Abstract
Contemporary history and criticism concerning the geocultural space of the Caribbean is largely reduced to the insular paradigm. The island trope works as a miniature model for the “New World” colonisation project but it is not compatible with the real geoculture and its history, which constitute a reticular space made of multiple connections and networks that surpass the area-space notion on which the insular paradigm is based. A sophisticated reticular geopoetics is suggested by contributions of indigenous expressions in the Caribbean like those of recent Wayuu literature. This geopoetics includes the coastal and fluvial networks that reach deep into the continental basin of the Caribbean Sea, in Central and South America.
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Notes
- 1.
Dara Goldman examines the proliferation of the island trope in literary and meta-literary discourses about the Caribbean in Out of Bounds. Islands and the Demarcation of Identity in the Hispanic Caribbean.
- 2.
Even a relatively inclusive landscape, such as the one in the Hispanic section of A History of Literature in the Caribbean, responds to this hierarchy.
- 3.
A notable exception to this trend is the book by Silvio Torres-Saillant, Caribbean Poetics. Toward an Aesthetic of West Indian Literature, which, as noted by Goldman, does not resort to the paradigm of the island. Goldman finds this absence of the island model in Torres-Saillant’s book inexplicable. I, however, find it in consonance with the author’s search for a theory developed by Caribbeans themselves, independent from Western theoreticians.
- 4.
I am making reference here to Viveiros de Castro’s ideas about the savage mind in his introduction to Pierre Clastres’ Archeology of Violence.
- 5.
In La América indígena en su literatura: los libros del cuarto mundo, Gordon Brotherston advances the notion of an indigenous American literature as the result of a complex grammatology and an integral textuality which include oral, sound, graphic and textile forms in a performative contextuality.
- 6.
Even the Carib, icons of savage insularity, bear testimony of communicating vessels with South American matrixes, specifically Amazonian. On the fallacy of the insularity of the Carib, Neil Whitehead says: “First, the Island Carib were, and are, part of a continental context, and cannot be analyzed as if they were solely an insular population”; and further on he notes the existence of “continuities across the Island Carib/Arawak (or Taino) conceptual frontier, the plurality of ethnic affinity and prescription in the pre-Columbian Antilles and the symbiosis of these ‘island’ populations with continental South America” (1995, pp. 12 and 15).
- 7.
Tarash, el jayechimajachi de Wanulumana, ha llegado
para cantar a los que le conocen…
su lengua nos festeja nuestra propia historia,
su lengua sostiene nuestra manera de ver la vida.
Yo, en cambio, escribo nuestras voces
para aquellos que no nos conocen,
para visitantes que buscan nuestro respeto…
Contrabandeo sueños con alijunas cercanos. (Rocha Vivas 2008, p. 372)
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Duchesne Winter, J.R. (2020). Inland Caribbean: A Glance into Wayuu Space. In: López, M., Vera-Rojas, M.T. (eds) New Perspectives on Hispanic Caribbean Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51498-3_3
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