El discurso narrativo del Caribe hispano: Una perspectiva del cuento (1960-1970)
Description
Traditionally, the Caribbean has been considered a separate area from the rest of Spanish-America and containing its own unity. Various theories of this Caribbean unity have been proposed. One has been suggested by Ramiro Guerra. By 1930, Guerra had already stated that the impossibility of combining the slave system with the agricultural-technological development of the sugar plantation was responsible for the shift from slave to wage labor and a transformation in the property system. Thus, for Guerra, the fundamental characteristic of Caribbean unity was the transformation of a feudal system into a capitalist one through a modernization process which established a society structured upon the principle of exploitation. This new society's principal characteristic was an economic relationship between capital and salaried workers Jorge Manach, on the other hand, considered that the unity of the Caribbean was based on literature. Manach asserted that Caribbean literature was more nationalistic and less cosmopolitan than the literature of South America. Another theorist, Jose Antonio Portuondo postulates that the factor which defines the Caribbean as a unity is the presence of American imperialism in the region. This situation, according to Portuondo, promoted the isolation that traditionally existed among the Caribbean nations. The polemic about Caribbean unity asserts that the Caribbean has undergone a series of historical changes which have given the region its unique characteristics, and, furthermore, that the economic and political interdependency created by the development of the sugar industry during the XIX Century have given Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico a distinctive character fostered, in part, by the 'plantation society.' My hypothesis is that there is a unitary Caribbean literary discourse that is an expression of socio-economic, political and cultural unity that affects the entire Caribbean region. In an attempt to find common elements that constitute a Caribbean literary discourse, Foucault's concept of 'general history,' which focuses on discontinuity, will be used to analyze the literature that has emerged from historical junctures of rupture in the region. For Cuba, a study of Jesus Diaz's Los anos duros, as a representative work of the testimonial literature that emerges with the Cuban Revolution. Miguel Fonseca's El enemigo, as a representative work of the 'post-War Generation,' and as a testimonial of the American intervention in the Dominican Republic. An analysis of Luis Rafael Sanchez En cuerpo de camisa as a new questioning of Puerto Rican identity in the light of the crisis of 'munocismo.'