Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

En este análisis de La música en Cuba (1946), de Alejo Carpentier, discutimos la inclusión del afrocubanismo en la conformación de la música y la cultura cubana, en conexión con los debates del nacionalismo y del vanguardismo. Tanto en este libro como en la literatura de Carpentier resuena su visión del tiempo y el concepto de lo real maravilloso, relacionados con la «autenticidad» de América Latina. Al mismo tiempo, su posición sobre las tareas del escritor latinoamericano gana acento particular cuando la música se convierte en el principal elemento para forjar la nacionalidad. Esta obra, que propone el arte musical como la clave de la «originalidad» de la cultura cubana, también permite analizar el papel que cumplen los intelectuales, en una época en que la literatura “asumía un puesto central dentro de las fuerzas componentes de la cultura del país o de la región” (Ángel Rama, 1985).

La base argumental de este artículo es que existe una preocupación geopolítica en el modernismo hispanoamericano, y que en algunas crónicas de Rubén Darío esta preocupación es abordada en su carácter global y capitalista, enfatizando el destino decadente de la cultura detradición greco-latina. Asimismo, esto muestra una línea de desarrollo dentro de la obra de Darío que se remonta a su visión de la modernidad chilena en Azul (“La canción del oro”). Se considera, además, la coyuntura crítica actual de los estudios sobre Darío en los que se acentúa el carácter transatlántico e hispanista de su obra por sobre la inscripción latinoamericanista que dominó a partir de los años 1960, ante todo por medio de la obra de Ángel Rama.

This text proposes a reflection on the theories of culture and/or lit-erature originating in different Caribbean countries and their pres-ence in the continent’s literary and cultural studies. This panel, toldin broad strokes, aims to clarify the beautiful essay entitled La islaque se repite (The Repeating Island, 1998) by Cuban writer AntonioBenitez Rojo and, based on this reading, looks at the song Haití byCaetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, originally recorded as part of therecord Tropicalia II in 1993.Benitez Rojo’s proposal brings to light elements found at the foundation of our culture marked by the presence of Africans and their traditions throughout the Americas. In each area and region, a different type of music and rhythm arose, but with the common characteristic of constituting the voice against tyranny. Practically all of the musical expressions of the Americas, including spirituals, sung in the churches of North America, jazz, blues, samba, son, tango, rumba, salsa, merengue, cumbia, etc., are related to the music and rhythm of the Africans from the very first moment they set foot on our continent.

Although the presence of black subjectivities is not new in Latin Americanliterature, the field had not acquired the force or topical recurrencehas achieved over the last fifteen years. This is articulated with the overwhelmingsocio-political movement ‘African descent’ identity -category agreed in 2000-, which has created a rhetoric from anthropology, sociology, the legal field, etc., which has also permeated the literary discourse. I propose in this article that positive racialization and from below, ie, from the same subalternized sectors in recent years, has led a stimulating rhetoric of a “should be” African descent that is repeated throughout the work, not only fictional, but also a certain sector of criticism. This work attempts to  roblematize the force with which the rhetoric of the productions of African descent identity has entered the Latin American literary criticism in recent years causing, in some cases, generalizing readings and racialized that naturalize the idea of pre-existence and transhistoricity of a “being African”.

This article analyzes the limits of solidarity based on the decentering of the mestizo protagonists in Limón Reggae by Costa Rican writer Anacristina Rossi (2007), which portrays the Costa Rican descendants of immigrants from the Antilles (primarily from Jamaica), and Big Banana by Honduran author Roberto Quesada (2000), which describes the Garifuna people from Honduras. While Limón Reggae explores a solidarity that is both political and structural in nature in both Costa Rica and the United States as well as the possibility of interracial romantic relationships, Big Banana focuses on empathetic solidarity through the relationship between Eduardo and Mairena on American soil, thus problematizing the possibility of reinventing one’s identity in this “third space.” In short, neither text dares offer a simplistic and/or homogenous solution for coexistence and so both groups finally remain separate. There is no ambition to reorient the inferior experience or even the experience of “the other.” Moreover, both emphasize the place of proclamation and in that way avoid falling into the fallacy of fictional solidarities that are lost in their own fantasy of solidarity for not listening to “the other”.

In recent decades, the Caribbean Space and the figure of the Afro-Costa Rican have become a creative seed that could well be interpreted as  a celebration of the symbols of an oppressed space and ethnicity. A detailed study shows, however, that the proposals are nothing more than anecdotal, stereotypical, exotic. This supposed insertion of the Caribbean and Afro-Costa Rican rather excludes and eliminates any real insertion, thus consolidating the traditional hegemonic discourses on which the Central Valley’s nationalism is founded, presenting other spaces as exotic and foreign. Esteban Ramirez’s Caribe (2004) is written under this assumption, depicting the Caribbean as an exotic space and those who live there as nothing more than foreigners, external to any real, inclusive national discourse. This essay looks at how the introduction of the Caribbean and Afro-Costa Ricans in a situation that portrays them as part of the homeland and a disjunctive view of the Caribbean as both idyllic and barbaric reconstructs a sense of exoticism that demonstrates a fragmented contemporaneity. Through a fetishization of the Caribbean, the lines of hegemony related to the ethnic debate and national identity are repositioned to create what Jerome Branche (1999) called a “new consensus or ‘definition’ of reality ultimately aimed at maintaining the status quo” of the dominant class (Negrismo: hibridez cultural, 485).

Migration both within and outside the Central American isthmus has marked the lives of millions of Central Americans in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This essay analyzes two works representative of the recent narrative subgenre centered on Central American migration: the novel The Tattooed Soldier (1998) by Hector Tobar and the feature film El camino (2007) directed by Ishtar Yasin. It argues that both texts approach the migration of Central American citizens through a narrative strategy identified as “deterritorialized circular violence” in which the initial violence (national, territorialized) migrates with the protagonists of both stories to their recipient countries, transforming along the way into a transnational, deterritorialized phenomenon. Due to the transnational, circular nature of this violence, the characters are not able to escape it and rather end up in worse circumstances after their voyage to their supposed “promised land.” Through this narrativestrategy, The Tattooed Soldier and El camino make powerful commentaries on the way vulnerable Central Americans have become victims of structural, institutionalized violence that extends beyond the national territory—and whose origin and common cause is the socioeconomic inequality and precariousness that impact these individuals before and after becoming migrants.

n the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Central American literary production has been using memory as an excuse or pretext in a valuable cultural production that not only incorporates it into the usual places, but also offers it as a tool to reconstruct and understand the past. Rafael Cuevas Molina’s 300 accentuates the fragmentation that arises from violence by looking through a kaleidoscope at events that marked the country of Guatemala during the 36-year internal armed conflict. With this in mind, this article attempts to distinguish the different social groups that are portrayed in this work in an effort to understand that their voices constitute an exercise in memory and recovery of a violent history. The novel is constructed in a way that fictionally incorporates the Military Logbook or Death Squad Dossier through a strategy that allows the author to combine various social actors in a scene written from the perspective of the State’s violence. The work emphasizes intertextuality and heteroglossia to create a complex universe which the reader must resolve and which, consequently, will unveil how terror, violence, silence and forgetfulness all interfere in the biases depicted.