Respondent to "Violence and Historical Counter-Narratives in Caribbean Literature"

This panel examines representations of shifting histories and politics in Caribbean and Caribbean American literature as a way to explore the tensions between competing historical archives, the production of national... [ view full abstract ]

This panel examines representations of shifting histories and politics in Caribbean and Caribbean American literature as a way to explore the tensions between competing historical archives, the production of national narratives, and the implications of embodied memory. The presenters will engage historical revisions that problematize narratives of national progress, immigration, and citizenship in the Greater Caribbean. This panel explores several questions, including: How do Latin@ writers re-imagine excised historical narratives of violence in the Caribbean in order to create decolonial critiques that challenge heteropatriarchal archives? How do Latin@ writers interrogate the violence enacted on the body to reframe it as a site that challenges “official” histories and archives? How do speculative fictions and historical revisions by Latin@ authors re-imagine futurity? Reading Latin@ literature that depicts violence and embodied forms of trauma, the panelists explore the geopolitical body politics of the Caribbean and challenge hegemonic histories to reveal alternative realities that have been disavowed.

Maia Gil’Adi’s paper, “Fukú, Post-Apocalyptic Haunting, and Science-Fiction Embodiment in Junot Díaz’s ‘Monstro,’” will explore the figure of the proto-zombie in Junot Díaz’s short story “Monstro” to argue the narrative presents the Caribbean as a post-apocalyptic space and Afro-Latin@s as science-fiction embodiments. Her paper examines the ways in which the proto-zombies demonstrate affective ties to the land and each other, raising larger questions about the forces emanating from history through their bodies, presenting a threat of “infecting” the rest of the Americas with their “blackness.”

Jennifer Harford Vargas’s paper, “The Fall of the Patriarchs in Cristina García’s King of Cuba,” will examine the figure of the patriarch as dictator in Cristina García’s King of Cuba to argue the novel stages the death of both octogenarian main characters as a way to articulate the desire for an alternative future for Cuba. Analyzing the literary technique of foil characters, she examines how the novel demythologizes the celebratory narratives of the Revolution and the Freedom Fighters that have dominated the Cuban diaspora. She suggests that by re-centering the novel’s female Cuban American character alongside other defiant second generation Cuban American daughters of the conservative exile generation, we can envision an alternative articulation of revolution and art in the service of a decolonial critique.

C. Christina Lam’s paper, “Flipping the Script: The Body and Belonging in Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa’s Daughters of Stone,” will elucidate the relationship between body, home, and belonging dramatized in Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa’s Daughters of Stone. In this study Lam demonstrates the ways that the body serves as a site of healing, knowing, and ultimately home. She reads Llanos-Figueroa’s novel as an act of intervention recuperating the Afro-Latin@ body from the colonial violence of slavery that would erase matrilineal legacies and deny the racialized body citizenship. In so doing she demonstrates how the novel flips the script of colonial violence by narrating her-stories via the embodied experience of community that welcomes the racialized subject home while challenging “official” histories that would otherwise deny the Afro-Latin@ body and belonging.