Silvio Torres-Saillant

One and Divisible: Meditations on Global Blackness

This article offers to the consideration of readers a number of site-specific vignettes that highlight the ways in which the experience of blackness--as different from the fact of blackness--may take different forms depending on the moment, the socio-cultural setting, the history, and the existential context in which it occurs. It asks about the wisdom of promoting ideas about global blackness that do not at the same time examine the political economy that explains the globalizing of blackness nor the deleterious legacy of Western discourse that construed people of African descent as a homogeneous branch of the human famly. The article invites reflection on the need to study the black experience internationally without a preordained narrative of racial self-affirmation, warning that the expectation that blacks will articulate their racial identity everywhere in the same way may result in the misrecognition an ensuing neglect of seminal chapters of the black experience.

The Hispanic Caribbean Question: On Geographies of Knowledge and Interlaced Human Landscapes

Abstract:This essay sustains that to earn credibility as a field seeking academic identity de lege, Hispanic Caribbean studies must address the legacy of the colonial past that keeps people in the Antillean world from communicating productively across national borders and language blocs. The field needs to help us address the following problems: relying on the insular metaphor to name a region whose population in large part inhabits continental land masses; making pan-Caribbean claims based on the knowledge (often partial) of only one linguistic zone; uncritically embracing transnationalism to explain the Antillean person’s mobility across polities; and conflating the tellurian geography of the region with the diasporic locales of Caribbean-descended citizens of Western metropolises. The essay advises the humble recognition of the Caribbean as a not easily learned culture area, one rife with internal diversity and a checkered history, and urges serious consideration of the interlaced human landscape pervading the region.

Divisible Blackness: Reflections on Heterogeneity and Racial Identity

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Racism in the Americas and the Latino Scholar

Citizens become most deserving of the name when they recognize themselves as agents of change responsible for making society more truly human. In that respect, the burden of citizenship usually weighs heavier for members of diasporic communities than for the regular citizenry since they have more than one society to improve. Among ethnic minorities in the United States, Latinos face this civil overload with distinct acuity. I can think of at least two reasons for this. First, Latinos for the most part still retain meaningful ties to their ancestral homelands. This is true whether their insertion into the U.S. population resulted from an act of American imperial conquest such as those of 1848 and 1898 or from the massive migratory flows that poured in from Latin America beginning in the first half of the twentieth century Second, most Latin American societies have in recent decades made seductive advances to their respective emigre communities to secure the continued flow of remittances that have become practically indispensable to the region’s economies. These advances include dual citizenship and voting rights abroad, initiatives whereby Latin American state authorities have sought to formalize legislatively their ties to their diasporic communities. Given this scenario, Latinos can feel authorized to intervene on behalf of the downtrodden in their ancestral homelands without concern for the predictable charge that in seeking to influence Latin American societies from their location in the North they might perpetuate the ethnocentric assumptions of American cultural imperialism in the region.

The Once and Future Muse: The Poetry and Poetics of Rhina P. Espaillat

T he Once and Future Muse: The Poetry and Poetics of Rhina P. Espaillat charts the literary trajectory, salient themes, aesthetic accomplishments, and critical reception of a major American poet whose work conveys a compelling message to our troubled world. The study also takes advantage of the chronology corresponding to the life of the poet to illustrate meaningful paradigmatic shifts in the production and consumption of literary texts in the United States after World War II that have indelibly marked the way subsequent generations would write, read, share, and discuss the art of literature. We understand that our choice of title, one that hearkens back to Le Morte Darthur (1485), the fifteenth-century epic prose narrative by Thomas Malory (?–1471), may elicit a measure of perplexity. What connection could there be between the work of Malory, an English author active over five centuries ago, and the oeuvre of our contemporary Caribbean-descended American poet? Malory wrote his book while behind bars after a public life that started out with his receipt of knighthood before 1442 and service in the Parliament of 1445 but degraded into I N T R O D U C T I O N

New York Dominican Writers

Silvio Torres-Saillant is Professor in the English Department at Syracuse University and was the founder of the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute. A member of the Editorial Board of the University of Houston’s Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Project, he serves as Associate Editor of Latino Studies (Palgrave) and has edited the New World Studies Series for the University of Virginia Press. He is the author of An Intellectual History of the Caribbean (2006).

Conversation Manqué: On Judging Someone Else's Book

In this response to his critics, the author values the areas of missed opportunity observed by Braziel, Buscaglia-Salgado, and Bogues, while also endeavoring to “defend” his book from those objections that he ascribes more to the exigencies of the critic’s particular reading practice than to the text’s demonstrable failings. He uses the occasion to meditate on the psychopathology that informs the writing of a scholarly critique of a peer’s work and the tension that such a task may entail.

Introduction: New Ways of Imagining the Caribbean

Silvio Torres-Saillant, Associate Professor of English and Director of the Latino-Latin American Studies Program at Syracuse University, specializes in Caribbean and Latino literature and culture, ethnic American literatures, intellectual history, and diasporic identities. His publications include An Intellectual History of the Caribbean (2006), Caribbean Poetics (1997), and The Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in the United States (2005; senior editor). Torres-Saillant was the 2005 2006 Wilbur Marvin Visiting Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, and a visiting associate professor in the Romance Languages and Literatures Department, both at Harvard University.

Caribbean Poetics: Toward an Aesthetic of West Indian Literature

Preface Note on the translations Introduction 1. The unity of Caribbean literature 2. Toward a Caribbean poetics 3. Kamau Brathwaite and the Caribbean word 4. Stages of the sacred in Rene Depestre 5. Pedro Mir and the historical imagination 6. Conclusion: in a decentralized literary order Bibliography Index.