas CES, Del Valle University and Colombia National University, 2010, pp. 649–51. Cairo, Ana. “Los otros marxistas y socialistas cubanos. 11990022-11995588.” Mariátegui, edited by Rosario Esteva et al. Centro de investigación y desarrolo de la cultural cubana Juan Marinello, Havana, 2002.

Racism vs. socialism in Cuba 247 Coronil, Fernando. “El futuro en el ruedo: historia y utopía en América Latina (1199889922001100).” Revista Casa de las Américas, no. 276, 2014, pp. 3–31. Depestre, René. “Lettre de Cuba.” Présence Africaine, vol. 4, 1965, pp. 105–42. ——. “Carta de Cuba sobre el imperialismo de la mala fe.” Casa de las Américas, vol. 6, no. 34, 1966, pp. 33–57. Du Bois, W. E. B. Las almas del pueblo negro [The Souls of Black Folk]. Fernando Ortíz Foundation, 2001 [1903]. González Casanova, Pablo. “Colonialismo interno (una redefinición).” La teoría marxista hoy, edited by A. Borón, J. Amadeo y S. González. CLACSO, 2006, pp. 409–34. Laó-Montes, Agustín. “Cartografía del campo político Afrodescendiente en América Latina.” Debates sobre ciudadanía y política raciales en las Américas negras, edited by Caridad Mosquera Rossero-Labbé, Agustín Laó-Montes, and Cesar Rodríguez Garavito. Collection Lecturas CES, Del Valle University and Colombia National University, 2010. Also available in Universitas Humanisticas, no. 68, July December 2009, pp. 207–45. Melgar Bao, Ricardo. “Rearmando la memoria. El primer debate socialista acerca de nuestros afroamericanos.” Revista Humania del Sur, vol. 2, no. 2, 2007, pp. 145–66. Moore, Carlos. “Le Peuple Noir a-t-il sa Place dans La Révolution Cubaine?” Présence Africaine, no. 52, 1964, pp. 177–230. Quijano, Aníbal. “Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América Latina.” La colonialidad del saber: Eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales: Perspectivas latinoamericanas, edited by Eduardo Lander. Editorial Ciencias Sociales, 2005, pp. 216–72. ——. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views from South, vol. 1, no. 3, 2000, 533–80. ——. “¡Qué tal raza!” Debates sobre ciudadanía y política raciales en las Américas negras, edited by Caridad Mosquera Rossero-Labbé, Agustín Laó-Montes, and Cesar Rodríguez Garavito. Collection Lecturas CES, Del Valle University and Colombia National University, 2010, pp. 183–94. Schwarz, Roberto. “Las ideas fuera de lugar.” Translated by Ana Clarisa Agüero and Diego García. C.I.F.F. yH – Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, www.ffyh.unc.edu.ar/archivos/ modernidades_a/II/Mod2Contenidos/Main-Traducciones.htm. Accessed 23 November, 2016. Wallerstein, Immanuel: Geopolítica y geocultura: ensayos sobre el moderno sistema mundial. Kairos, 2007. ——. The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. Academic Press, 1974. Zurbano, Roberto. “Cuba: Doce dificultades para enfrentar el (neo)racismo o doce razones para abrir el (otro) debate.” Revista Universidad de La Habana, no. 273, 2012, pp. 266–77. Also available at acahttps://www.geledes.org.br/cuba-doce-dificultades-para-enfrentaral-neoracismo-e-doce-razones-para-abrir-el-otro-debate/.

13 “Let us be Moors” Conversion to Islam in Cuba Ilja Labischinski

“Seamos Moros” (“Let us be Moors”) is what Cuban national hero José Martí wrote in 1893 in support of the Berber uprising against Spanish rule in northern Morocco. He wrote these lines just two years before the Cuban War of Independence and when the battles of European empires over their possessions in Asia and Africa were in full swing. Martí thus connected the Cuban history of colonialism and foreign domination to the experiences of the Muslim population in North Africa. Nowadays Martí’s catchphrase has become even more relevant. As projections of the Pew Forum show, the number of Muslims in the Americas will more than double in the next 20 years, from 5 million in 2010 to nearly 11 million in 2030 (Grim and Karim). This growth can be attributed to migration flows from Muslim people on the one hand and conversion to Islam on the other hand (Aidi 44). The phenomenon of conversion to Islam in Cuban society has been observed since the 1990s and even more so in the past ten years. The initial question of my ethnographic research was why Cubans convert to Islam, especially because generally, views of what is considered to be Cuban and what is viewed as Islamic do not go together. During a two-month field trip in Cuba from February to April 2013 I thus conducted several interviews, mostly in Havana, with a community of Cubans who had converted to Islam. The reasons why people decide to change their religious affiliation are diverse and subjective. The rise of Islam in Cuba is mostly viewed as a recent phenomenon that has its roots in the financial crisis of the island (e.g., Mesa Delmonte). However, given the long history of Islam in the Americas, which goes back to at least the 15th century, I was interested in how important this history was for the community of converted Cubans and what role it might have played in their decisions to convert to Islam. In other words, I was interested in the historical perspectives of Cuban Muslims and the importance they attribute to this history today. For many Islamic converts, the religion links the Cuban history of Spanish colonization to a reclaiming of their Islamic past. In that perspective, converting to Islam therefore does not mean taking up a new religion, but going back to their roots. During my research I recorded several narratives of Islamic history in Cuba that were all characterized by their translocal nature, two of which will be presented in the following: The role of Muslims in the transatlantic slave trade, and the influence of the Nation of Islam from North America. The two people who told

Conversion to Islam in Cuba 249 me these stories were Mauricio and Mustafa. While Mauricio had converted only two years before and only recently discovered the community of Cuban Muslims, Mustafa had converted in the 1990s and therefore is one of the oldest and most highly regarded members of the community. Nevertheless, both told me quite similar stories about how they decided to become Muslim and how translocal histories influenced their decisions. Both stories are marked by experiences of discrimination and racism. Before I present their stories in detail, I will briefly examine the history of the community of Cuban Muslims in the context of the broader history of the Americas and, given its particularity in the Caribbean context, Cuban history since the Cuban Revolution. Based on the narratives of Mauricio and Mustafa, I will then discuss how Cuban Muslims use their religion to redress discrimination and racism in the Cuban society. By telling their history as a history of translocal entanglements, they challenge how Western and Cuban history is commonly being told.

Islam in the Americas Following the violent conflicts in the Middle East and the terror attacks in Europe and the United States, Islam and its followers have received increasing media attention across Europe and the Americas to the effect that Islam is often seen as a problem or a threat (Merz 3). However, Islamophobia or anti-Islamic racism is not a phenomenon that started after September 11, 2001. It is at least as old as the conquest of the Americas, and linked to its history (Grosfoguel and Mielants 2). Like the history of Europe, the history of the Americas has been shaped by entanglements with Islam. In 1492, Cristobál Colón crossed the Atlantic just a few months before the Spanish Reconquista was completed. Both events are inseparably entangled in that the Reconquista was the precondition for a successful conquest of the Americas. Spaniards who served in the fight against Muslims played an important role in the conquest of the Americas. They could use techniques they had learned in the fights of the Reconquista to fight against the indigenous population of the Americas. Muslims had arrived on the American continent with the Spanish colonization. The Mexican historian Hernán Taboada examines the influence of Islam during colonization in his book La Sombra del Islam en la conquista de América. Furthermore, Black Crescent by Michael A. Gomez and Sylviane A. Diouf’s Servants of Allah present a good overview of the history of enslaved Muslims in the Americas. However, the numbers and data presented in works about Islam during the period of colonization should be treated carefully, as background information and references to sources are frequently missing. Another issue is that researchers who examine Islam in the Americas during colonization tend to overstate its influence: “Camino igualmente dudoso es el de quienes han apuntado a influencias culturales de origen árabe-islámico en América Latina, para deducir de ello una nutrida presencia mora desde el inicio mismo de la Colonia. Topónimos o andrónimos, técnicas agrícolas, estilos artísticos, comida, apero equino, la moda de las ‘tapadas’ ‘tapadas’ limeñas, instituciones, fiestas, creencias, todo ello ha

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sido llamado a colación, con una lógica errática” (Taboada, “El Moro en las Indias” 116).1 Nevertheless, one can clearly say that Muslims have lived on the American continent since its colonization and that this historical presence of Islam has left traces. While the conquest on the American side of the ocean went on, Muslims and Jews in Spain were forced to convert to Christianity and later in the 16th century were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula completely. The submission of the indigenous populations in the Americas and the expulsion of Jews and Muslims created a closed European-Christian identity that was seen as superior to all other religions (Shohat 96). In this process, Jews and Muslims became internal Others, while the indigenous populations of the Americas became the external Others (Mignolo 21). Alterity was thus constructed along religious lines, and thereby a new hierarchy was established, with Christian Europeans on top. Below were Muslims and Jews, people with the ‘wrong’ religion, followed by the indigenous populations of the Americas and Africa, who were seen as people ‘without’ religion (Maldonado-Torres). During the Renaissance, the myth was created that Europe and European culture and knowledge came from a single, ostensibly pure Greek-Roman source (Martín-Muñoz 24). Any contribution from Muslims or Jews and the historical entanglements between Islam and Europe were ignored (Samman and Al-Zo’by 5). In this historiography, the Byzantine Empire, the history of Jews (apart from their annihilation), Muslim Spain, and European colonialism have no place (Asad 215), as a result of which Islam lost its place in the history of the Western World. From the 16th to the 19th century, Africa was the source of the largest number of enslaved people in the history of humanity (Zeuske, Handbuch 461). African people were dehumanized and seen as a commodity by European slave traders. According to the slave voyages database, about 12.5 million people from Africa were enslaved and displaced to the Americas, out of which 10.7 million people survived the middle passage. For the first time in history a global economic order was established that connected distant regions around the whole world (OfuateyAlazard 112). The presence of Muslims in this system has been overlooked for a long time, but Muslims were involved in the transatlantic slave trade in various situations. The Caribbean was the American center of the trade in human beings. Between 1680 and 1886, sugar production flourished on the plantations of Jamaica, Hispaniola, and Cuba because of slavery, which turned the region into the “Black Caribbean” and a laboratory of early globalization (Zeuske, Schwarze Karibik 7). Even though slavery had been present in Cuba since early colonial times, “Cuba developed the most compact, most efficient and best known [system of] slavery of the Western world in the early 19th century” (Zeuske, Schwarze Karibik 1).2 Juan Pérez de la Riva counts 1.3 million enslaved Africans deported to Cuba between 1525 and 1873 (Pérez de la Riva 35). The rise of Cuba as the largest producer of sugar and concurrently the largest importer of enslaved people was closely related to the events on another Caribbean island, Haiti. In the wake of events starting in 1791 and the ‘unthinkable revolution’ of enslaved people in

Conversion to Islam in Cuba 251 Haiti, Cuban plantations were able to grow and to accommodate the European demand for sugar, as a result of which slavery on the island reached its peak. Very little is known about the presence of enslaved Muslims in Cuba. Even though it is probable that Muslims were imported to Cuba, this does not automatically mean that they practiced their religion there. Yet, it is possible to find traces of Islamic influence on Afro-Cuban religions (Marcuzzi): The evidence . . . points to the arrival of Islamized Africans into Cuba from a very early period and suggests that this migration continued to take place throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Direct references to Mandinga, Cape, Bambara and Wolof slaves and free men and women in Cuba and other parts of the Caribbean and Hispanic America indicate that they arrived in not insignificant numbers and that their presence was important enough to be recorded in a considerable number of cases. (Barcia 9) The European colonialism of the 19th century further led to the perception of Arab countries as not being capable of progress and modernization. This perception legitimized the territorial expansion and exploitation of imperial powers (Said). Religious explanations for European supremacy were replaced by biological and racial explanations. The colonization of the Middle East changed the relationship between Christian Europe and the Islamic Orient from imperial difference to colonial difference, and Muslims became the subject of European colonial imagination (Grosfoguel and Mielants 3). As a consequence, it was not Muslim religion per se that was seen as inferior to Christianity, but the people that practiced it. In many Caribbean countries, the presence of Muslims can be traced to indentured labor programs. After the abolition of slavery, the need for cheap human labor was large. Caribbean colonies indentured workers from predominantly Muslim countries, such as Indonesia and Pakistan. These people often had to work under slave-like conditions but could practice their faith, and they were therefore able to keep their religious traditions alive in the diaspora. With the secularization of Europe in the 19th century, this ‘inferiorization’ of people was no longer determined by religion and the discourse shifted to explain ‘inferiority’ in terms of biological and racial differences. Following the wars and subsequent processes of political decolonization in the 20th century, European domination over its colonies was no longer acceptable. Biological racism was disproved, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was approved by the United Nations General Assembly. Nevertheless, the assumed superiority of Western values lingered and continues to influence Western thought to the present. Pseudo-biological explanations of superiority were now replaced by cultural theories of supremacy (Wade 7) After September 11, 2001, European and American fears of foreign infiltration became connected to Islam, which in turn became associated with terrorism.

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Especially in the USA, the press generally tends to see illegal immigrants as another potential threat to national security, which led to a massive militarization of the border between the US and Mexico (Grosfoguel and Mielants 5). Americans and Europeans frequently perceive Islam to be a monolithic construction and its diverse beliefs, social structures and the many different languages of Muslims across the globe are grouped under the term Islamic (Merz 37–38). Islam thus has become part of a public debate in which Muslims are often displayed as violent and backward, and as people whose values do not match those of a constitutional democracy (Daniel 143). Prejudices against Muslims are often intensified through the media, in which Muslims are rarely seen as individuals, but as a large group of people, and are often represented in connection to violence (Martin-Muñoz 26). Muslims are therefore ascribed a single religious identity that ostensibly overshadows any other type of social affiliation or belonging. This kind of essentialization leads to more hierarchies and ascriptions according to which Christians are associated with freedom, democracy, individualism and modernity, while Muslims are associated with tradition, patriarchy and despotism (Martínmuñoz 26). This type of dichotomy and hierarchy of Orient and Occident perpetuates what Palestinian literary theorist Edward Said described in the concept of Orientalism. To simultaneously be a Muslim and a European or an American is often excluded from public perception. This also applies in the context of Cuba, whose image has been formed by ‘rum, cigars, and salacious women.’ For example, the national dish—which has the meaningful name Moros y Cristianos—is pork with rice and beans, which implies that to be a Muslim and a Cuban at the same time seems to be a contradiction. For many Cubans, Islam and Cuba seem to be contradictory. A lot of people to whom I spoke told me stories about how they were asked where they came from as soon as they admitted to being Muslim. When they explained they were also Cuban, reactions varied from curious looks to irritated questions. One Cuban Muslim told me that, as a reaction to admitting his religion, he received the following question: “Eres musulmán? Vienes de Musulandia?”3 These reactions are exemplary for how Islam and its followers are seen by many Europeans, Americans, and also Cubans. As outlined above, since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, Islam has received increasing media attention in Latin America and the Caribbean as well. Worldwide, various human rights organizations have voiced their concerns about the growing amount of intolerance and discrimination against Muslims and at the same time put out a warning against a new type of racism that seems to start growing all over (Caro 238).4

Conversion to Islam and resistance against racism In spite of the long history of Islam in the Americas, for a long time the main reason that was commonly given for the presence of the religion in Latin America was immigration from Arabic or Asian countries (Sills and Baggett 28),

Conversion to Islam in Cuba 253 a perception that has only recently undergone a change. Today, conversion to Islam is one of the main causes for why Islam has become more and more noticeable in Latin America (Logroño Narbona 5–6). Yet, Muslims in Latin America have not received much scholarly attention.5 This differs from the United States, where Islamic social movements such as the Nation of Islam have been around since the 1960s and personalities like Malcolm X and Muhammed Ali raised an interest in and an awareness of Islam in the United States, to the effect that a fair number of publications about the Nation of Islam and about Black Muslims in the USA already exist. The Nation of Islam was founded in the 1930s in the USA during the world economic crisis. Many people came from the Southern states of the USA to the North to look for work. There they were mostly confronted with unemployment, poverty, and racism. The Nation of Islam knew how to combine and use religious and socio-political topics to quickly gain members. First, the organization opened up two temples in Detroit and Chicago. By the end of the 1970s, the Nation of Islam had more than 70 temples in the USA, Jamaica, and Barbados. However, the influence of the Nation of Islam was limited mainly to English-speaking countries in the Americas, while effects on Latin America were minor. In Brazil, a Black Muslim movement was established, which was independent of the movements in the USA but still incorporated many of the ideas espoused by the Nation of Islam. Though people of different ethnic and social backgrounds are converting to Islam, it is mostly the marginalized people in urban Western centers who are attracted by the alleged color-blindness of Islam (Aidi 44). Converting seems to be a possibility that challenges the discrimination and racism in their countries by entering an international umma,6 where social status is ostensibly no longer important. Theories of religious conversion thus have seen conversion to Islam in the Americas—at least since Malcolm X—as a response to Western racism and imperialism (Aidi 44). The first converts in Cuba were solely Black Cubans from a neighborhood in Havana that is often associated with poverty. Every person I talked to told me that the ‘special period’ had been a particularly difficult time for them. The 1990s’ socalled “special period in times of peace” (periodo especial en tiempos de paz) marks the serious economic crisis, which can be seen as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Although my interlocutors barely wanted to talk to me about this time, it was clear that to them it had been a time of social exclusion. Accordingly, religion provided the possibility of escaping from that feeling and gave them hope and strength. To them, Islam clearly represented a religion that went against racism and discrimination. With the terror attacks of 9/11, Muslims not only stepped into the public eye, but also drew the attention of the police and security agencies, which also increased the interest in the Muslims of Latin America and the Caribbean. US security agencies were especially concerned with the activities of Hezbollah in Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay (Connel). Attacks on Jewish or Israeli facilities in Buenos Aires were also interpreted as Islamic terrorism, which was said to have reached the Latin American continent (Montenegro 1). On top of that, the missionary work

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of Muslim converts in Chiapas drew attention in the media (Glüsing). All of those reports considered Islam in the Americas as a recent phenomenon and neglected its longer history as outlined above. Starting in 2009, a project called “Islam in Latin America” under the leadership of Maria del March Logroño Narbona was established by the University of Florida and the Carnegie Foundation. Its aim is to undermine stereotypes regarding Islam in the public and in the media with substantiated factual analyses. The central themes of the project are the historical developments of Islam in Latin America, the diasporic-religious practices of Latin American Muslims, and the perception of Muslims in the media. In respect of these themes, a number of different studies about several Latin American countries have been completed, such as analyses of Muslim identity in Argentina (Montenegro) and Columbia (Castellanos), as well as about conversions to Islam in Mexico (Pastor de Maria y Campos). However, most of the works of the research project see Islam as a phenomenon of the 20th and 21st centuries and only rarely connect it to its historical roots or global complexity. The history of Islam in Latin American countries is often only briefly addressed, and it is rarely connected to the current situation of local Muslim communities. In spite of this widespread neglect of regional histories and contexts, Islam is one of the main religions practiced in the Americas today. In the Caribbean, the presence of Muslims differs from country to country and dates back to different historical timeframes, events, and regions of origin, including the descendants of indentured laborers mentioned above. In Jamaica in the 1990s, 3,000 Muslims lived mainly around Kingston and were largely unrecognized in the predominantly Christian country (Afroz 30). The region’s largest Muslim concentrations, however, are in Suriname, with an estimated 100,000 believers; in Trinidad and Tobago, with 100,000 Muslims; and in Guyana, with an estimated Muslim population of 120,000 (Voll 266).

The Muslim community in Cuba To understand the origins of the community of Cuban Muslims it is important to consider the situation of religions in Cuba in general as well as the changes that occurred after the Cuban Revolution of 1959. With the Revolution, religious life on the island changed dramatically. The Catholic Church opposed the new regime, which resulted in an open conflict (Hoffmann 158). The constitution of 1976 proclaimed the country to be a secular state. Only a year before that, members of religious organizations had been prohibited from joining the state-run massorganizations, including the Communist Party. The constitution included the principle of religious freedom, but only under the condition that socialist morality was to be respected. The situation of religions in Cuban society changed in the 1990s during the socalled “special period in times of peace,” in which Cuba lost the majority of its commercial contacts and its gross domestic product declined rapidly. Due to the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s most important supporter and trade partner disappeared, which caused a severe economic crisis for the country, which soon

Conversion to Islam in Cuba 255 reached every level of society. The effects were felt in all spheres of life, making the word “crisis” part of day-to-day discourse. The crisis altered daily life, forcing people to reflect and search for alternatives and answers to the problems of survival (Perera Pintado 148). At the same time, some political alterations enabled visible changes to the situation of religions in Cuba. For example, it was now possible for members of the Communist Party to be official members of a religious community, which had been prohibited until 1992. In the same year, a constitutional amendment prohibited all forms of religious discrimination. A further consequence of the economic crisis that influenced the religious panorama on the island was the controlled economic opening of Cuba to the outside world and economic liberalization measures that sought out new foreign trade partners. Hence during this period new religious practices that had not been part of Cuba’s previous religious spectrum reached the island. Beyond quantitative measures of growing religious affiliation, the revival has meant that religion has come to play a greater role in daily life (Alonso 155; Perera Pintado 151). In this context that it is possible to regard the formation and the institutionalization of today’s Muslim community in Cuba. In comparison to other Muslim communities, the Cuban one is rather small, although one can only speculate about the exact size and number of members. According to members of the community, approximately 10,000 Muslims reside on the island. A large number are foreign students, especially from African countries, Pakistan, and Indonesia. There are also many refugees from Palestine and the Western Sahara region. The largest part of the Muslim presence in Cuba— as in most other countries in the Americas—can be traced back to migration movements. However, the number of Cubans who have converted to Islam has been growing steadily over the past years. The community estimates that since the 1990s approximately 2,000 to 3,000 Cubans have converted to Islam. The vast majority live in the capital Havana. The Muslim community in Cuba shows some peculiarities when compared to other Muslim communities in the Americas. In many countries, the Internet plays a vital role in supplying information about Islam and in the decision to convert. Even though more Cubans can now access the Internet, it is still difficult and expensive compared to access in other countries. Getting in contact with the religion therefore almost always happens in a different way. Cuba has only one Muslim community that is officially recognized by the government. This community has its seat in in a normal residential home. This means that there are practically no visible places to go for people who are interested in this religion. Another peculiarity of the situation of Islam on the island surely is its political situation. As a socialist state, the government of Cuba continues to have a fraught relationship with its religious communities, in spite of the changes mentioned above. At the same time, there are increasing relations between Cuba and states like Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, the governments of which demand a respectful treatment of the Muslim community by the Cuban government. As outlined above, the Muslim community of converts in Cuba as it exists today goes back to developments of the 1990s. The founder of today’s community of

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Cuban Muslims is Pedro Lazo Torres. He now is the Imam of the community and his followers call him Yahya. He is considered to have been the first Cuban convert. Yayha looked for further possibilities to find out more about Islam, and thus tried to get in contact with Muslim university students and ambassadors. The community started growing, not least through support from foreign embassies and organizations, especially from Qatar, the Emirates, Algeria, and Iran. In 2002, together with other Cuban Muslims, Yahya founded the Liga Islámica de Cuba, which since 2007 has the status of a legal person. The Liga Islámica is the only official Islamic organization in Cuba. The most prominent goal of the organization is to unify all Muslims on the island, Cubans and foreigners, and to help promote building a mosque in Havana. To date, Cuba remains the only Latin American Country without an Islamic house of prayer. The members of the community meet every Friday at the house of Imam Yahya to pray, eat, and talk together on his small terrace. Religious life for Muslims in Cuba also brings some social challenges for believers. Many feel insecure about whether it is appropriate to greet one another in the Cuban way by kissing on the cheek. According to the Imam Yayha, the Islamic nutritional guidelines also pose a special challenge for Muslims in Cuba. Most food contains pork, and Rum is something like a national drink. In addition, the acceptance of fasting during Ramadan is not very high in Cuban society. Ostracism and discrimination against Muslims are part of the social reality in Cuba. Yahya told me that his friends often joke about his religion and sometimes call him a terrorist just for fun. Other examples that were given included a female student who was expelled from university because she refused to take off her headscarf, while others were not allowed to visit English language classes. Cuban Muslims are often perceived as strangers in their own country. Many Muslims say that they are stared at on the street and that people ask them where they come from. As a result, many Cuban Muslims hide their beliefs in public. It is thus also very important to the members of the community that, although they are Muslims, they still feel Cuban, as indicated in the frequently heard phrase “somos creyentes, pero somos cubanos.”7

Cuban stories of conversion to Islam The history of Islam in Cuba is especially important to the members of the community of Cuban Muslim converts. One of the members who told me about the translocal entanglements of the history of Cuba and Islam is Mustafa. He is one of the Muslims of today’s community who has been practicing Islam the longest and therefore enjoys a high standing within the community. He told me that Islam—like he himself—has roots in Africa. For him, the transatlantic slave trade and the Haitian Revolution play a vital role in the memory of the Cuban converts to Islam. The revolution in Haiti also plays an important role for Mauricio, another Cuban Muslim convert who told me his conversion story. “Primero estado liberado del Caribe es Haití. Una rebelión de negros. ¿Quiénes eran esos negros? Muchos

Conversion to Islam in Cuba 257 de estos negros no tenían costumbres de otra cosa que no fuera el Islam.”8 Mauricio talks about episodes of the Haitian Revolution that in his opinion prove that the revolutionaries must have been Muslims. He wants to illustrate that enslaved Muslims were especially rebellious and freedom-loving and therefore did not comply with European colonists. The role of enslaved Muslims has indeed been neglected for a long time in analyses of the European slave trade with Africans. Widely divergent estimates are based on the few existing sources that consider the religion of enslaved people and vary between 10% and 30% of enslaved Africans, based on the areas of origin and their religious situation at that time (Gomez 36). In 1835, the largest slave rebellion took place in Bahia, Brazil. It is said that enslaved Muslims played an important role in that rebellion (Reis). Muslim slaves were generally said to be rebellious and ungovernable, and they were famous for often gaining back their freedom (Lovejoy 7) by buying themselves out of captivity. The image of rebellious Muslim slaves continues to be a vital one for members of the community of Cuban Muslims and the fact that Muslim enslaved people had often participated in revolts was frequently pointed out to me by Mustafa and Mauricio as well. Both attributed this to the freedom-loving and rebellious character of Muslims. In the literature about enslaved Muslims in Africa and the Americas, they are often described as literate and educated (Diouf 107). Yahya, the Imam of the community, was especially interested in painting a picture of Muslim slaves as very educated and loyal servants of god: they kept their Islamic beliefs and because of their willpower did not convert to Christianity. For Mauricio, the Islamic rituals of enslaved Africans are still visible in Cuban religions today. He told me of Islamic elements that were overseen when considering the African influences on Cuba. For example, he explained to me why the Ifá oracle is full of Islamic elements. Mauricio himself had practiced different Afro-Cuban religions before he decided to convert to Islam. To him it is clear that the slaves from Africa brought their religious beliefs with them to Cuba: “Estos negros cuando vinieron para Cuba, vinieron con sus costumbres.”9 Mauricio has no doubts that there was a large number of Muslims amongst the displaced Africans. That is why to him it is obvious that one of the orishás of Cuban santería, Shango, had been a Muslim in Africa: “Changó estuve un musulmán en la tierra de Malé.”10 In his opinion, the pressure from the Catholic Church on enslaved Muslims had been so high that it was not possible for them to keep their religion. However, the practices of the Muslims found their way into different rituals of other religions that were practiced by enslaved people. Mauricio thinks his argument is supported by the fact that the word Alá can be found in many rituals. The political relationships Cuba maintains with African states are of great importance. After the Revolution, Cuba established diplomatic relations only with Egypt. Shortly after, the new Cuban regime began to internationalize the Revolution. Africa was in the center of its interests. Just two years after the fall of the Batista-regime, the new Cuban leaders sent delegates to North Africa in support of the Algerian freedom movement. The biggest and best-known

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intervention of the Cuban regime, however, was in Angola. Between November 1975 and March 1976, about 30,000 Cubans were sent to the African country, compared to 2,000 Cubans in total in all international interventions until that point. These numbers illustrate the enormous dimensions of the Cuban engagement in Angola. The Caribbean island was therefore instrumental in the victory of the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA) (Gleijeses 31–34). Mauricio was one of the 30,000 Cubans in Angola. Mauricio’s goal was to go to Angola to learn more about himself, his identity and his roots as an Afro-Cuban, so he asked me: “Donde está mi identidad? Allá en Africa.”11 He said about himself: “Soy descendiente de esa gente en Angola.”12 Mauricio learned about Islam for the first time during his stay in Angola, even though he had known about Islamic influences based on the European slave trade in African people before he left for Angola. For Mauricio, the influence of the Cuban international missions on the development of Islam in Cuba is not limited to his personal experiences in Angola, as less well-known missions also had a large impact on the situation of the Muslim community in Cuba today. In addition, the new political alliances with Islamic countries such as Iran or Saudi Arabia are affecting the religious situation on the island. “Mira una embajada del Reinado de Arabia Saudita en Cuba que antes no existía. Son momentos de apertura en diferentes campos.”13 The embassies of these countries are closely entangled with the development of the Muslim community in Cuba. Without the religious activities of the embassies, the Islamic faith could not have spread across the island. In addition to the political international missions, relationships on the educational level also influenced the situation of Cuban Muslims. Just two years after the Cuban Revolution, the first African students from Guinea came to Cuba in order to study for higher university degrees (Gleijeses 30). The internationalization of Cuban education therefore quickly became part of the new government policy of Fidel Castro. The Cuban government would show support for foreign students through scholarships, waivers of student fees, providing room and board, and covering the cost of local transportation (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 137).14 Special emphasis was given to supporting young people from refugee camps from Palestine and the Western Sahara. There are many Muslims among foreign students in Cuba, mostly from African countries and the Middle East. The largest community of Muslim students, approximately 900 in total, however, comes from Pakistan (Febles Pérez 2013). They are very interested in communicating with Cubans and are happy to help the community of Muslim converts gain more knowledge about their religion. Communication and contact between them is so close that marriages between Muslims from different countries occur within the Cuban community. Juan, one of the most active members of the community when it comes to organizing religious and cultural events, explained the enormous importance of the Muslim students for the community: El hecho de que miles de estudiantes de países árabes y países africanos y tantos árabes y africanos tengan la religión del Islam y hayan interactuado con la sociedad cubana también ha influido en el cambio de mentalidad acerca

Conversion to Islam in Cuba 259 del Islam y de los musulmanes. Mucho de estos estudiantes están en diferentes zonas del país han interactuado con la población cubana y en su gran mayoría la población cubana opina lo mismo, que buenos muchachos son estos estudiantes, que bueno que tienen estos hábitos de comida, que buenos estudiantes son y la gran mayoría de los cubanos que los han conocido tienen un buen criterio de ellos. Eso hace también que cambie, lógicamente la imagen, la idea que tienen sobre los musulmanes.15 Just like Juan, many Cubans had their first personal encounters with Islam through Muslim students and gained knowledge about Islam through these encounters, as a result of which some decided to convert. Even today foreign students continue to play a vital role for the Muslim community. They supply Muslim Cubans with information and religious objects. To Cuban Muslims they are a way to connect with the world outside Cuba. Based on their experiences, the foreigners also supply the community with information about how Islam is lived and practiced in other countries. Other translocal entanglements that influenced Cuban Muslims in their decision to convert to Islam are the Black Nationalist Movement and the ideas of PanAfricanism that spread from the USA and other Caribbean islands to Cuba. One Cuban Muslim for whom those entanglements are crucial is Miguel. Influenced by Malcolm X and the Afro-Islamic strand of the Civil Rights Movement in the USA, Miguel began to search for his own roots in the Islamic parts of Africa. Miguel explained to me in great detail the colonial history of surnames of Black people in the Americas today, the roots of Islam in Africa, and the meaning of the name Malcolm X. He also pointed out that Islam came to the Americas through enslaved Africans. According to him, Islam had been forgotten for a while but was then rediscovered by Black people in the Americas, and the Nation of Islam had a special influence on that process. Mustafa also told me that the first thing he read about Islam was the biography of Malcolm X. He was impressed by the personality of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam’s fight for civil rights for Black people in the USA, which led to his fascination with Islam. He stated that from that point on he carried the desire to convert to Islam inside him but simply lacked the opportunity, as he did not know any other Muslims and at the time no contact point in Havana existed. It took several years until he met Imam Yahya and other Cuban Muslims by chance. In the 1990s, he spent time with the Cuban Muslims and got to learn about the religion. In 2000, he committed himself to Islam on his birthday and converted. Mustafa described the influence of a presentation by Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, which he attended in 1998. During his “World Friendship Tour,” Farrakhan visited the island several times. To Mustafa and other members of the Cuban Muslim community, his speeches held a great appeal. He was fascinated by the history of Black Muslims and the fight against racism in the USA. Mustafa also told me that he was even able to chat with Farrakhan during a visit to Cuba in 2012. Farrakhan was surprised and excited about the existence of a Muslim community in Cuba, about which he had apparently not

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known before. Farrakhan promised Mustafa and his community his support, which left a lasting impression on Mustafa. In his speeches, Farrakhan understood how to relate Cuba’s fight for independence from the USA to the fight of the Black Muslims against the repression of the US government. According to Mustafa, Farrakhan preached a universal revolution that would connect the socialist and Muslim worlds with each other. Fidel Castro could broadly agree on these points and thus supported him. The Cuban revolutionary leader had already taken the position that there was no contradiction between the socialist revolution and religion after the successful revolution in Iran in 1979. The Cuban government and the Nation of Islam both found the USA to be their enemy and therefore found common interests. The Nation of Islam and other Islamic civil rights movements have an important influence on the Cuban community. More generally, the connection between Islam and anti-imperialism is very important to Cuban Muslims, as it makes it possible for Islam to occupy a place within the Cuban Revolution. However, community members emphasize that they are not a social movement, but a religious organization. Thus, the Cuban authorities monitor them with a measure of suspicion, even though there is a generally successful cooperation between the community and the Cuban government. This means that discussions about racism and religious discrimination take place, but only within the community and not with Cuban society more broadly. It is still very difficult to denounce racism in Cuban society. Therefore, it is even more important to the community that their situation and their history be known.

Conclusion By looking at the origins of the Islamic community on the island and at the conversion stories of Cuban Muslims, a narrative of change, survival, reconstruction, influence, complexity, creativity, and internationalism emerges. From that viewpoint, Islam in Cuba and in the Americas is not a threat or invasion from the outside, but a product of entangled American history. When considering the growing Muslim community in Cuba today, José Martís catchphrase “seamos moros” means something new. More and more Cubans are converting to Islam, and the Muslim community has been growing for years. “Let us be moors” also has another dimension to it, however, as for many Muslim converts it combines the Cuban history of Spanish colonization with the reclaiming of a Muslim African past. Converting to Islam for them does not mean taking up a new religion but to go back to their roots. The narratives of the people presented here explain just that, and although they are only a few examples out of hundreds of stories, they tell new narratives about the history of Islam in the Americas. To the Cuban Muslims, telling the history of a small religious community in the Caribbean as a history of entanglements aims to fight against prejudices, racism, and discrimination. It can present a different picture of Islam, one that does not show religion as a threat from the outside, but as a religion that has been present in the Americas for more than 500 years.

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Notes 1 “Likewise uncertain is the way people have noted cultural influences of Arabic-Islamic origin and deduce a Moorish presence from the very beginning of the Colony. Toponyms or andronyms, agricultural techniques, artistic styles, food, apero equino, the fashion style of tapadas limeñas, institutions, parties, beliefs, all of these were connected, in a false logic.” 2 “Auf Kuba entwickelte sich im frühen 19. Jahrhundert die kompakteste, effizienteste und bekannteste Sklaverei der westlichen Welt.” 3 “Are you Muslim? Do you come from Musuland?” 4 The Open Society Institute has confirmed Islamophobic tendencies in Europe in their annual report of 2007 (Merz 375). The agency for basic rights in the European Union also confirmed in 2007 that Islamophobia as a form of discrimination and intolerance has become part of the social reality in Europe and, when looking at older studies, has clearly increased (Martin-Muñoz 22). 5 For the longer history of Black Muslims in America, see e.g. the works of C. Eric Lincoln and Michael A. Gomez. 6 Umma is Arabic for community and is commonly used by Muslims to refer to the collective community of all Islamic people in the world. 7 “We are believers, but we are Cubans.” 8 “The first free state in the Caribbean is Haiti. A rebellion of Black people. Who were these Black people? A lot of them had Islamic customs.” 9 “When these Black people came to Cuba, they came with their customs.” 10 “Changó was a Muslim in Malé.” 11 “Where is my identity? Over there in Africa.” 12 “I am a descendent of these people in Angola.” 13 “Look, an embassy of Saudi Arabia in Cuba that didn’t exist before. These are moments of opening in different fields.” 14 Until 2000, a total of 35,000 school and university students from more than 37 third world countries received scholarships from the Cuban government, which enabled them to continue their school education or go to university on the island (Risquet Valdés 96). Since 1961 more than 16,500 foreign students have received a Cuban university degree (Martín Sabina). 15 “The fact that thousands of students from Arabic and African countries and so many Arabs and Africans are Islamic and have interacted with the Cuban society has influences on the mentality towards Islam and Muslims. A lot of these students in various parts of the country have interacted with the Cuban population and the majority of the Cuban population thinks the same, that these students are good people, how good their eating habits are, how good these students are and the majority of the Cubans who met with them have a good opinion of them. This fact also changes the picture, the idea the Cubans have of Muslims.”

Works cited Afroz, Sultana. “The Unsung Slaves: Islam in the Plantation Society.” Caribbean Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 3, 1995, pp. 30–44. Aidi, Hisham. “Let us be Moors: Islam Race and ‘Connected Histories’ ‘Connected Histories’.” Middle East Report, vol. 229, 2003, pp. 42–53. Alonso, Aurelio. “Religion in Cuba’s Socialist Transition.” Socialism and Democracy, vol. 24 no. 1, 2011, pp. 147–159. Asad, Talal. “Muslims and European Identity: Can Europe Represent Islam?” The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union, edited by Anthon Pagden. Cambridge UP, 2002, pp. 209–227.

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Barcia, Manuel. “West African Islam in Colonial Cuba.” Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies, vol. 35, no. 2, 2014, pp. 1–14. Caro, Isaac. Islam y Judaísmo contemporáneos en América Latina. RIL, 2010. Castellanos, Diego. “Islam in Colombia: Between Assimilation and Exclusion.” Islam in Latin America Working Paper Series, 2010. https://lacc.fiu.edu/ research/islam-in-latinamerica/working-papers/islam_in_colombia.pdf. Connel, Curtis C. “Understanding Islam and its Impact on Latin America.” Research Report Submitted to Air Force Fellows, CADRE/AR, 2004. Daniel, Anna. “Der Islam als das Andere: Postkoloniale Perspektiven.” Doing Modernity – Doing Religion, edited by Anna Daniel et al. Springer VS, 2012, pp. 143–167. Diouf, Sylviane A. Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas. New York U, 1998. Febles Pérez, Mairim. “Representación Social de la Religión Islámica en la comunidad universitaria Fructuoso Rodríguez Pérez.” Unpublished Master’s Thesis, Universidad Agraria de La Habana, 2013. Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Elena. “Education, Migration and Internationalism: Situating Muslim Middle Eastern and North African Students in Cuba.” The Journal of North African Studies, vol. 15, no. 2, 2009, pp. 137–155. Gleijeses, Piero. Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976. UNC, 2003. Glüsing, Jens. “Praying to Allah in Mexico: Islam Is Gaining a Foothold in Chiapas.” Der Spiegel, no. 22, 2005, p. 130. Gomez, Michael A. Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas. Cambridge UP, 2005. Grim, Brian J., and Mehtab S. Karim. “The Future of the Global Muslim Population: Projections for 2010-2030.” Pew Research Center, 2011, www.pewforum.org/files/ 2011/01/FutureGlobalMuslimPopulation-WebPDF-Feb10.pdf. Accessed April 1, 2014. Grosfoguel, Ramón and Eric Mielants. “The Long-Durée Entanglements between Islamophobia and Racism in the Modern/Colonial/Capitalist/Patriarchal World-System: An Introduction.” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, vol. 5, no.1, 2006, pp. 1–12. Hoffmann, Bert. Kuba. 3rd ed. C.H. Beck, 2009. Lincoln, C. Eric. The Black Muslims in America. 3rd ed. Eerdmans, 1994. Logroño Narbona, Maria. Islam and Muslims in Latin America: An Overview. Florida International UP, 2010. Lovejoy, Paul E. “The Urban Background of Enslaved Muslims in the Americas.” Slavery and Abolition, vol. 26, no. 3, 2005, pp. 347–372. Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. “Reconciliation as a Contested Future: Decolonization as Project or Beyond the Paradigm of War.” Reconciliation: Nation and Churches in Latin America, edited by Iain Maclean. Ashgate, 2006, pp. 225–246. Marcuzzi, Michael. “Writing on the Wall: Some Speculations on Islamic Talismans, Catholic Prayers, and the Preparation of Cuban Bata Drums for Orisha Worship.” Black Music Research Journal, vol. 31, no. 1, 2011, pp. 209–227. Martín-Muñoz, Gema. “Unconscious Islamophobia.” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, vol. 8, no. 2, 2010, pp. 21–28. Martín Sabina, Elvira. La Educación Superior en Cuba en la década del 90. Felix Varela, 2002. Merz, Sibille. “Islam.” Wie Rassismus aus Wörtern spricht: (K)Erben des Kolonialismus im Wissensarchiv deutsche Sprache. Ein kritisches Nachschlagewerk, edited by Susan Arndt and Nadja Ofuatey-Alazard. Unrast, 2011, pp. 365–377.

Conversion to Islam in Cuba 263 Mesa Delmonte. “Muslims in Cuba.” Islam in Latin America Working Paper Series, 2010. http://www.muslimpopulation.com/pdf/Cubanmuslim_ Drluismesa.pdf. Mignolo, Walter. “Islamophobie/Hispanophobia: The (Re) Configuration of the Racial Imperial/Colonial Matrix.” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of SelfKnowledge, vol. 5, no. 1, 2006, pp. 13–28. Moebus, Christina. “Kuba: Die katholische Kirche als Vermittler zwischen Staat und Gesellschaft.” Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 2011. http://library.fes.de/pdf-files/iez/08771.pdf. Montenegro, Silvia. “Musulmanes en Argentina: Instituciones, identidades y membresía.” Islam in Latin America Working Paper Series, 2010. https://lacc.fiu.edu/research/islamin-latin-america/working-papers/islam_in_argentina.pdf. Ofuatey-Alazard, Nadja. “Sklaverei.” Wie Rassismus aus Wörtern spricht: (K)Erben des Kolonialismus im Wissensarchiv deutsche Sprache. Ein kritisches Nachschlagewerk, edited by Susan Arndt and Nadja Ofuatey-Alazard. Unrast, 2011, pp. 103–113. Pastor de María y Campos, Camila. “Being a New Muslim in Mexico: Conversion as Class Mobility.” Islam in Latin America Working Paper Series, 2010. http://www.muslim population.com/pdf/Mexico_Camilamuslim.pdf. Perera Pintado, Ana Celia. “Religion and Cuban Identity in a Transnational Context.” Latin American Perspectives, vol. 32, no. 1, 2005, pp. 147–173. Pérez de la Riva, Juan. “La tasa de mortalidad esclava.” El monto de la inmigración forzada en el siglo XIX, edited by Pérez de la Riva. Ed. de Ciencias Sociales, 1974, pp. 35–40. Rauhut, Claudia. “Die Santería-Religion und die kommunistische Partei- und Regierungspolitik in Kuba.” Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung, edited by Ulrich Mählert. Aufbau, 2009, pp. 199–210. Reis, João José. Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia. Johns Hopkins UP, 1993. Risquet Valdés, Jorge. El segundo frente del Che en el Congo: Historia del Batallón Patricio Lumumba. Abril, 2000. Said, Edward. Orientalism. Pantheon, 1978. Samman, Khaldoun and Mazhar Al-Zo’by. “Introduction: Islam and the Modern Orientalist World-System.” Islam and the Orientalist World-System, edited by Mazhar Al-Zo’by and Khaldoun Samman. Paradigm, 2008. pp. 3–22. Shohat, Ella. “Staging the Quincentenary: The Middle East and the Americas.” Third Text, vol. 6, no. 21, 1992, pp. 95–106. Sills, David and Kevin Baggett. “Islam in Latin America.” The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology, vol. 15, no. 2, 2011, pp. 28–41. Taboada, Hernan. La sombra del Islam en la Conquista de América. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2004. ——. “El Moro en las Indias.” Latinoamérica: Anuario de estudios latinoamericanos, no. 39, 2004, pp. 115–133. Voll, John O. “Muslims in the Caribbean. Ethnic Sojourners and Citizens.” Muslim Minorities in the West: Visible and Invisible, edited by Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Jane I. Smith. Altamira, 2002, pp. 265–277. Wade, Peter. Race, Nature and Culture: An Anthropological Perspective. Pluto P, 2002. Zeuske, Michael. Schwarze Karibik: Sklaven, Sklavereikulturen und Emanzipation. Rotpunkt, 2004. ——. Handbuch Geschichte der Sklaverei: Eine Globalgeschichte von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013.

14 Thinking resistance Critique and resistance in the philosophical concept of Foucault and in the postcolonial and decolonial theories of Bhabha and Mignolo Marita Rainsborough

Introduction Taking his concept of power and his definition of liberty as a starting point, Michel Foucault’s philosophy always assumes that there is also a possibility for resistance; for him the subject always remains at the center of actions for change: “Freedom can be practiced in resistance, insubordination, counter-conduct, as well as ethical subjectivation” (Simons 314). Despite his critique of the subject Foucault succeeds in arguing the emancipatory potential of human action. This process is concerned with the act of identifying the fracture lines which allow transformations—an action which takes place over and over again and for which there are no readymade concepts or procedures. Resistance can thus be described as the practice of freedom. Foucault defines varying forms of resistance which evolve in differing socio-historical situations: “resistances that are possible, necessary, improbable; others that are spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerted, rampant, or violent; still others that are quick to compromise, interested, or sacrificial” (Foucault, The Will 96), including political revolts and armed resistance struggles. Resistance and critique, argues Foucault, are closely interlinked with the shaping of the self also involved in this process. While Foucault, in the Kantian tradition, understands critique and resistance as the subject’s basic task as an element of transformation of the self and society within the scope of the historical process, that is to say as de-subjection, postcolonial and decolonial thinkers have developed theories of resistance and critique which discuss the particular role of the post/colonial situations and ‘coloniality,’1 providing both an analytical instrument and also specific models for action. Homi Bhabha’s concepts of the third space; hybridity; mimicry and migration and Walter Mignolo’s theories of border thinking; pluriversality and epistemic disobedience represent attempts to rethink critique and resistance. In the following I trace their respective relation to postcolonial and decolonial questions and concerns. This is of great importance for Latin American and Caribbean Studies in general and alludes theoretically to the important topic of ‘coloniality’— the darker side of ‘modernity’2—and the possibilities for critique and resistance in and from these regions.

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Critique and resistance in the works of Foucault Foucault’s concept of resistance is embedded in his theory of power and must be considered from this perspective. The possibility of resistance by means of the concept of freedom is logically anchored in the concept of power, since where there is power there is also resistance by virtue of the fact that power presupposes confrontation with opposing power. Every individual can be both the starting point for power as well as for resistance. We must assume that resistance is omnipresent since its starting point is located in opposing power. Foucault’s concept of resistance is primarily based on the model of combat (Han 46) and, to a lesser extent, of play (Han 65–66). Within the scope of his productive, dynamic, strategically oriented, and relationally understood power concept Foucault investigates the historic expressions of power practices and strategies as well as various resistance practices. By referencing Kant’s definition of critique and ethos it can be asserted that Foucault achieves a connection between the logic of power and the ethics of power (Han 128), in which those forms of resistance also relevant to self-shaping are anchored. Foucault also emphasizes the significance of affective moments (Foucault, La grand colère 277) such as rage, which has an activating effect. Crucial for Foucault is ethos (Foucault, The Ethics 286), a mindset in which resistive criticism plays a central role. In this context he writes of de-subjection (Foucault, Kritik 15), a partial liberation from power contexts. In the context of the cultivation of criticism and the ability to resist, Foucault emphasizes the importance of applying technologies of the self to the constitution of the self by the self (“Technologies of the Self” 300). The objective here is to become master over one’s self; to elude certain ways of being ruled, and to influence these ways. Foucault’s examination of colonialism takes place in various of his works and can be viewed as the starting point for his analysis of the Occidental concept of reason. It is not, however, a key focus of his philosophy. In the preface to the first edition of Madness and Civilization Foucault emphasizes that the Occident’s colonizing reason originated from its desire to differentiate itself from the Orient: Within the universality of the European ratio there is a division which the Orient represents, conceived as the origin; dreamed as the dizzying point out of which yearnings for, and promises of, a return are born; the Orient, presented as Occident’s colonizing reason but endlessly inaccessible since it always remains the border – as the night of the beginning during which the Occident formed itself but, however, drew a dividing line the Orient is, for the Occident, everything which the latter is not, although it is in the Orient that the Occident must embark on the search for its primal truth. A history of this great division, which spans the entire development of the Occident, must be written; it will observe the continuity and changes; it will, however, also show it in its tragic hieratic character. (qtd. in Jambet 229)3 In his radio lecture “Les Hétérotopies” Foucault discusses the heterotopic character of colonies, where, in addition to the economic benefit they generated, testing

266 Marita Rainsborough grounds for regimentation techniques and population-related measures came into being and the realization of ‘perfect societies’ was aspired to (Heterotopien 20). He emphasizes the corresponding exploitation and violence: Maybe could we also say that in order to know other cultures—non-Western cultures, so-called primitive cultures, or American, African, and Chinese cultures etc. —in order to know these cultures, we had not only to marginalize them, not only to look down upon them, but also to exploit them, to conquer them and in some ways through violence to keep them silent?4. (Foucault, “Lost Interview”) On the topic of resistance practices in post/colonial contexts, in addition to the significance of liberation practices,5 Foucault emphasizes the importance of practices of freedom: when a colonized people attempts to liberate itself from its colonizers, this is indeed a practice of liberation in the strict sense. But we know very well, and moreover in this specific case, that this practice of liberation is not in itself sufficient to define the practices of freedom that will still be needed if this people, this society, and these individuals are to be able to define admissible and acceptable forms of existence or political society. This is why I emphasize practices of freedom over processes of liberation; again, the latter indeed have their place, but they do not seem to me to be capable by themselves of defining all the practical forms of freedom. (Ethics 282–83) For Foucault, the practices of freedom have an ethical dimension and are considered in more detail in the context of his aesthetics respectively ethics of existence. They are linked to the application of techniques of the self for the shaping of the self. Foucault writes: “Liberation paves the way for new power relationships, which must be controlled by practices of freedom” (Ethics 283–84). The examination of racism plays a central role in the Foucauldian world of thought, particularly within the scope of his concept of power. Foucault poses the question: “How is racism rooted in occidental culture”? (Magiros 10).6 He argues that racism is linked to the general Occidental culture of knowledge and the subject. “Foucault takes this idea—that racism is a kind of interface between premodern and modern power systems—as his starting point” (Magiros 105). When doing so, he refers to an historical and a biological use (Foucault, Society 80) of the term ‘race.’7 Race, on the one hand, is related to groups with differing origins, languages, and religion and, in this context, to defeats, oppression, conquests, etc.—in other words, it expresses historico-political divides. On the other hand, it is based on the “symbolic function” of “blood” (Foucault, Society 147, qtd. in Stone 364) and has, since the mid-19th century, been understood in the biologicalmedical sense. The divide connected with it also runs right through the middle of society. Races thus become both ‘true’ and the ‘other’ race. It is this opinion

Thinking resistance 267 Foucault defines as racist. The concept of ‘cleansing’ is also linked to this, in which context Foucault writes about “race in the singular” (Foucault, Society 81). The binary divide increasingly changes to an image of “the integrity, the superiority, and the purity of the race” (Foucault, Society 81) becoming a ‘state racism’ with the state as the protector of the norm: Modern racism results from a decision (albeit “anonymous” since it is an operation of power) about who can die, either directly (the Holocaust and other ethnic cleansing practices) or indirectly (perhaps not as heinous, but definitely more common than the direct forms). These indirect forms of “letting die” include decisions about whose crime and mortality rates can be higher, who needs medical insurance, and whose actions need more or less disciplinary control. (Stone 364) According to Foucault, “[t]he connection between racism and antirevolutionary discourse and politics in the West is not, then, accidental” (Society 81). A differentiation is indirectly made between ‘state-supporting’ and ‘subversive’ ‘race.’8 Foucault’s linking of the racial discourse to bio-politics as a form of power integrates the apparatus of sexuality. In this context he also refers to a biologization of war: “Once the State functions in the bio-power mode, racism alone can justify the murderous function of the state” (Foucault, Society 256). Foucault writes as follows on this subject: What in fact is racism? It is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die . . . It is a way of separating out the groups that exist within a population. It is, in short, a way of establishing a biological type caesura within a population that appears to be a biological domain. This will allow power to treat that population as a mixture of races, or to be more accurate, to treat the species, to subdivide the species it controls, into the subspecies known, precisely [so], as races. (qtd. in Stone 365)9 The racism on which National Socialism was based is viewed as a combination of sovereignty power and bio-politics. Foucault writes: “How can one both make a biopower function and exercise the rights of war, the rights of murder [sic], and the function of death, without becoming racist? That was the problem, and that, I think, is still the problem” (qtd. in Stone 366).10 Foucault furthermore asserts that biology and medicine as sciences in general have contributed to the emergence of racism, since they take terms such as ‘normal’ and ‘pathological’ as their starting points. These, argues Foucault, are the origins of contemporary racism. Parallel to this he clearly speaks out against a psychologization of racism, demanding instead the recognition of the otherness of the other (Magiros 115–16). In this context Foucault rejects universalist theories of the human being which result in

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the exclusion of the other, forgoing a general definition of the human being. He states: “This is one of my deeply held beliefs, and it can be traced back to all the disservices which this idea of the human being has done us for many years” (Foucault, “Wer sind Sie” 789). Foucault in general takes historically different forms of racism and historical overlays as his starting point, undertaking a historiography of the term ‘race.’ It becomes clear that Foucault, even if he did not specifically take colonialism as the basis for his consideration of racism, identified key aspects of this topic such as, for example, the exclusion of the ‘Oriental’ from colonial reason. He also developed the term ‘biopolitics’ as an appropriate tool for the analysis of colonial and postcolonial situations. His differentiation between practices of liberation and practices of freedom indicates that the ensuring of freedom, even after formal independence from colonial power structures, is a challenging task linked to the shaping of the self.

Bhabha’s forms of resistance Bhabha presents an examination of various forms of resistance in terms of his cultural theory of the third space, itself based on the historical and current analysis of colonial and postcolonial situations. He makes clear that mimetic forms of adaptation can also be understood as practices of resistance. Mimicry as a form of behavior on the part of those who have been colonized provokes fear on the part of the colonial masters and is interpreted as derisive criticism. It affects both sameness and difference in equal measure, “as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite” (Bhabha, Location of Culture 86, qtd. in Sieber 105). The colonial master is thus presented with a mirror in which he recognizes himself as a “democrat and despot” (Bhabha, Location of Culture 97, qtd. in Sieber 106) and becomes conscious that he has left his ideals far behind. Bhabha emphasizes the opportunities available to the oppressed to resist: “The question now arises ‘How does one function as an agent when one’s own opportunities for action are limited, for example due to exclusion and oppression?’ I think that even in this position of the underdog there are opportunities to reverse the imposed cultural authorities; to take on some of them and to reject others” (Über kulturelle Hybridität 13). He continues: They could now assert their own subaltern authority, negotiating space for themselves. In this context of a not simply identity-based but also complex idea of a collective, non-identity based ability to act they were able to construct the ability to act of a subjectivity, whereby it was precisely the lack of subjectivity which was able to make this third space accessible. (Bhabha, Über kulturelle Hybridität 65) Bhabha argues that the term ‘hybridity/hybridization’ should be understood in this context. Within the scope of Bhabha’s concept of the third space migration is understood as a metaphor: “It insists—through the migrant metaphor—that cultural and political identity is constructed through a process of othering” (Rutherford

Thinking resistance 269 and Bhabha, Third Space 219). Hybridities develop in the interspaces that allow difference to be experienced;11 a difference which should not be understood as a categorizing adaption to hegemonic ideas and does not presuppose the forgoing of an own ethnic, cultural allegiance in the process of constructing identity:12 “Metaphor produces hybrid realities by yoking together unlikely traditions of thought” (Bhabha, Third Space 212). Bhabha selects the metaphor of migration with regard to the literary context and is concerned with the construction of forms of solidarity:13 “[t]he fragmentation of identity is often celebrated as a kind of pure anarchic liberalism or voluntarism, but I prefer to see it as a recognition of the importance of the alienation of the self in the construction of forms of solidarity” (Third Space 213). Migration can thus be understood as a form of resistance which results in new forms of cooperation.14 Bhabha takes the concept of the ambivalence and hybridity of language as his starting point.15 In the context of a specific situation and a specific counterpart, a space for interpretation which must be negotiated within the scope of a performative, dialogical process is created which can be understood as a third area of discourse, a so-called third space, which spans a culture or bridges cultures, whereby it also encompasses a temporal dimension.16 Culture is thus not a homogeneous or homogenizing space; it is, according to Bhabha, characterized by hybridity—as an area between; as an area between semiotic carriers and semiotic content within the scope of which hybrid subjects develop: “all forms of culture are continually in a process of hybridity. But for me the importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third emerges, rather hybridity to me is the ‘third space’ which enables other positions to emerge” (“DissemiNation” 211). Hybridization must, in this context, be understood as a process—“Hybridization is thus, for me, a process, a movement and is not concerned with multiple identities—a term for which, by the way, I do not have much time” (Bhabha, Über kulturelle Hybridität 66). In this performative cultural theory17 the third space proves itself to be a space of translation. Its objective should be to negotiate solutions. Bhabha argues that this also results in a new understanding of theory that should reference the examination of specific situations with regard to the constellation of subject positions and not be related to categorizing and abstracting processes. Translation can, according to Bhabha, also take the form of resistance. Parallel to this, Bhabha’s theory also represents a proposal for the handling of contemporary problems in the global context. The subject model of hybridity favors a negotiation of differing models of the self; forms of living; values and goals of different cultures which must, already in themselves, be understood as hybrid constructions and which do not have a hierarchical relationship to one another. “The time for ‘assimilating’ minorities to holistic and organic notions of cultural value has passed—the very language of cultural community needs to be rethought from a postcolonial perspective” (Bhabha, “DissemiNation” 219).18 There are thus no innately superior cultures. Cultures should enter into an exchange; these dialogical, dynamic processes are, as a matter of principle, never-ending. In contrast to multiculturalism, which assumes the special position of a specific

270 Marita Rainsborough culture and demands tolerance of differing cultures, Bhabha emphasizes the necessity of fragmentary coexistence and community which allows plurality to co-exist—pluri-versality instead of uni-versality—, i.e. diversity.19 Cultural difference should not be understood as cultural diversity. He calls for a negotiation of the difference in the in between of the third space, which takes the fundamental thesis of cultural hybridity as its starting point, which is not perceived as a defect or threat. Hybrid subjects are distinguished both by identification as well as difference with regard to differing identity factors.20 Bhabha’s support of diversity is expressed in a strategy for a concept of “ ‘critical and dialogical cosmopolitanism,’ wherein diversity itself might become a universal project” (Pollock, Bhabha, Breckenridge, Chakrabarty 13). In Bhabha’s work resistance must be understood in the sense of negotiation:21 “we are always negotiating in any situation of political opposition or antagonism. Subversion is negotiation; transgression is negotiation; negotiation is not just some kind of compromise or ‘selling out’ which people too easily understand it to be” (Bhabha, “DissemiNation” 216). He also states: “Similarly we need to reformulate what we mean by ‘reformism’: all forms of political activity involve reformations and reformulations. With some historical hindsight we may call it ‘revolution,’ those critical moments, but what is actually happening if you slow them up are very fast reforms and reformulations,” a ‘transformational power’ which he attributes to the subject as a matter of principle (Bhabha, “DissemiNation” 299). The basis of his theory of resistance is the conviction that the simplified differentiation between the ruler and the ruled must be avoided because “any monolithic description of authoritative power (such as ‘Thatcherism’), based on that kind of binarism, is not going to be a very accurate reflection of what is actually happening in the world” (Bhabha, “DissemiNation” 220–21). His theory of power and authority is thus concerned with the negotiating processes of authority in the context of questions of power; with moments of authorization and deauthorization. The starting point for this is his concept of the “ambivalent nature of that relationship” (Bhabha, “DissemiNation” 221). He asserts that there is a connection between negotiation and hybridity: “So I think that political negotiation is a very important issue, and hybridity is precisely about the fact that when a new situation, a new alliance formulates itself, it may demand that you should translate your principles, rethink them, extend them” (Bhabha, “DissemiNation” 216). Bhabha bemoans traditionalism and immobility in thinking, demanding a rewriting of the history of the West, into which the history of colonialism must be incorporated as a counter-history. For him there is a direct link between the modernity of the West and colonialism:22 “The other point I’m trying to make is not only that the history of colonialism is the history of the West but also that the history of colonialism is a counter-history to the normative, traditional history of the West” (Bhabha, “DissemiNation” 218). This form of writing history can also be considered to be a form of resistance. It can thus be determined that Bhabha’s turning of the term ‘hybridity’ as well as also of the terms ‘ambivalence’ or ‘mimicry,’ can, in summary and viewed in general terms,

Thinking resistance 271 be interpreted as figures of thought and/or metaphors which allow the resistance and ability to act of the colonized vis-à-vis the claim of the colonizers to cultural authority to be theorized and discoursed. (Babka and Posselt in Bhabha, Über kulturelle Hybridität 13) Similar comments can be made with regard to the terms ‘translation’ and ‘migration.’ Bhabha’s repertoire of practices of resistance refers in equal measure to colonial and postcolonial practices. In his work a concept of resistance which views the difference between reform and revolution as being only gradual becomes visible, while his concept rejects violence as a possible form of negotiation.23

Mignolo’s concept of critique and resistance In Mignolo’s works resistance begins with the breaking down of colonial and postcolonial thought structures. Taking Mudimbe as his starting point, he references the term gnosis (Mudimbe, The Invention ix), which does greater justice to the complexity of knowledge in its various forms than the term epistemology. In addition to alternative forms of knowledge gnosis includes both doxa and episteme. Mignolo calls for intellectual decolonization and border thinking: “Border gnoseology is a critical reflection on knowledge production from both the interior borders of the modern/colonial world system . . . and the exterior borders” (Local Histories/Global Designs 11). He demands a political and epistemic de-linking and decolonial knowledges in order to change the categories of consideration and evaluation, as well as a geo- and body politics of knowledge. Mignolo also criticizes the idea of a neutral subject of knowledge: “Once upon a time scholars assumed that the knowing subject in the disciplines is transparent, disincorporated from the known and untouched by the geo-political configuration of the world in which people are racially ranked and regions are racially configured” (Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience” 1). He argues that the subject of knowledge is not universal, as in Descartes’ theory—referencing Castro-Gómez, Mignolo writes in this context of the hubris of the zero point—but rather integrated into geo- and body-political configurations: “By setting the scenario in terms of geo- and bodypolitics I am starting and departing from already familiar notions of ‘situated knowledges.’ Sure, all knowledges are situated and every knowledge is constructed. But that is just the beginning. The question is: who, when, why is constructing knowledges” (“Epistemic Disobedience” 2). The starting point for this decolonial thought is, according to Mignolo, the colonial wound: “the de-colonial path has one thing in common: the colonial wound, the fact that regions and people around the world have been classified as underdeveloped economically and mentally” (“Epistemic Disobedience” 3). While Foucault may take an approach that is, in its basic principle, similar, examining the construction of knowledge he does not, however, sufficiently take into consideration the link between the history of modernity with that of colonialism; he lacks the colonial/postcolonial experience. “I would surmise, following Chatterjee’s argument, that what Foucault did not have was the colonial experience and political interest propelled by the colonial

272 Marita Rainsborough wound that allowed Chatterjee to ‘feel’ and ‘see’ beyond both Kant and Foucault” (Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience” 12). As a result, Foucault’s interpretation of Kant’s essay “What is Enlightenment” is deficient, since the former overlooks the latter’s localization in the European concept of the human being. At the heart of this secular version of the theological-cosmological framework of knowledge is Western philosophy’s concept of reason, with its ego/mind views of reason in addition to the transcendental reason of its main proponents, Descartes and Kant. Their ego-politics of knowledge (Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience” 19) locate knowledge solely in the soul and factors such as the body, emotion, desire, humiliation, etc. remain excluded. In addition to this, Foucault’s concept of biopolitics should be expanded to include the aspect of body politics and greater attention should be paid to colonial techniques: “Thus, body-politics is the darker side and the missing half of biopolitics: body-politics describes de-colonial technologies enacted by bodies who realized that they were considered less human at the moment they realized that the very act of describing them as less human was a radical un-human consideration” (Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience” 16). He continues: “Bodypolitics is a fundamental component of de-colonial thinking, de-colonial doing and the de-colonial option” (Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience” 16). Mignolo repeatedly references Fanon in this context, whose sociogenesis demonstrates classifications of the human being and the “formation of the modern/colonial world that placed Negros [sic] on the lower scale of the Renaissance idea of Man and Human Beings” (“Epistemic Disobedience” 17). Fanon emphasizes the shaping of a Black identity through the eyes of the White. Mignolo argues: “This consideration shifts the geography of reason and illuminates the fact that the colonies were not a secondary and marginal event in the history of Europe but, on the contrary, colonial history is the non-acknowledged center in the making of modern Europe” (“Epistemic Disobedience” 16). Instead of Foucauldian historical apriori or the episteme, Mignolo refers to frames and super-frames which structure knowledge, and to the “transformation of the frame of mind and the organisation of knowledge, the disciplines and institutions” (“Epistemic Disobedience” 6).24 The idea of framing indirectly references the Foucauldian Inside and Outside and his notion of the exclusion process in his spatial theory of knowledge. Mignolo asserts that “the first World had indeed the privilege of inventing the classification and being part of it” (“Epistemic Disobedience” 8). In addition to this, he points out the link between identity and recognition—“you get the idea of the interrelations between the politics of identity and epistemology” (Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience” 14). Mignolo emphasizes that “[t]here are many kinds of ‘our modernity’ around the globe—Ghanaian, Indian, Maori, Afro Caribbean, North African, Islamic in their extended diversity—while there is one ‘their’ modernity within the ‘heterogeneity’ of France, England, Germany and the United States” (“Epistemic Disobedience” 15). Taking these considerations as his starting point, Mignolo calls for epistemic disobedience, which should result in civil disobedience: “Epistemic disobedience is necessary to take on civil disobedience (Gandhi, Martin

Thinking resistance 273 Luther King) to its point of non-return” (“Epistemic Disobedience” 15). In this context he calls on former colonies to develop new theories and to reflect on their own culture and history. His concept of critical/decolonial cosmopolitanism makes clear that Mignolo, despite all his criticism of Kant’s cosmopolitanism, nevertheless wishes to hold on to the cosmopolitan concept per se.25 Mignolo, however, warns against a cosmopolitan world order which has “all the features of global imperial designs” at its disposal and must be felt to be “dictated from above” (“De-colonial Cosmopolitanism” 85). He prefers communal forms of organization and grassroots change. Border thinking emphasizes the plurality and heterogeneity of the global community as a counter-concept to globalization which to him is in some parts based on cosmopolitan thought.26 For example, Mignolo calls for a “reinscription of spirituality in socio-economic organization” (“De-colonial Cosmopolitanism” 87). He wishes to draw on categories of thought related to beliefs and forms of living that presuppose respect for natural living conditions within the scope of his cosmopolitanism. He wants to explode the traditional Western frame of thought: “It is first and foremost to re-inscribe in the present and toward the future categories of thought, ways of living and believing, the human respect for life that Westerners labeled ‘nature’ and which became detached from the ‘human and culture’ ” (Mignolo, “De-colonial Cosmopolitanism” 87). Mignolo characterizes his form of cosmopolitanism as transmodern: “De-colonial cosmopolitanism is, in a nutshell, transmodern cosmopolitanism” (“De-colonial Cosmopolitanism” 90).

Foucault, Bhabha and Mignolo: a comparison Foucault, Bhabha and Mignolo are all equally concerned with the breaking down of existing thought structures of an exclusive and normalizing nature. All three employ spatial metaphors in this context. In his spatial theory of thought Foucault writes of the Inside and Outside and heterotopy; Bhabha of the third space and Mignolo of frames which construct exclusion. For all three resistance and thought are closely connected. Bhabha emphasizes the importance of hybrid thought, which represents thought on differences: “This inability to endure contradiction, ambivalence and alterity is the point at which, as I interpret it, the banality of evil comes in” (Über kulturelle Hybridität 76).27 With the assertion “[y]ou always arrive too late to an appointment with your neighbour,” Bhabha calls for an ethics of closeness (Über kulturelle Hybridität 76(77). His forms of resistance such as, in particular, mimesis, migration and translation are examples of negotiation as, in most cases, reforming and only in exceptions as revolutionary activities. His concept of resistance gives preference to negotiation processes over practices of resistance by means of violence. Mignolo develops a decolonially focused epistemology respectively gnoseology based on Foucauldian constructivism, which decisively expands understandings of the modern. Although Mignolo criticizes Foucault on many issues, he does not wholly reject the latter’s theoretical framework as, for example, demonstrated by basing his theory of cognition on the frame and super-frame categories. Mignolo, however, forgoes the application of Foucault’s archaeological and genealogical

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processes, referencing the hermeneutic processes of text interpretation and sociohistorical analysis which are, however, executed with the same objective of identifying fundamental paradigms. Mignolo calls for pluridimensional and multidimensional hermeneutics and the critical reflection of scientific disciplines, within whose scope processes of understanding are located, in order to resolve the dilemma of colonial semiosis (“Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse” 126–28). He thus develops, on the one hand, the theological and, on the other, the secular cosmological basic principles, “theo-politically and ego-politically founded” (Mignolo, “Epistemic Disoberdience” 18),28 which have structured Western thinking since the Renaissance and which were at the root of the setting of goals, the avenues of approach, and the legitimations of colonialization processes. In contrast to Bhabha, Mignolo does not take the era of the Enlightenment and the 19th century as the starting point for his criticism of colonialism and the links which, he argues, exist between colonialism and modernity, but rather the Renaissance. Referencing Fanon, Mignolo attributes racism in particular to the hierarchical perception and thought structures of hegemonic Western cultures and, in contrast to Foucault, interprets them psychologically. Foucault locates racism in the sociohistoric and/or cultural context, illustrating its function as a “mechanism for the homogenization of society and the concealment of the contradictory interests of societal groups” (Magiros 145). Racism is, according to both authors, linked to the strategies of political power. In this context Mignolo references Foucault’s concept of bio-power. The incorporation of a body politics within the field of biopower, which Mignolo calls for within the scope of his criticism of Foucault, already exists in Foucault’s concept of disciplining the body in the context of his discussion of disciplinary power. It is, however, further expanded upon by Mignolo in conjunction with his referencing of Fanon’s ideas. Foucault also integrates body politics into the field of bio-politics, albeit in terms of a specific referencing of the apparatus of sexuality. Foucault, however, always considers forms of power in combination and interlinking with one another. The particular focus of Foucault’s examination of racism is on state racism, which must be transcended. He views racism primarily “as a discourse, function or structure . . . thus leaving unanswered the question of how the specific subjects come to support such a structure” (Magiros 145). Magiros argues in this context that there is a gap in Foucault’s theory, particularly with regard to racism among the classes and the racist subject. Stone, in contrast, asserts that according to Foucault, racism is a general call to resistance: “In Foucault’s account of racism, everyone is affected. Thus, it becomes everyone’s problem, opening the possibility of resistance to anyone, regardless of whether they are the alleged victims of racism or not. Everyone is a victim of racism insofar as its operations go forth without critical reflection and resistance” (Stone 366). He continues: “Foucault offers us important ways to rethink power and politics that help us not to be deceived by false understandings of power at play in experience, which in turn leads to more effective strategies of resistance” (Stone 366–67). In contrast to Foucault, Bhabha and Mignolo presuppose the transformation of epistemic considerations into practical action and do not elaborate

Thinking resistance 275 any further on this. Foucault develops a theory of self-practices, which includes the dimensions of the body and behavior. He argues that a change in thought is, by itself, not sufficient for resistive behavior. While Foucault repeatedly sharply criticizes the hegemonic thought of the Occidental cultural space with its epistemes, categories, and values, presenting a theory of racism—in particular, state racism—he does not succeed in doing justice to the special requirements of an analysis of the colonial/postcolonial situation as a whole. In many areas he lacks, as Mignolo puts it, a geopolitics of knowledge, even if he possesses its fundamentals. In summary, it can nevertheless be established that the Foucauldian theoretical framework of thought is partially the basis for the ideas of both Bhabha and Mignolo, or can at least be considered as compatible with these ideas. Mignolo thus references Foucault’s epistemic basic assumption of the constructed nature of knowledge in the contexts of power and the idea of the Inside and Outside as well as his concept of bio-politics. His emphasis on body politics is also completely in line with Foucault. The expansion of epistemology towards gnoseology finds its counterpart in Foucault’s work in the recognition of madness as a different kind of cognizance and his criticism of the exclusion of madness since the era of Descartes. Both emphasize the necessity of criticism and resistance. With his call for decolonial cosmopolitanism29 Mignolo, however, goes far beyond Foucault—as does Bhabha with his only partially developed concept of dialogical-critical cosmopolitanism (Pollock, Bhabha, Breckenridge, Chakrabarty 13)30— since Foucault fails to present any concrete political concepts to change the world in a global context. During his phase of developing the ethics and/or aesthetics of the self, Foucault took the path of emphasizing the necessity of the self-shaping of the individual to achieve change towards a society in which liberty, friendship, and responsibility should be of particular importance and in which the recognition of the other in his otherness should be possible. In this context Foucault believes that a pragmatic political approach, driven by criticism and resistance, makes sense. Bhabha’s postcolonial concept, in turn, differs from Foucault in particular through its cultural understanding which is oriented to a dialogical and dynamic model of diversity and which asserts that culture has, as a matter of principle, a hybrid character, while Foucault questions the contradiction of nature and culture in particular, emphasizing their differing socio-historical expressions, each of which are defined by discursive and dispositive structures formed in the contexts of power. Both Bhabha and Foucault, however, have a similar understanding of counter-power respectively resistance, which is, as a matter of principle, always possible, also for those known as the powerless and the ruled. Both theoreticians base their concepts on a relational definition of power which includes renamings, re-evaluations, and slight deviations in action as forms of resistance. Bhabha’s concern is to consider the coexistence of different cultures in postcolonial contexts with regard to the contemporary requirements of getting on with each other, while Foucault focuses on the social enabling of living out different forms of living in the widest sense—e.g. with regard to the gender aspect—by means of criticism and resistance. Foucault, however, does not present any concrete analysis of the

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colonial/postcolonial situation, although he repeatedly sharply criticizes Occidental thought. His concepts in this context can and should certainly be expanded. This expansion of thought would definitely be in the spirit of Foucault.

Notes 1 Mignolo does not use the term ‘postcolonial.’ He thereby intends to demonstrate the continuation of colonial power structures after the independence of former colonies by using the term ‘coloniality’ in reference to the logic of domination in the modern/colonial world. For further information about this discussion see Bhambra. By using the term ‘post/colonial’ I want to point out colonial structures and the continuation of colonial power practices and structures in a modified manner after formal independence. 2 This refers to Mignolo’s The Darker Side of Western Modernity. 3 This quote from Foucault’s Wahnsinn und Gesellschaft (German edition) as well as all subsequent quotations from German texts have been translated by Alison Fry. 4 This comment by Foucault originates from an interview recorded in his Paris apartment in 1971, which had been lost for many years. 5 Practices of liberation include revolts. Commenting on their moral validity, Foucault asks: “Is one right to revolt, or not? Let us leave the question open. People do revolt; that is the fact.” He continues: “A question of ethics? Perhaps. A question of reality, without a doubt” (“Useless to Revolt?” 452). 6 In connection with the problem of racism, Magiros refers to Foucault’s The Will to Knowledge, “From the Light of War to the Birth of History” and “To Make Live and to Let Die: The Birth of Racism.” 7 Foucault argues that this type of historiography is directed against the so-called ‘Jupiter history,’ in which the unity and significance of the law is emphasized and justice is understood as a subjugating justice, which manifests schism (Magiros 19–20). 8 Magiros uses the terms ‘unity’ and ‘parasites’ in this context (26). 9 Stone cites from Foucault, Society Must Be Defended (254–55). Stone comments on this: “[r]acism is a necessary part of biopolitics because it allows society to take on the right to kill that once belonged to the sovereign” (366). 10 Stone cites from Foucault, Society Must Be Defended (263). Stone localizes the classical age as the beginning of a racism linked to biopolitics: “[i]f biopower is necessarily racist, we can say that the beginning of the Classical Age marks the start of racist age” (366). 11 Elsewhere he writes “[t]o that end we should remember that it is the ‘inter’—the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the inbetween space—that carries the burden of the meaning of culture” (Bhabha, The Location 56). Ha repeatedly points out that hybridity according to Bhabha should not be thought of in the sense of cultural or racist/ethnic blendings but rather as a political concept of the altering of knowledge and power in which cultural and ethnic difference should be located in particular in the self and a “[d]isplacement and/or relocation of a hegemonic narrative” (Ethnizität und Migration 164) should be carried out. Ha demonstrates that the term is often employed in postmodern and late capitalist discourses and has become a buzzword. In this context see Ha, Hype um Hybridität. 12 Bhabha’s term ‘difference’ is based on the work of Étienne Balibar. Balibar develops the concept of an ‘equality-in-difference’ (Bhabha, The Location xvii). 13 Salman Rushdie in particular is his literary point of reference. “To think of migration as metaphor suggests that the very language of the novel, its form and rhetoric, must be open to meanings that are ambivalent, doubling and dissembling” (Bhabha, Third Space 212). 14 The metaphor of migration makes clear the contradiction between the Western ideals of civitas and ‘civilisation,’ the discourse on rights, as well as the discriminatory legal and cultural status of migrants and refugees (Bhabha, Third Space 218-19).

Thinking resistance 277 15 “[The] teachings on ambivalence do not stop at steadfast endurance. The experience of ambivalence also includes the motivation to speak; the urge to express one’s self; a form of working through the unsolved and contradictory in order to gain the right to a narrative. The most extreme forms of ambivalence—’There is never a document of culture without it simultaneously being one of barbarism.’ [In the footnote 39 Bhabha quotes Walter Benjamin. Illuminationen: Ausgewählte Schriften 1. Suhrkamp, 1961, pp. 271–72]—are most particularly those moments which drive steadfast endurance to demand the power to act of addressing and discussion” (Bhabha, Über kulturelle Hybridität 51–52). 16 Bhabha rejects an overvaluation of the spatial vis-à-vis the temporal, which he identifies, for example, in the works of Foucault (Bhabha, Über kulturelle Hybridität 68). 17 The term ‘performative’ is used in the sense of dynamic and dialogical processes, focusing on enunciations of the boundaries between cultures and their translations. 18 Bhabha refers in this context to the linguistic changes in the field of gender. 19 “No true universalism can be constructed without recognizing that there is a diversity of universals on which analyses are based” (Pollock, Bhabha, Breckenridge, Chakrabarty 7). And: “[i]n another, the formulation offered is ‘critical and dialogical cosmopolitanism,’ wherein diversity itself might become a universal project” (Pollock, Bhabha, Breckenridge, Chakrabarty 13). 20 Bhabha makes clear that he does not understand hybridity as a logical identity but rather with regard to the “constitution of the subject in the interplay of power and authority” (Babka and Posselt in Bhabha, Über kulturelle Hybridität 9). He continues: “[w]hile the term ‘hybridization’ may make reference to the subject’s disposition it is not concerned with the constitution of subjectivity per se” (Bhabha, Über kulturelle Hybridität 9). 21 “A negotiation which recognizes that the levels of conflict or antagonism are very close, not simply polarized but rather much closer and more chaotic”—Bhabha argues that the only goal of the polarizing perspective is to reverse power (Über kulturelle Hybridität 71–72). 22 “I think we need to draw attention to the fact that the advent of Western modernity, located as it generally is in the 18th and 19th centuries, was the moment when certain master narratives of the state, the citizen, cultural value, art, science, the novel, when these major cultural discourses and identities came to define the ‘Enlightenment’ of Western society and the critical rationality of Western personhood. The time at which these things were happening was the same time at which the West was producing another history of itself through its colonial possessions and relations. That ideological tension, visible in the history of the West as a despotic power, at the very moment of the birth of democracy and modernity, has not been adequately written in a contradictory and contrapuntal discourse of tradition. Unable to resolve that contradiction perhaps, the history of the West as a despotic power, a colonial power, has not been written side by side with its claims to democracy and solidarity . . . The material legacy of this repressed history is inscribed in the return of post-colonial peoples to the metropolis” (Bhabha, “DissemiNation” 218). 23 His attitude towards violence becomes clear in his foreword to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. 24 Mignolo thus displays a similarity to Judith Butler, who also refers to framing without, however, taking higher-ranking super-frames as her starting point (Butler 40). The latter are comparable to Foucault’s epistemes. Foucault is also familiar with structuring principles operating at different levels and displaying differing degrees of importance, dimension and dissemination. 25 He views Kant’s cosmopolitan project as being comparable to the project of Christianization: “Kant’s cosmopolitanism was its secular version,” and points out that the cosmopolitan project is neither “a natural course of history” nor a purely legal project (Mignolo, “De-colonial Cosmopolitanism” 87). The overcoming of the nationstate is also not desirable. In his critique of Kantian thought Mignolo, however, neglects

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the former’s scepticism concerning a world state, the reason for Kant’s opting for a voluntary federation of states, whereby he certainly presupposes the sovereignty of the nation-state. For Mignolo Kant’s cosmopolitian must be seen in connection with the project of the modern, which must be viewed in the context of the West’s post/colonial intentions. Mignolo criticizes hegemonic forms of knowledge, among which he includes Kant’s theory, which he wishes to break down. By doing so, he reduces Kant’s project to a specific form of knowledge. The process of globalization, “the project of homogenizing the world under the will and desires of Western civilization,” should also be incorporated into critical analyses (Mignolo, “De-colonial Cosmopolitanism” 85). Über kulturelle Hybridität is a published German version of a lecture titled “Globalisation and Ambivalence” (November 8, 2007). Mignolo writes of “Theo-and ego-politics of knowledge” (“Epistemic Disobedience” 19). Mignolo’s Critical or Decolonial Cosmopolitanism is a cosmopolitanism which should not be initiated and supported from the top down by means of the creation of supraor transnational institutions or the changing of human rights, but rather should come from the bottom up. A more precise development of this concept would, however, be desirable. Bhabha and his co-authors emphasize dialogue, criticism, and diversity. The team of authors refers to the relevance of cosmopolitan practices.

Works cited Babka, Anna and Gerald Posselt. “Vorwort,” Über kulturelle Hybridität: Tradition and Übersetzung, by Homi K. Bhabha, Turia + Kant, 2012, pp. 7–15. Balibar, Étienne. Die Grenzen der Demokratie. Argument, 1993. Bhabha, Homi K. “DissemiNation: time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation.” Nation and Narration, edited by Homi K. Bhabha. Routledge, 1990, pp. 291–322. ——. The Location of Culture. 1994. Routledge, 2004. ——. “Foreword: Framing Fanon by Homi K. Bhabha.” The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon. Grove Press, 2004, pp. vii–xli. ——. Über kulturelle Hybridität: Tradition and Übersetzung. Translated by Kathrina Menke. Turia + Kant, 2012. Bhambra, Gurminder K. “Postcolonial and decolonial dialogues.” Postcolonial Studies, vol. 17, no. 2, 2014, pp. 115–21. Butler, Judith. Raster des Krieges: Warum wir nicht jedes Leid beklagen. Campus Verlag, 2010. Foucault, Michel. Wahnsinn und Gesellschaft: Eine Geschichte des Wahns im Zeitalter der Vernunft. Suhrkamp, 1973. ——. “Leben machen und sterben lassen: Die Geburt des Rassismus. Lecture in March 1976.” Bio-Macht, edited by Sebastian Reinfeld, Richard Schwarz, and Michel Foucault, no. 25. DISS-Texte, 1992, pp. 27–50. ——. The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality: 1. Penguin Books, 1998. ——. “Technologies of the Self,” Michel Foucault: Ethics: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, edited by Paul Rabinow. Penguin Books, 2000, pp. 223–51. ——. “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom.” Michel Foucault: Ethics: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, edited by Paul Rabinow. Penguin Books, 2000, pp. 281–301. ——. “La grand colère des faits.” Dits et écrits II, by Foucault, Gallimard, 2001, pp. 277–97.

Thinking resistance 279 ——. “Wer sind Sie, Professor Foucault?” Foucault, Michel: Dits et Ecrits: Schriften: Schriften in vier Bänden: Dits et Ecrits: Band I: 1954–1969, edited by Daniel Defert and François Ewald. Suhrkamp, 2001, pp. 770–93. ——. “Useless to Revolt?” Michel Foucault: Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, edited by James D. Faubion. Penguin Books, 2002, pp. 449–55. ——. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France 1975–1976. Picador, 2003. ——. Die Heterotopien: Les hétérotopes: Der utopische Körper: Le corps utopique: Zwei Radiovorträge. Suhrkamp, 2005. Foucault, Michel. “The Lost Interview” [1971]. YouTube, uploaded by Lionel Claris, March 20, 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzoOhhh4aJg. Ha, Kien Nghi. Ethnizität and Migration Reloaded: Kulturelle Identität, Differenz and Hybridität im postkolonialen Diskurs. Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Berlin, 2004. ——. Hype um Hybridität: Kultureller Differenzkonsum and postmoderne Verwertungstechniken im Spätkapitalismus. transcript Verlag, 2005. Han, Byung-Chul. Was ist Macht? Reclam Verlag, 2005. Jambet, Christian. “Konstitution des Subjekts and spirituelle Praxis.” Spiele der Wahrheit: Michel Foucaults Denken, edited by François Ewald and Bernhard Waldenfels. Suhrkamp, 1991, pp. 229–48. Magiros, Angelika. Foucaults Beitrag zur Rassismustheorie. Argument, 1995. Mignolo, Walter D. “Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse: Cultural Critique or Academic Colonialism?” Latin American Research Review, vol. 28, no. 3, 1993, pp. 120–34. ——. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton UP, 2000. ——. “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and De-Colonial Freedom.” Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 26, SAGE, 2009, pp. 1–23. ——. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Latin America Otherwise). Duke UP, 2011. ——. “De-colonial Cosmopolitanism and Dialogues among Civilizations.” Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitan Studies, edited by Gerard Delanty. Routledge, 2012, pp. 85–100. Mudimbe, Valentin-Yves. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. Indiana UP, 1988. Pollock, Sheldon, Homi K. Bhabha, Carol A. Breckenridge, and Dipesh Chakrabarty. “Cosmopolitanism.” Cosmopolitanism, edited by Carol A. Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, and Dipesh Chakrabarty. Duke UP, 2002, pp. 1–14. Rutherford, Jonathan, and Homi Bhabha. “The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha.” Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, edited by Jonathan Rutherford. Lawrence and Wishart, 1990, pp. 207–21. Sieber, Cornelia. “Der ‘dritte Raum des Aussprechens’ – Hybridität – Minderheitendifferenz. Homi K. Bhabha: ‘The Location of the Culture.’” Schlüsselwerke der Postcolonial Studies, edited by Julia Reuter and Alexandra Karentzos. Springer VS, 2012, pp. 97–108. Simons, Jon. “Power, Resistance, and Freedom.” A Companion to Foucault, edited by Christopher Falzon, Timothy O’Leary, and Jana Sawicki. Blackwell Publishing Limited, 2013, pp. 301–19. Stone, Brad E. “Power, Politcs, Racism.” A Companion to Foucault, edited by Christopher Falzon, Timothy O’Leary, and Jana Sawicki. Blackwell Publishing Limited, 2013, pp. 353–67.

Index

Page numbers in bold refer to tables. Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Abd’Allah-Álvarez Ramírez, Sandra 199, 215–26 abolition: activism 77, 107, 108; British movement 141; post-abolitionist discourses 77, 80, 89, 90; of slavery 85, 87, 89, 251; of the slave trade 141 academia 147, 152, 156, 163, 202; feminism in 194, 198, 203, 208, 210 academic: activism 138; discourses and debates 6, 14, 138, 140, 147, 230, 233, 235; feminism 16, 196–7, 199–200, 204, 207, 210; historiography 113; institutions 145, 233, 238 action committee: in student activism 169–72, 176, 178, 180, 182–4 activism: 13–15, 239; academic 14, 138; anti-racist 227, 239, cyberfeminist 198, 224; feminist 9, 207, 223; Internet 14, 16, 173, 174, 184, 188, 190, 191, 206, 208, 217, 220, 223; literary 11; political 8, 116, 117, 138, 221, 238; for reparations 137, 139, 140; and resistant practices 9, 14; social 227, 238, 243; social media 194, 199, 203; of students 171, 190, 191 activist, activists: 7; abolitionist 77; Black Power Movement 139–40; contributions 9; culture 14; feminist 194–201, 218, 222; human rights 142, 146; perspectives 8, 16; reparations 139, 140, 141–7; students 16, 169–91; voices 14, 16 aesthetics 6, 19, 46, 91, 105, 123, 124, 266, 275; decolonial 8, 54n4

Afro-Caribbean 89, 126, 137, 139, 145, 151, 157; feminism 6; identity 50; indigenization 42; religion 7, 128 Afro-Costa Rican 151, 154 Afro-Cuban 199, 219, 220, 224, 239, 258; literature 219; religion 251, 257 Afrocubanas 6, 17, 219, 220, 222, 224 Afro-Cubanismo 6 Afromodernidades 217 agency 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 18, 27, 33, 127, 139, 145, 147, 154, 155, 160, 241 agenda 7, 128, 180, 203, 206, 209–11, 233, 235, 238, 242, 244; CARICOM 139, 140, 143; Durban Declaration 137, 140; feminism 195, 200, 202, 219; reparations 138, 141, 142, 145, 146, 147; student activism 178, 180 agenda setting 202–3, 206, 209–10 agreement 180, 183, 189 Ahlqvist, Toni 195, 202, 205 Alexander, M. Jacqui 44 Almeida, Yudivian 217 alterity 11, 58, 61, 67, 68, 116, 117, 250, 273 alternative media 178, 180, 182, 184, 187, 188, 190 ambivalence 8, 76, 87, 157, 269, 270, 273, 277n15 Anancy 163 Angola 245n2, 258 Animal Studies 36 Antillanité 3, 6, 11, 56, 78; see also Caribbeanness

Index anti-racism 7, 44; in Cuba 16, 17, 222, 227, 231, 233–4, 236, 238–40, 242–4; and anti-capitalism 227, 233–4 apology for slavery and its legacies 137, 142, 143 Aragon, Louis 58, 59 archipelago 3, 35, 57, 80; archipelagic thinking 86, 87 arrivants 42, 43, 45, 49, 50, 53 Atkinson, Joshua 173 austerity measures 171, 185 authority 26, 40, 51, 66, 128, 177, 196, 268, 270, 271 autobiography 46, 110 Barrat, Virginia 215 barricades 172, 175, 176, 186; Amor de Barricada 187 Barriteau, Eudine 197 Beckles, Hilary 15, 141 belonging 82, 92, 151, 155, 160, 161, 252 Benítez Rojo, Antonio 3, 86, 87, 98, 130 Bernabé, Jean 3, 11, 56–8, 61, 65–6, 72, 78–9, 85, 90–1 Bernard, Eulalia 154, 159 Besson, Gérard 25–7, 31, 36 Bhabha, Homi 2, 9, 18, 27, 87, 264, 268–71, 273–5 bilingual 11, 57, 59, 65, 157 biography 108, 259 biopolitics 267, 268, 272, 274, 275 biopower 267, 274, 276n10 Black Power Movement 15, 44, 139, 140 blogging 7, 9, 16, 17, 19, 186, 194–5, 199, 203–4, 207, 208, 209–10, 215–24, 239, 246n9 body politics 271, 272, 274, 275 Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo 237 border-crossing 10, 27, 31, 37 border thinking 264, 271, 273 Boricua Spring 189 Boruca 153, 162 Bourdieu, Pierre 60 Boyce Davies, Carol 11, 41, 46 Bribri 151, 156–62 brinca verjas 177 Britton, Celia 66, 92 Broome, Pearson 204 Butler, Judith 173, 277n24

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Cáceres, Rina 152 Cahier d’un retour au pays natal 77–8 capital 60, 144; global 152; multi/transnational 48, 50; political 234; symbolic 242 capitalism 2, 3, 4, 7, 36, 40, 41, 43, 44, 45, 46, 50, 51, 52, 53, 139, 158, 229, 231, 233, 234, 240, 242, 244; anti-capitalism 227, 233, 234 Capote Cruz, Zaida 219, 223 Caribbeanness 3, 56, 57; see also Antillanité CARICOM 5, 15, 137–41, 143, 145, 147 Carpentier, Alejo 9, 13, 122–31 Castro, Fidel 229, 234, 238, 258, 260 Castro-Gómez, Santiago: hubris of the zero point 271 Central America 15, 151, 152, 155, 162, 163 Certification 98 180, 189 Césaire, Aimé 3, 6, 11, 56–9, 77–8, 105, 139, 233 Chamoiseau, Patrick 3, 9, 11, 12, 56, 58, 65, 76, 78, 79, 81–5, 87–8, 90–1, 93–4 Chaos-monde 86 children’s literature 9, 10, 25, 27, 37n1 Christianity 30, 31, 32, 40, 44, 45, 48, 49, 139, 250–2, 254, 257 citizenship 4, 8, 144, 146, 161, 243 civil disobedience 170, 272 class 25, 27, 43, 89, 106, 114, 117, 118, 138, 162, 163, 196, 198, 199, 203, 215, 221, 227, 229, 232–5, 237, 239, 242, 274 Clifford, James 59 Code Noir 83, 87 Code Red for Gender Justice 198, 204 collective identity 16, 94, 95, 173, 175, 177, 180, 184, 189, 190 Collins, Merle 9, 10, 11, 40–2, 46–53 Collins, Patricia Hill 196 Colombia 29, 138, 153, 162 colonial 1–5, 7–8, 10–13, 15–18, 28, 30, 40–53, 76–83, 86–95, 104, 106, 109–13, 116–17, 125, 127, 137–42, 144–7, 151–2, 154, 158, 162, 163, 192, 224, 227–8, 230–2, 242, 245, 250, 251,

282

Index

259, 268, 271–2, 274–6; past 12, 76, 89, 91, 95, 99, 111, 116–17, 151, 163; semiosis 274; system of stratification 162–3; wound 271–2 colonialism 3, 5, 14, 17, 37, 40–2, 44, 48, 79, 83, 95, 137–9, 143, 146–7, 227–8, 230–3, 235, 241, 248, 265, 268, 270–1, 274; British 48, 87, 137, 141, 144; European 77, 137, 250–1; French 77, 87, 104; internal 17, 227, 230–3, 235, 241; Spanish 18, 77, 248–9, 260 coloniality 1, 3, 4, 41, 44, 47, 49, 53, 78, 139, 162, 229, 230, 243, 264, 276; of power 45, 138, 227, 229, 230, 241, 244, 245n3 colonization 2–3, 7, 9, 12–13, 18, 40–2, 44–5, 70, 82, 85, 163, 166, 248–51, 260, 274 Colón Solá, Aura 179, 186 Colour of Forgetting, The 9–10, 40–53 Combahee River Collective 6 combat, model of 265 Comité de Acción: de Ciencias Naturales (CACN) 170; de Ciencias Sociales (CACS) 169; de Comunicaciones (CAC) 170; de Estudiantes de Derecho (CAED) 169–70, 171, 175; de Humanidades (CAH) 170 Comité de Estudiantes en Defensa de la Educación Pública (CEDEP) 170 community 5, 16, 28, 29, 30, 37, 51, 78, 80, 82, 86, 87, 91, 92, 94, 110, 130, 137, 140, 151, 153, 155, 157, 158, 159, 162, 171, 177, 188, 190, 191, 199, 200, 201, 203, 207, 210, 211, 221, 222, 244, 269, 270, 273; of Cuban Muslims 248, 249, 254–60; global 273 Confiant, Raphaël 3, 9, 11, 12, 56–8, 60, 61–7, 69–72, 76, 78–9, 83–91, 93 connectivity 209, 216 conquest 1, 3, 4, 40, 43, 45, 46, 48, 50, 52, 53, 94, 108, 125, 249–50, 266 Consejo General de Estudiantes (CGE) 171, 174, 180, 183, 185, 186 constitution, political 5, 12, 104, 110, 151, 162, 252, 254, 255; of the self 265 constructivism 273 contact of languages 70, 72 contact zones 2

contrapuntal: analysis 127; composition 127; narration 126; reading 13 conversion to Islam 9, 17–18, 248, 252–4, 256, 260 conviviality 9, 157, 160 Cooper, Carolyn 45, 51 Coronil, Fernando 138, 240 cosmology 7, 158; cosmologial 272 cosmopolitanism 18, 270, 273, 275 Costa Rica 9, 15, 19n1, 151, 153, 155–63 counter-conduct 264 counter-framing 173 counter-history 270 counter-narrative 106, 115 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 198 Creole, creole 3, 7, 9, 11, 40, 42, 43, 46, 49, 53, 56, 61, 80, 82, 87, 94, 114; indigeneity 40, 42, 43, 54; language 7, 9, 11, 57, 58, 59, 61, 63–72, 160 Creoleness 11, 56, 57, 61, 65–6, 73n1, 85; see also Créolité Créolisation 57, 61, 66–8, 71, 72, 73n6, 80, 85, 91, 94, 97n14, 98n21 creolism 61, 66–7 Créolité 3, 6, 56, 78, 84–5, 91, 98n21; see also Creoleness creolization 2, 6, 53, 66, 88 critical indigenous theory 42 critique 2, 6, 8, 9, 13, 18, 40–2, 46–8, 115, 118, 152, 198–9, 222, 224, 264–5, 271 Cuba 3, 4, 6, 9, 16–18, 64, 125, 138, 140, 199, 215–24, 227–30, 232–44, 248–61; Marxism 227, 229, 234; rap in 7; Revolution 5, 228, 234, 235, 237, 249, 254, 258, 260; socialism 17, 228, 230–2, 236, 241, 244 cultural identity 83, 85, 88, 95 cultural memory 111, 113, 152 cultural resistance 44, 106, 118–19 cyberfeminism 14, 17, 18, 198, 215, 217, 219, 221 cyberspace 28, 198, 221 da Rimini, Francesca 215 de las Casas, Bartholomew 125 debt 114, 143; bondage 3; cancellation 137, 141; historical 15, 139

Index decolonial 5, 6, 10, 17, 40–1, 45–6, 49–51, 138–9, 228, 230–1, 264, 271, 273; aesthetics/aesthesis 8; cosmopolitanism 18, 273, 275, 278n29 decoloniality 11, 40–1, 44, 45, 47, 49–50 decolonization 17, 44, 53, 140, 152, 227–8, 251, 271; of knowledge 145 decolonizing perspective 41, 162 dehumanization 79, 82, 85–6, 89–90, 153–5, 160 Deleuze, Gilles 130 democracy 50–1, 179, 231, 252; participatory 51, 179 demonization 30, 36, 106 denial 59, 112–13 Depestre, René 58–9 Descartes, René 271–2, 275 de-subjection 264–5 dialectical image 9, 12, 104, 106 diaspora 4, 5, 7, 9, 18, 42, 44, 157, 201, 251; African 5, 15, 25, 28, 31, 155, 160, 162, 163; in Central and Latin America 15, 155, 162, 163; Cuban 7 diasporic 15, 40, 45, 151, 160–3, 243, 254 Díaz, Elaine 217 dictatorship 110 difference 5, 27, 36, 160, 196–8, 200–1, 238, 243–4, 251, 268–70, 273 diglossia 65, 70 diglossic 69; pain 57, 65 disciplinary: control 276; power 274; silence 231 Discours antillais 73n7, 76, 78, 84, 91–2 discrimination 17, 18, 109, 137–8, 157, 159–60, 162, 197, 199, 221–4, 230, 232–3, 238–9, 240, 249, 252–3, 255–6, 260 Ditsö 157, 165n21 diversity 108, 160, 176, 181, 218, 220, 227, 230, 238, 243, 270, 272, 275 Douaire-Banny, Anne 59 double historical discourse 17, 240 double revolutionary consciousness 235 douens 34, 38 doxa 271 Durban Declaration 137, 140, 162 Duvalier, François 110, 111, 117; Duvalierism 111

283

economic: capital 60; crisis 241, 253–5; entanglements 142; exploitation 41, 45, 87, 117, 138; inequality 5, 114, 137; integration 5; oppression 42, 53; relations 40; structures 11, 43, 95, 139, 227–9, 236; system 8, 41, 44, 53, 85, 93, 250; transformation 240, 242, 273 ego-politics of knowledge 272 Einwohner, Rachel L. 195, 196 elite 4, 42, 44, 110, 115, 118, 141, 200 El reino de este mundo 9, 13, 122–31 Éloge de la Créolité 56, 72, 78, 85 El Tayeb, Fatima 162 emancipation 12, 13, 44, 82, 86, 88, 104, 105, 108, 144, 244; movements 91; political 89, 113; social 240; of women 17 emancipatory potential 16, 196, 264 Enlightenment 104, 105, 113, 126, 128, 272, 274, 277n22 enslaved people 3, 12–13, 77, 81, 83–4, 89, 91, 104, 112–14, 117, 126, 137–8, 141, 144, 228, 234, 249, 250–1, 257, 259 enslavement 2, 4, 6, 14, 77, 93, 104, 137 entangled narrator 13, 127–30 entanglement 2, 3, 7–8, 15, 17–18, 41, 123–4, 128, 131, 138, 139–40, 142, 146–7, 190, 249–50, 256, 258–60 environment 25, 31, 35–7, 50, 52, 84–5, 92–3, 144, 175, 216, 218; environmental 10, 25, 28, 34–6, 41 episteme 271–2, 275 epistemic disobedience 264, 271–3 epistemicide 152, 160 epistemology 15, 16, 41, 139, 195–7, 210, 271–3, 275 Erdheim, Mario 152 Eshu-Elegba 129, 130 ethics 265, 275–6; of closeness 273 ethno-psychoanalytical approach 15, 152 Europeanness 15, 56, 151, 159 exile 127 extinction, mythologies and narratives of 42–4, 47 Fanon, Frantz 2, 6, 15, 41, 99, 139, 142, 153–4, 272, 274 Farrakhan, Louis 259–60

284

Index

Feigenbaum, Anna 173–5, 177, 179, 184, 189 feminism 17, 194, 196–211, 215–24; see also cyberfeminism feminist 6, 7, 9, 16–17, 41, 155, 173, 194–211, 215–24; ecofeminist 35; methodology 16, 194–211; resistance 16, 195, 202 Feminist Aliens 16, 196, 207 Ferreira, Grada 161 Flores, Cindy Gabriela 219 folklore 9–10, 25–6, 28, 34, 38n8 Forte, Maximilian 42–4 Fortuño, Luis 169, 181, 187 Foucault, Michel 2, 9, 14, 18, 196, 264–8, 271–6 Free Radio Berkeley 186 Frenzel, Fabian 173–5, 177, 179, 184, 189 Galouchko, Annouchka 31 García, Ofelia 59–60, 65 Gauvin, Lise 57, 67 gender 4, 6–7, 10, 15, 25–7, 29, 33–4, 40–5, 49, 52–3, 109, 138, 143, 152, 155, 161–2, 195, 197–9, 207, 215, 217–19, 221–4, 232, 239, 275; and communication 211; and culture 219; equality 215; ideology 45; inequality 45; systems 11, 41, 44 general student assembly, University of Puerto Rico 169, 183 Género y Cultura 219, 221, 224 genre 6–7, 10, 27, 106, 239 geopolitics 1, 3, 6, 41, 45; of knowledge 18, 271, 275 Glissant, Édouard 2, 3, 9, 11–12, 56–8, 60–4, 66–8, 70–2, 76, 78–81, 83–8, 91–4, 105, 130 globalization, globalized 1, 5, 12, 18, 36, 44, 243, 244, 250, 273; capitalism 50; modernity 92 Global North 3–4, 6, 16, 28, 35, 105, 196 Global South 10, 16, 28, 44, 114, 195–6 gnoseology 271, 273, 275; gnosis 271 González Casanova, Pablo 231 Gordillo, Lirians 219, 222–3 grassroots 14, 16, 50, 138, 199–201, 203, 206, 207, 273 Great Britain 14, 60, 137, 141–4

Greater Caribbean 1, 8, 19n1, 155, 160–2 Grenada 11, 47–8, 51 Groundation Grenada 199 Guattari, Félix 130 Gudmundson, Lowell 163 guerrier de l’imaginaire 79 Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Encarnación 151 Haiti 2, 9, 12–13, 58–9, 78, 104–16, 118, 123, 129, 216, 250–1, 256; Revolution 5, 12–13, 18, 104–14, 117–19, 123, 125, 128, 256–7 Haitian Turn 105, 117 Haraway, Donna 198, 215 Harding, Sandra 195, 197, 211 Hauser, Ursula 152 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 128–30, 132n18 hegemony 3, 4, 8, 17, 43, 46, 76, 87, 93, 118, 124, 138, 196, 229, 236, 274 hermeneutics 274 Hernández, Rosalva Aída 161 Hernández Hormilla, Helen 219, 222–3 hero 12, 17, 76, 78–9, 81, 92–4, 109–10, 112, 248 heroic 12, 79, 90, 92, 95, 108–9 heroism 78–9, 81, 85–6, 92–3 heterogeneity 76, 272–3 heterogeneous 8, 44, 80, 84, 87, 232 heteropatriarchy 40, 44 heterosexuality 43, 44, 162 heterotopy 265, 273 Hispaniola 2, 123, 250 historical injustice 53, 141, 143–4, 146 historiography 12, 92, 105, 109, 112–13, 123, 128, 145, 250, 268 historiopoetic 76, 88, 94 history 2–7, 9, 12–13, 15, 17–18, 32, 40–5, 52, 76–7, 80–3, 87–93, 95, 104–11, 114–15, 118–19, 122–3, 127–31, 138–9, 141–5, 147, 152, 154, 156, 161–3, 171, 189, 220, 228–31, 235, 239, 248–50, 252, 254, 256, 259–60, 265, 270–3 Hoffmann Riem, Christa 164 Hollander, Jocelyn A. 195, 196 Hooker, Juliet 151, 160–1 hooks, bell 152, 155, 161

Index Hopkinson, Nalo 35–6 horizontal decision-making (HDM) 16, 179 horizontal racism 44, 50 Hornberger, Nancy 60 human rights 85, 104–5, 140, 142, 146, 162, 251–2 hybrid 27, 34, 37, 42, 59, 65, 68, 273, 275; subject 269–70 hybridism 11, 58, 61, 67, 70 hybridity 1, 26–7, 31, 65, 264, 268–70 hybridization 268–9 identité-relation 57, 68 identité-rhizome 57, 68 identity 5, 7, 10–12, 15–16, 27–30, 34, 40, 42, 46, 50, 52, 56–7, 61, 68, 83–5, 87–8, 91, 93–5, 109–11, 113–14, 116–17, 173, 175, 177, 180, 184, 189–90, 196, 207, 221, 223–4, 228, 241–3, 250, 252, 254, 258, 268–70, 272; identity politics 157, 160 ideology 25, 29, 35–6, 40, 45, 81, 89, 110, 198, 221, 227, 229, 234, 237–8 image 9, 12–13, 16, 31–2, 35, 69, 76–9, 81–3, 92–4, 104–6, 108–10, 112–14, 116–19, 125, 130, 161, 184, 186, 188, 209, 223, 252, 257, 267 imagery 31, 52 imaginaire des langues 57–8, 68, 71 imaginary 12, 46, 76, 80, 94–5, 129, 144, 151, 153–4, 158, 161–2, 228 immigration 151, 252 imperial 11, 25, 28, 35, 41–2, 44–5, 48, 114, 227–8, 251, 273 imperialism 5, 17, 40, 42, 53, 228–9, 233, 235, 244, 253, 260 indenture 3, 44, 53, 81, 251, 254 independence 5, 10, 12, 15, 25, 40, 42–4, 46, 53, 58, 104, 107–9, 114–17, 141, 143–4, 153, 228, 234, 260, 268; formal 5, 268, 276 indigeneity 10, 11, 15, 40–3, 50, 53–4, 153, 155–6, 159–61, 163, 165 indigénisme 109–10 indigenous 7, 9, 10, 11, 15, 40–53, 137, 151–63, 249–50; territory 151, 153, 156–7, 159–61, 166 Indo-Caribbean 6, 50

285

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) 207, 215–16, 219, 221 inheritance 11, 41, 44, 48, 53, 229, 234, 238 injustice 10, 43, 46, 47, 49, 53, 141, 143–7 innovation 59, 63, 207, 210 intermingling of languages 57, 60, 64, 68, 70–2 internal colonialism 17, 227, 230–3, 235, 241 Internet 16–17, 27–8, 191, 195, 198, 202–3, 208, 215–21, 224, 255; activism 14, 16, 173–4, 184, 188, 190–1; World Stats (IWS) 216 interracial: relations 162, 232; subjectivity 15, 151, 160, 163; tensions 156 intersectional 7, 16, 17, 198, 210; feminism 194–211 intertextuality 91, 94, 109, 125 Islam 9, 17–18, 248–61 Islamophobia 249 Jackson, Shona N. 40, 42, 50, 53 Jamaica 4–5, 6, 15, 45, 138–47, 157–9, 162, 198, 250, 253–4 Jamaican National Commission on Reparations (JNCR) 141–2, 145, 147 Jews 66, 250, 253 Junco, Sandalio 233, 245n6 justice 14, 49, 137, 141, 143, 146–7, 162, 198–9, 240, 271, 275 Kalinago 44, 47, 49–50 Kant, Immanuel 113, 264–5, 272–3 Kaplan, Andreas M. 202 Keens-Douglas, Richardo 31–2 knowledge 11, 17, 29–30, 40–1, 57, 82, 93, 113, 123, 128, 141, 145–6, 152, 156–8, 194–5, 197, 201, 204–5, 208, 223, 227, 231, 245, 250, 258–9, 271–2, 275; modes and registers of 10, 12, 13, 40, 106, 124, 128, 145, 162, 266, 271; historiographical 112, 117; indigenous 41, 51; politics of 6, 18; production 3, 15–16, 105, 145, 147, 152, 157, 160, 162–3, 194–7, 199, 201, 210–11, 271

286

Index

L’Esclave vieil homme et le molosse 12, 76, 79, 80–3, 88, 93–5 Lahens, Yanick 12, 113–15, 117 La Lézarde 71, 78 land rights 47–8, 52 language 7, 11, 26, 36, 40, 43, 57–61, 64–73, 83, 146, 160–1, 202, 206, 221, 252, 256, 266, 269, 276; ideologies 7; nation language 7; practices 58, 60, 65; representation 57, 68–70; system 60, 64 Latin America 7, 13, 17, 19n1, 41, 104, 107, 138, 152, 162–3, 219, 227, 230–1, 233, 240, 244, 252–4, 256, 264 law 7, 11, 30, 41, 45, 48–50, 141, 144, 169, 170, 180, 204 Lazo Torres, Pedro 256 Leapers Hill 47, 50 Legba see Eshu-Elegba Le quatrième siècle 71, 78 Letra con género 219, 224 Lewis, Rupert 15, 140, 142 liberation 83, 106, 113, 139, 177, 231, 238, 265–6, 268 liberty 59, 65, 84, 109, 129, 264, 275 Liga Islámica de Cuba 256 liminality 50, 129, 177, 189 Limón 151, 153, 157, 159–61 Link, Holly 60 literature 2, 7, 9, 10–13, 17, 25, 27, 28, 37, 41, 76, 92, 106–9, 116–17, 128, 165, 219, 222, 224, 239 Lora, Ricardo Olivero 186 Lorde, Audre 194, 196 lo real maravilloso 9, 13, 122, 123, 128–31 Lorne, Ras Miguel 144 Mahagony 71, 76, 79–81, 83, 88, 91–5 Malcolm X 234, 253, 259 Mama D’Lo 10, 25–7, 31–4, 36–7 Manifiesto das Mulheres Negras 6 Maroon, maroon 5, 9, 11–12, 57–9, 67, 72, 76–81, 83–6, 88–95, 139 marooning 11, 18, 56–8, 60, 64, 72, 86 marronage 6, 76–81, 86–90, 93–5, 234 marqueur de paroles 79 Martí, José 6, 17, 248, 260 Martiatu Terry, Inés Maria 6, 219–20, 222, 224

Martinique 6, 64, 69, 80, 82, 90–1 masculine 45, 109, 219 masculinism 109 Más Farías, Sara 217, 221 maternity 34, 220 matrilineal 158 mayoría silente 177 McClean, Danielle 9, 10, 25, 27–38 McClintock, Anne 43, 45, 52 McCurdy, Patrick 173–5, 177, 179, 184, 189 media 1, 9, 17, 19, 28, 92, 116–17, 140, 145, 174–5, 178, 180, 182, 184, 187–90, 195, 198–9, 201–11, 216, 223–4, 230, 232, 237–8, 249, 252, 254; social 9, 16, 171, 184, 194–5, 199, 201–11 memory 11–13, 35, 40, 46–7, 52–3, 84–5, 88, 92–3, 111, 113, 115, 119, 128, 142, 144–5, 152, 256 Mendoza, Breny 162 mestizaje 157–8, 160–3 meta-narrative 118 metaphor 27, 51–2, 73, 153, 160, 268–9, 271, 273 métissage 11, 58, 61, 67 Mignolo, Walter 3, 9, 18, 41, 45, 138, 250, 264, 271–6 migrant 84, 152; metaphor 268 migration 1, 2, 5, 18, 138, 157, 161–3, 207, 248, 251, 255, 264, 268–9, 271, 273 Millennium Development Goals 207 mimicry 264, 268, 270 Mintz, Sydney 2, 138 Miranda, Rafael Cancel 171 Miskito 157, 162 Mi vida es un fino equilibrio 219–20, 224 mobility 4–5, 15, 115, 146, 160, 270 modernity 3, 5, 40, 43, 45, 92–3, 105, 113, 116, 138–9, 142, 145, 252, 264, 270–2, 274 motherhood 34, 220; see also maternity Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA) 258 Moya, Isabel 219 Mudimbe, V.Y. 271 multicultural 49, 53 multiculturalism 42, 269

Index

287

multidimensional 93, 163, 274 multilingual 58, 60, 66 Murdoch, Adlai H. 59 Muslim 18, 248–60

orality 7, 47, 56 Orient, oriental 127, 251–2, 265, 268 Orientalism 252 othering 15, 151, 160, 268

Nadig, Maya 152 narration 6, 10, 13, 16, 41, 47, 50–1, 61, 79–80, 82, 84, 122–4, 126, 128–31 National Policy and Program of Action for a Society Free of Racism, Racial Discrimination and Xenophobia, Costa Rica 162 Nation of Islam 248, 253, 259, 260 Negra Cubana Tenía Que Ser 16, 199, 216, 218 Nègre marron 12, 70, 76, 79–80, 83–92, 95 Négritude 3, 6, 11, 56, 77, 78–9, 89–91, 105, 108 neocolonial 3, 44–5, 47–9, 228, 229 neoliberal 4, 180, 192, 243 neologism 61, 65 network 4, 14, 16, 28, 51, 138, 140, 146, 171–2, 174, 177, 184, 189–91, 202–4, 208–10, 216–17, 227; social 172, 184, 199, 217, 202, 208, 209, 216 New Jewel Movement 50 New Moon’s Arms, The (2007) 35 Newton, Melanie J. 42–4, 46, 47 Nicaragua 19n1, 156–8, 161–2 noirisme 110 nomadic 25, 127–31 Norberg, Kathryn 197, 211 Nutmeg Princess, The 31, 32

Pacific 42, 153, 155, 161–2 Pan-Africanism 3, 105, 140, 231, 259 Panama 19n1, 156, 162 Papa Bois 10, 25–6, 29, 31–4, 36–7 Partido Nuevo Progresista (PNP), Puerto Rico 169 patriarchy 40, 43–5, 52–3, 215, 223, 229, 244, 252 Pierce, Juliane 215 plantation 50, 58, 77, 79–81, 84, 85–91, 250–1; economy and system 2, 3, 58, 87, 91, 104, 107, 227 Plant, Judith 35 Plant, Sadie 198, 225 pluriversality 264, 270 Poétique de la Relation 3, 78 politics of identity 272; see also identity politics polyphonic 104, 129 Portales Machado, Yasmin Silvia 216–21, 224 postcolonial 2, 6, 8, 10, 12–13, 18, 28, 36–7, 41, 44–6, 76, 78, 88–90, 92–3, 122–3, 127, 130, 138, 142, 264, 268–9, 271, 275–6; post-colonial 28, 105, 113, 116–17; post/colonial 76, 78–9, 81–3, 88, 90–1, 93–5, 264, 266, 276n1 power 1–5, 10, 12, 14–15, 18–19, 26–7, 32–3, 36, 41–6, 49–50, 52, 66, 78, 80–1, 83, 87–9, 92–3, 104, 106–7, 109, 111–14, 117, 124, 137–40, 146, 177, 179, 187–9, 196–7, 203, 216, 221, 230, 236, 241–2, 251, 264–8, 270, 274–5; asymmetries and differentials 15, 19, 146, 161, 200; coloniality of 138, 227, 229–30, 241, 244; colonial matrix of 41, 45, 49; practices 265, 276; relations 8, 16, 18, 82, 83, 85–6, 90, 92, 152–3, 161–2, 173, 197, 236, 266; structures 1–2, 5, 78, 80, 82–3, 86, 88–9, 114, 152, 154, 195, 204, 229, 268 practices 1, 6, 7, 9, 11, 14, 29–30, 40–1, 44, 46–51, 131, 138–9, 144–5, 184, 195, 197, 201–2, 224, 227, 236, 239, 254;

obeah 29–30 Obrist, Hans Ulrich 68 occident 131, 252, 265 occidental 15, 266, 275–6 occupation 88, 108, 110, 172–5, 177–8, 181, 184, 186, 189 Omeros 35 One Billion Rising 199–200 online publishing 28, 37 oppression 2, 6, 7, 11, 37, 42, 44, 46, 49, 53, 66, 77–9, 82, 90, 117, 123, 155, 194, 196, 198, 224, 229, 237–8, 241, 243–4, 266 oral history 6, 47, 163

288

Index

of freedom 264, 266, 268; language 58, 60, 65; of liberation 266, 268; of resistance 1–2, 6, 8–9, 13, 16, 122, 148, 215, 265, 268, 271, 273 property 35, 49, 144, 204 Protector’s Pledge, The 9–10, 25, 27–8, 33–4, 37 protest 6–7, 9, 14–16, 78, 110, 114–15, 169–89, 202; camp 16, 172–9, 184, 188–9; songs 180 Prudent, Lambert Félix 70 public higher education 173–4, 180, 186, 189 public space 188, 221, 232, 236 public sphere 7, 17, 37, 106, 217–18, 222, 224, 238 Puerto Rican Statehood Students Association (PRSSA) 169 Puerto Rico 5, 9, 15, 169–91 queer 44, 152, 196, 220 Quijano, Anibal 138, 229, 230 race 27–8, 33, 41, 83, 109, 138, 151–2, 160–2, 198–9, 215, 221, 227, 229–30, 233, 237, 239, 243, 266–8 racial discrimination 137–8, 157, 162, 199, 222, 230, 232, 239–40 racialization, racialized 2, 4, 5, 9, 15, 29, 40, 44–6, 50, 138, 151, 154–5, 160, 224, 236, 238–9, 243 racism 9, 15, 17–18, 44–5, 50, 110, 140, 144, 151, 153–5, 161–2, 217, 227–60, 266–8, 274–5 Rastafari 15, 139–40, 142, 144 Ravines du devant-jour 11, 57, 61–6, 69–70 rebellion 5, 6, 78, 80, 95, 109, 127, 129, 139, 257 Recio, Milena 217–18 Reconquista 249 Reddock, Rhoda 7, 196–8 reform 50, 144, 177, 270–1 Regional Articulation of African Descendants from Latin America and the Caribbean (ARAC) 227 religion 7, 9, 18, 30–1, 44, 125, 138, 145, 159, 181, 198, 221, 227, 236, 248–60, 266; belief systems 130; discrimination

232; organizations 238; religiousness 228, 239; religious practices 2, 6, 8, 17, 30, 145, 239 reparations 5, 9, 14–15, 137–47 reparatory justice 15, 18, 137, 141, 143, 147 repertoire 175, 271; in linguistics 58, 60, 65 representation 1, 6–7, 11, 16, 28, 34, 40, 45, 49, 51, 57–8, 79, 94, 122, 124, 129, 152, 161–2, 180, 189, 199, 224; of the Haitian Revolution 105–10, 116, 119; language 68–72 resilience 160, 161 resistance 1–2, 4–18, 25, 32, 36, 41, 44, 47, 56, 58, 66–7, 72, 76–9, 81–2, 86–92, 94–5, 104, 106, 116, 118–19, 122–8, 130–1, 139, 145, 155, 160–2, 173–5, 179, 184, 187–91, 194–7, 202, 208, 215, 231, 233, 238, 240, 244, 252, 264–5, 268–71, 273–5 resistance performance 9, 15, 169, 173–4, 176–7, 180–3, 188–91 resistance practices see practices resistant past 9, 106, 109, 111, 115, 117 resistive criticism 265 responsibility 44, 88, 90, 139, 142, 147, 154, 163, 171, 190, 203, 244, 275 revelation 82, 124, 126–7 revolt 77, 106, 108, 128, 257, 264, 276n5 rhetoric 35, 51, 59, 108 rhetorical 114, 118, 154, 242 Rio Piedras campus 15, 169, 171, 173–6, 180, 183, 185, 187, 189 Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia 152 road mapping 195, 205–7 Rodney, Walter 3, 15, 139, 142 Rodríguez, Omar 185 Rojas Conejo, Daniel 158 rompe huelga 177 roots 14, 18, 57, 68, 110, 130, 146, 157, 159, 161, 196, 199, 210, 248, 254, 256, 258–60 Said, Edward 13, 127, 251–2 Sancha, José Figueroa 183 San José 158 Santería 129, 145, 257 Schœlcher, Victor 77–81, 83, 90, 95

Index Schwarz, Roberto 239 Scott, David 143 self-image 104, 110, 113, 117 self-perception 15, 156, 160 self-practices, theory of 275 setting, fictional 41, 48, 51, 53 settler 41–6, 48, 53; colonialism 40, 42; modernity 40 sexuality 26, 41, 43–5, 138, 162, 199, 218, 232, 267, 274 Shepherd, Verene 6, 15, 139, 141–6 Shome, Raka 152 Sieder, Rachel 161 Sierra, María Teresa 161 silencing, silenced 5, 9, 14, 43, 105, 111–12, 145, 152, 155–6, 162–3, 196, 198 Silvera, Makeda 198 slavery 4, 5, 9, 12, 15, 44, 46, 50, 52–3, 58, 61, 76–80, 82–90, 93, 107, 109–10, 113, 137–9, 141–7, 154, 227–8, 250–1; crime against humanity 137; reparations 5, 9, 14–15, 137–8, 140, 145 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai 152 social justice 14, 42, 53, 146, 199 social media 9, 16, 171, 184, 194–5, 199, 201–11 social network 172, 184, 199, 202, 208, 209, 216 solidarity 15, 50, 82, 114, 152, 157, 177, 196, 240, 244, 269 soucouyant 25–6, 30 Sousa Santos, Boaventura de 162 sovereignty 41, 43, 267 space 1, 2, 3, 6–7, 10, 16–18, 27, 31, 35–6, 42–3, 46, 48, 50, 80–3, 86–7, 123, 127, 129, 131, 151–2, 159–60, 174–5, 186, 188, 198, 199, 227–8, 231–2, 234, 236, 238–43, 268, 275; digital/virtual 216–24, 238; liminal 50; public 188, 221, 232, 236; of resistance 4, 13, 16, 18, 128, 169, 173–4, 179, 188–91; third space 87, 264, 268–70, 273; translanguaging 60; of translation 269 Spaniards 163, 249 spirituality 30, 41, 47, 273 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 92, 154 state racism 18, 267, 274, 275

289

stereotype 4, 30, 33, 108, 112–13, 116, 118, 125, 153, 155, 158, 186, 191, 254 Steyerl, Hito 151 stigma, stigmatization 105, 113, 118, 154, 233 Strarrs, Josephine 215 strike 15, 16, 65, 169–91 student activism 16, 170–92 subaltern, subalternized 92, 116–18, 151, 154, 158, 162, 227, 228, 242, 268 subjectivity, subjectivities 15, 88, 115, 151–2, 160–1, 163–5, 196, 242, 268, 277 subRosa 198, 225 subversion 1, 9, 18, 215, 219, 270 subvert 7, 28, 34, 42, 125, 128, 154, 161, 198 super-frame 272–3 Surrealism, Surrealists 123–5, 130 tactics 41, 174–5, 184, 188, 190 Talamanca 151, 156–7, 159, 161 third space 87, 264, 268–70, 273 Tout-monde 11, 57, 58, 61–4, 66–8, 71–2, 78, 80–1, 86–7, 91, 94; Traité du 78, 86–7 traditional media 184, 187–9, 203 transatlantic slave trade 3, 5, 77, 83, 89, 91, 137, 140–2, 248, 250, 256–8 transformation 8, 13–14, 45, 57, 78–9, 82–5, 89, 92, 94–5, 130, 155, 206–7, 228, 230, 237, 240, 242–3, 264, 270, 272, 274; of the self 264 transgression 14, 129, 270 translanguaging 9, 11, 58–61, 64–6, 72 translation 15, 57, 66–7, 72, 152, 163, 269, 271, 273 trans-local, translocal 18, 163, 248–9, 256, 259 transmodern 273 transnational 1, 3, 7–8, 18–19, 36, 46, 50, 147, 163, 174, 189, 198, 229, 244; networks 14, 16, 138, 140, 189 transregional entanglements 138, 140, 147 trickster 52, 128–9, 131 Trinidad and Tobago 26, 254; Trinidad 29, 42, 47; Trinidadian 10, 28, 34, 138 Trouillot, Lyonel 12, 114–17

290

Index

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph 5–6, 12, 14, 105, 110–13, 115, 117–18 tuition 169, 174–5, 177 Turner, Victor 173, 177 underdevelopment 3, 139, 146, 230, 271 UN International Decade for People of African Descent 140 United States of America 5, 6, 43, 104, 159, 162, 169, 184, 198, 228–9, 231, 234–5, 243, 249, 253, 272; USAmerican 3, 7, 107, 112 UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent 140, 146 uprising 4, 17, 51, 80, 104, 112, 128, 130, 234, 248; textualities 11, 46 utopia 107, 128 violence 3, 6, 16, 26, 37, 42, 108, 116, 151–2, 154–5, 157, 188, 199, 215, 217, 219, 223, 252, 266, 271, 273

VNS Matrix 215 Vodun, Vodou, Voodoo 31–2, 38n6, 125–6, 128–30 voiceless 155 vulnerability 92, 155, 240, 242 Walcott, Derek 3, 35 Walking into Walls 199 Wallerstein, Immanuel 1, 229 warrior of the imaginary 12, 76, 80, 94–5 Web 2.0 202, 216 Weedon, Chris 160 Wei, Li 60, 65 White supremacy 11, 43, 154, 159, 251 Williams, Cen 59, 60 Williams, Eric 138, 142 Wolf, Diane 200 Wolfe, Justin 163 Womantra 199 world literature 108 zombies 56; zombification 107