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Chapter 10 Hospitality Rituals and Caribbean Migrants: Tom Wolfe’s Back to Blood, Ana Lydia Vega’s “Encancaranublado,” and Francisco Goldman’s The Ordinary Seaman
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Abstract
In “The Caribean Imaginary in ‘Encancaranublado’ by Ana Lydia Vega,” Diana Vélez argues that the Caribbean “is a space that can be theorized productively within both paradigms: both diaspora and borderland” (828). This chapter proposes that hospitality can also offer an apt theoretical frame to analyze the interactions between and among migrants on one hand, and between migrants and Americans on the other. The chapter examines Ana Lydia Vega’s story as part of a series of literary works that gravitate around acts of hospitality. Vega’s “Encancaranublado” and Edwidge Dunticat’s “Children of the Sea” and “Caroline’s Wedding” establish a direct connection between contemporary migrants and the slave trade. Tom Wolfe’s Back to Blood and Francisco Goldman’s The Ordinary Seaman tackle the stasis and the hostility of the arrival. If Wolf’s character is literally suspended between land and sea, between being a ‘dry’ or a ‘wet’ foot, between standing a chance of being welcome to America or being sent to Guantánamo, Goldman’s characters undergo a process of depersonalization that transforms them into slaves and zombies. The four examples show that the arrival to an American harbor never translates as hospitality, and that mobility for Caribbean migrants often translates as another variation of mobility ‘in chains.’
Literature and Culture across the Line
Volume Editor:
What constitutes a border situation? How translatable and “portable” is the border? What are the borders of words surrounding the border? In its five sections, Border Transits: Literature and Culture across the Line intends to address these issues as it brings together visions of border dynamics from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The volume opens with “Part I: (B)orders and lines: A Theoretical Intervention,” which explores the circle and the cross as spatial configurations of two contradictory urges, to separate and divide on the one hand, and to welcome and allow passage on the other. “Part II: Visions of the Mexican-US Border” zooms in onto the Mexican-United States border as it delves into the border transits between the two neighboring countries. But what happens when we situate the border on the cultural terrain? How well does the border travel? “Part III: Cultural Intersections” expands the border encounter as it deals with the different ways in which texts are encoded, registered, appropriated, mimicked and transformed in other cultural texts. “Part IV: Trans-Nations,” addresses instances of trans-American relations stemming from experiences of up-rooting and intercultural contacts in the context of mass-migration and migratory flows. Finally, “Part V: Trans-Lations,” deals with the ways in which the cultural borderlands suffuse other discourses and cultural practices.
The volume is of interest for scholars and researchers in the field of Border studies, Chicano studies, “Ethnic Studies,” as well as American Literature and Culture.
The volume is of interest for scholars and researchers in the field of Border studies, Chicano studies, “Ethnic Studies,” as well as American Literature and Culture.
Literature and Culture across the Line
Volume Editor:
What constitutes a border situation? How translatable and “portable” is the border? What are the borders of words surrounding the border? In its five sections, Border Transits: Literature and Culture across the Line intends to address these issues as it brings together visions of border dynamics from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The volume opens with “Part I: (B)orders and lines: A Theoretical Intervention,” which explores the circle and the cross as spatial configurations of two contradictory urges, to separate and divide on the one hand, and to welcome and allow passage on the other. “Part II: Visions of the Mexican-US Border” zooms in onto the Mexican-United States border as it delves into the border transits between the two neighboring countries. But what happens when we situate the border on the cultural terrain? How well does the border travel? “Part III: Cultural Intersections” expands the border encounter as it deals with the different ways in which texts are encoded, registered, appropriated, mimicked and transformed in other cultural texts. “Part IV: Trans-Nations,” addresses instances of trans-American relations stemming from experiences of up-rooting and intercultural contacts in the context of mass-migration and migratory flows. Finally, “Part V: Trans-Lations,” deals with the ways in which the cultural borderlands suffuse other discourses and cultural practices.
The volume is of interest for scholars and researchers in the field of Border studies, Chicano studies, “Ethnic Studies,” as well as American Literature and Culture.
The volume is of interest for scholars and researchers in the field of Border studies, Chicano studies, “Ethnic Studies,” as well as American Literature and Culture.
This series looks at the different literary traditions of the United States, including African American literature, Native American literature, Chicano and US latino literature, Asian American literature, as well as emergent literatures such as Indian or Arab American.
Although the series' focus is mostly comparative, multiethnic, and intercultural, it also welcomes feature analyses of single literary traditions.
Issues of race, ethnicity, class gender, and the interspace between the political and the aesthetic, among other possible topics, figure prominently in the series.
Authors are cordially invited to submit proposals and/or full manuscripts to the publisher at BRILL, Masja Horn.
Although the series' focus is mostly comparative, multiethnic, and intercultural, it also welcomes feature analyses of single literary traditions.
Issues of race, ethnicity, class gender, and the interspace between the political and the aesthetic, among other possible topics, figure prominently in the series.
Authors are cordially invited to submit proposals and/or full manuscripts to the publisher at BRILL, Masja Horn.
This volume stems from the idea that the notion of borders and borderlines as clear-cut frontiers separating not only political and geographical areas, but also cultural, linguistic and semiotic spaces, does not fully address the complexity of contemporary cultural encounters. Centering on a whole range of literary works from the United States and the Caribbean, the contributors suggest and discuss different theoretical and methodological grounds to address the literary production taking place across the lines in North American and Caribbean culture. The volume represents a pioneering attempt at proposing the concept of the border as a useful paradigm not only for the study of Chicano literature but also for the other American literatures. The works presented in the volume illustrate various aspects and manifestations of the textual border(lands), and explore the double-voiced discourse of border texts by writers like Harriet E. Wilson, Rudolfo Anaya, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, Louise Erdrich, Helena Viramontes, Paule Marshall and Monica Sone, among others. This book is of interest for scholars and researchers in the field of comparative American studies and ethnic studies.
This volume stems from the idea that the notion of borders and borderlines as clear-cut frontiers separating not only political and geographical areas, but also cultural, linguistic and semiotic spaces, does not fully address the complexity of contemporary cultural encounters. Centering on a whole range of literary works from the United States and the Caribbean, the contributors suggest and discuss different theoretical and methodological grounds to address the literary production taking place across the lines in North American and Caribbean culture. The volume represents a pioneering attempt at proposing the concept of the border as a useful paradigm not only for the study of Chicano literature but also for the other American literatures. The works presented in the volume illustrate various aspects and manifestations of the textual border(lands), and explore the double-voiced discourse of border texts by writers like Harriet E. Wilson, Rudolfo Anaya, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, Louise Erdrich, Helena Viramontes, Paule Marshall and Monica Sone, among others. This book is of interest for scholars and researchers in the field of comparative American studies and ethnic studies.
Magical Realism in US Ethnic Literatures
Uncertain Mirrors realigns magical realism within a changing critical landscape, from Aristotelian mimesis to Adorno’s concept of negative dialectics. In between, the volume traverses a vast theoretical arena, from postmodernism and postcolonialism to Lévinasian philosophy and eco-criticism. The volume opens and closes with dialectical instability, as it recasts the mutability of the term “mimesis” as both a “world-reflecting” and a “world-creating” mechanism. Magical realism, the authors contend, offers another stance of the possible; it also situates the reader at a hybrid aesthetic matrix inextricably linked to postcolonial theory, postmodernism, Bakhtinian theory, and quantum physics. As Uncertain Mirrors explores, magical realist texts partake of modernist exhaustion as much as of postmodernist replenishment, yet they stem from a different “location of culture” and “direction of culture;” they offer complex aesthetic artifacts that, in their recreation of alternative geographic and semiotic spaces, dislocate hegemonic texts and ideologies. Their unrealistic excess effects a breach in the totalized unity represented by 19th century realism, and plays the dissonant chord of the particular and the non-identical.
Magical Realism in US Ethnic Literatures
Uncertain Mirrors realigns magical realism within a changing critical landscape, from Aristotelian mimesis to Adorno’s concept of negative dialectics. In between, the volume traverses a vast theoretical arena, from postmodernism and postcolonialism to Lévinasian philosophy and eco-criticism. The volume opens and closes with dialectical instability, as it recasts the mutability of the term “mimesis” as both a “world-reflecting” and a “world-creating” mechanism. Magical realism, the authors contend, offers another stance of the possible; it also situates the reader at a hybrid aesthetic matrix inextricably linked to postcolonial theory, postmodernism, Bakhtinian theory, and quantum physics. As Uncertain Mirrors explores, magical realist texts partake of modernist exhaustion as much as of postmodernist replenishment, yet they stem from a different “location of culture” and “direction of culture;” they offer complex aesthetic artifacts that, in their recreation of alternative geographic and semiotic spaces, dislocate hegemonic texts and ideologies. Their unrealistic excess effects a breach in the totalized unity represented by 19th century realism, and plays the dissonant chord of the particular and the non-identical.