Marika Preziuso (Birkbeck, University of London)
Just as none of us is outside geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, forms, images and imaginings. (Edward Said Culture and Imperialism, 7)
This paper intends to provide an overview of the research that has led to the recent completion of my PhD thesis. It maps five key texts authored by twentieth century and contemporary women writers of Caribbean descent: Jean Rhys from Dominica, Maryse Condé from Guadeloupe, Edwidge Danticat from Haiti, Julia Alvarez from the Dominican Republic, and Achy Obejas from Cuba. It argues that ‘hybridity’ is a dominant trope through which the Caribbean has been imagined - from the figuration of the exotic ‘tropics’ of colonial memory, to the hybrid constructs of national identities such as the Creole, Indio and Mestizo produced within specific islands, to the Caribbean as a ‘universal’ exemplar for phenomena of ‘multiculturalism’ – and it makes a case for the critical value of literature in revealing the stakes of that imagining. By following hybridity on the journey charted by the five texts, from the figuring of spatial tropes of the colonial plantation, to the independent island-state, to the Latino neighbourhood in the USA and a Cuban-American reimagining of the ‘island’, the thesis demonstrates that the counternarratives of Caribbean identities produced in these locations can reconfigure the Caribbean from an ‘imagined’ to what I term as a ‘lived-imagined’ space. By redefining the Caribbean as a ‘lived-imagined’ space, these texts reveal the cost of the complex legacies, historical and geopolitical, of hybrid imagining. At the same time they envision the potential of the Caribbean diaspora’s negotiation with those legacies to challenge the cultural imaginaries which continue to mark European and US engagement in the region.
