Islanders in transit: Insular migrancy and shifting identities in Atlantic narratives
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Description
This study examines the works of contemporary writers (such as Pedro Verges, Junot Diaz, Maria Olinda Beja, Luis Rafael Sanchez and Manuel Ferreira) whose works intersect on the levels of ideology, narrative, and construction within the insular imagination. Encompassing the Atlantic island nations of Cape Verde, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Sao Tome e Principe, it argues that the insular subject, a victim and agent of our modern world contemporary Diaspora, is in a perpetual voyage toward a shifting identity. The project maintains that transit and migrancy, in our (Post)-Modern/(Post)-Colonial moment, erase and eradicate the subject's original identity, and impose a new 'indefinable' identity that is shadowed by loss, in a betweenness of place and being. The conceptual voyage of the subject's identity in modern migrancy maps out the migrant cycle that the subject undergoes: the relationship the subject develops with the insular space, the dislocation from place, the relocation of culture and place, and the attempt of a homecoming Based on the ideas that Benitez Rojo proposes in La isla que se repite, the existence of a shared experience among the many island nations of the Caribbean, particularly the colonial legacy, aids in effectively legitimizing the Atlantic cultural bridge. The repeated experience of colonialism that Benitez Rojo proposes as a link among Cuba, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico, allows the comparison with Portugal's colonial project while it ruled in Africa, and specifically in Cape Verde and Sao Tome e Principe. Thus, legitimizing the common experience of their transatlantic colonial past. Indeed, the Atlantic insular experience is based on repetition, and this project links the diasporic migration, represented in insular literature, to the present day status of these nations The conclusion argues in favor of a relationship among migrancy, (Post)Coloniality/(Post)Modernity and insular identity and creates a link between the repeating Atlantic colonial past and the current labor diasporas. It reiterates the creation of new hybrid identities, and the cultural role as a 'dangerous supplement' that migrancy plays in the modern proliferation of shifting identities