Reterritorializing Caribbean Diaspora Literature

The Caribbean is often cited as the paradigmatic instance of the deterritorialization of culture. Three new studies of Caribbean literature by Stanka Radović, Elena Machado Saéz, and BCrossed D sign©nCrossed D sign©dicte Boisseron challenge the persistent, often delocalizing identification of the Caribbean with deterritorialization by suggesting that greater attention needs to be given to the processes of reterritorialization in which Caribbean diaspora cultures are perpetually engaged. These studies point to reterritorialization both as a function of Caribbean diaspora literature and as conditioning its production and reception. In so doing, Machado Saéz and Boisseron in particular also challenge the celebratory narratives of diaspora that became entrenched in the 1990s, suggesting that the position that contemporary Caribbean diaspora writers occupy is a profoundly ambivalent one marked by the fears of commodification and inauthenticity. Taken together, these scholarly interventions call for a reorientation of Caribbean literary studies toward the question of locality