Part of review forum on “The Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature” by Sarah Quesada
The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature by Sarah Quesada constitutes a discerning exploration of the latent sources and manifestations of African presences in Latinx and Caribbean creative productions of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Through a variety of (mainly but not exclusively narrative) texts and (UNESCO heritage) sites that lend themselves to thought-provoking analysis of the African memorial archive, this book probes into the planetary “routedness” of Black signifiers despite their continuous peripheralization in (New) World Literature. By (re)visiting texts and (re)reading sites, Quesada deconstructs the politics and poetics which obscure, commodify, and distort complex African relics, beliefs, arts, culture, and turn them into monologic, simplistic, and palatable icons at the service of socio-cultural agents with excess symbolic power to shape attitudes globally.
The chapter on commodification, for instance, addresses the problematic erosion of the traumatic dimension of the slave trade commemoration by neoliberal structures such as the World Bank, IMF, and UNESCO, thereby reconfiguring spaces of suffering into pleasure hubs that serve the interests of transnational middle class, whereas these sites become inaccessible to disenfranchised locals whose collective memories they purport to perpetuate. This paradox is reminiscent of the Ghanaian author Armah’s (Reference Armah1995) critique that slave trade commemorations in Africa and the Americas often end up re-inshrining the capitalist system that led to the tragedy in the first place.
The study recenters Africa in the Black Atlantic debates, arguing that though the focus on the Middle Passage is crucial in understanding the socio-cultural dynamics of Black presence in the New World, this tendency should not be to the detriment of a deeper engagement with Africa. Despite the author’s humble submission that critical engagement with Africa from Latinx and Caribbean standpoints need not replace studies emerging from Africa itself, her transversal and transdisciplinary coast-to-coast analysis is quite inspiring for contemporary African studies, which foregrounds Africa as a relational space that resonates beyond its actual physical cartographic boarders (Niaah Reference Du Bois2008). This underlines the pertinence of the “deep archives” of African societies in order to understand the extent of Africa’s indocility (Mbembe Reference Mbembe1988) and resilience in the face of European epistemicide and the persistent survival/re-existence of that archive thanks to the planetary presence of Africa. In a historical context of the Americas where Blackness is seen as a “problem” (Dubois Reference Niaah1903), Quesada’s work investigates the hegemonic strategies in dealing with the Black Question in Latinx studies and in World Literature debate, restituting the haunting quality of slave trade memory as an ethical interrogation of global geopolitics, imperialism, and neocolonial relations.
The strength of this work lies in its capacity to narrow down on textual/spatial details, unravelling otherwise fleeting and tacit motifs and traces in the works of Junot Díaz, Achy Obejas, Tomás Rivera and Rudolfo Anaya, and Gabriel García Márquez and connecting them cogently with systematic patterns of representation that reflect the approaches of the UNESCO Slave Route Project in spaces such as Badagry, Gorée, Ouidah, and so on. Quesada’s work is foremost a contribution in humanizing the image of Africa in the face of its invisibilized as well as its caricaturized presences in Latinx and Caribbean Literature.
Considering Operation Carlota in Angola in the light of the contradictory reality of Cuba’s Black population and their structural marginalization under his Communist regime, Castro’s ambiguous stance is redolent of many African leaders (Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta and Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, for instance) of the era of political decolonization, whose international postures concealed their less-than-savoury legacies in their respective multiethnic national contexts. However, while Quesada’s readings and reflections on Cuba’s intervention in Angola might portray it as an epitome of the failed Latin-Africa, I think taking into account the Cold War, the regional dynamics, and African political perspectives on that intervention would lead to less pessimistic assessment of that historical alliance than expressed in that chapter.
