Erica L. Johnson (Wagner College)
New York City has become a prominent location in the Caribbean Diaspora, and the city presents a microcosm of the region’s tremendous linguistic and cultural diversity. Not only does New York house large populations of Creole, Spanish, French, and English speakers from the Caribbean, but its cosmopolitan density forges communities amongst people from different national and linguistic backgrounds, causing its denizens to redefine the overlapping meanings of regional, national, local, and global identities. My paper examines a series of novels that prompt the question of how to reconceptualize movement between the Caribbean and New York City in global terms, given that the characters in them do not, in fact, experience migration as a linear journey from one nation to another but rather as a disorienting, open-ended state of transit between different locales. Dionne Brand, Edwidge Danticat, and Cristina Garcia, who write about their native countries of Trinidad, Haiti, and Cuba, respectively, present Caribbean migrations as mobilizations in a world that is both interconnected and disjointed. They challenge national and linguistic boundaries by depicting different national locales as so intimately and ambivalently linked that they provoke in characters a sense of the uncanny, a theme upon which the paper will seek to elaborate. Drawing on the work of postcolonial historian Dipesh Chakrabarty and urban studies scholar Saskia Sassen, both of whom dismantle narratives of linear, progressive spatialities and temporalities, I examine the uncanny dis/location of Caribbean characters. This concept of the uncanny, which derives from Freud’s essay on the unheimliche, captures the conflation of strangeness and familiarity—of feeling at home and yet displaced—that emerges as a prominent theme in these novels and as an important articulation of globalized Caribbean identity. My paper contributes to new, comparative perspectives on how writers represent Caribbean mobility in the context of the globalized city.
