The problematic of identity-memory in the Cuban-American fiction of Cristina García and Achy Obejas

Cuban-American authors Cristina García and Achy Obejas denote in their fictional works concerns regarding the fragmented memory of second-generation Cuban-American immigrants. Owing to the turbulent political origin of this exiled community, the characters of these works have identity conflicts related to the difficulty of accessing the historical memory of their ancestors’ land and community. However, as the narratives progress, the source of these conflicts proves to be the nationalist approach to identification which they end up challenging by relating themselves to history, memory, and identity in alternative postnational ways. The protagonists of these works, thus, contest traditional postulates in the study of memory like those of Maurice Halbwachs, who believed that the historical memory of a nation had an important role in determining the individual’s identity.

Cross Scripts: Inscribing Hebrew into Jewish American Literature

Most Jewish immigrants to America during the early 20th century arrived speaking Yiddish or Ladino and using Hebrew and Aramaic for liturgical purposes. When subsequent generations abandoned the first two languages, Hebrew and Aramaic were retained, used primarily for liturgy and rites of passage. Jewish American writers have often inserted Hebrew into their English texts by either reproducing the original alphabet or transliterating into Latin letters. This essay focuses on diverse strategies for representing liturgical Hebrew with an emphasis on the poetic, thematic, and sociolinguistic aspects of these expressions of both home and the foreign. Hebrew transliteration is discussed for its literary (rather than phonetic) rendering, for its multilingual creative contact with the other languages and cultures of each narrative. Among the authors whose works are discussed are Philip Roth, Michael Chabon, Nathan Englander, Joshua Cohen, Achy Obejas, and Gary Shteyngart.

“The One Who Comes from the Sea”: Marine Crisis and the New Oceanic Weird in Rita Indiana’s La mucama de Omicunlé (2015)

Caribbean literature is permeated by submarine aesthetics registering the environmental histories of colonialism and capitalism. In this essay, we contribute to the emergent discipline of critical ocean studies by delineating the contours of the “Oceanic Weird”. We begin with a brief survey of Old Weird tales by authors such as William Hope Hodgson and, most famously, H.P. Lovecraft, who were writing in the context of a world still dominated by European colonialism, but increasingly reshaped by an emergent US imperialism. We explore how these tales are both ecophobic and racialized, teeming with fears of deep geological time and the alterity of both nonhuman life and non-European civilizations, and argue that they register the oil-fuelled, militarised emergence of US imperial naval dominance. Subsequently, we turn to Rita Indiana’s neo-Lovecraftian novel, La mucama de Omicunlé [Tentacle, trans. Achy Obejas 2019], set in the Dominican Republic, as a key example of the contemporary efflorescence of ecocritical New Weird Caribbean fiction. We explore how the novel refashions Oceanic Weird tropes to represent the intertwining of marine ecological crisis in an era of global climate emergency with forms of oppression rooted in hierarchies of gender, sexuality, race, and class.

A tradução como mediação cultural: as traduções da obra de Junot Diaz

This article has as its object the translations of the Dominican American writer Junot Díaz to Spanish, with special emphasis on the work of the Cuban-born translator Achy Obejas. Author of a short but remarkable work, Díaz elaborates his narratives in a variety of English that often incorporates elements of Spanish. His writing poetics includes the lexicon of Caribbean Spanish and syntactic structures and proper rhythm of his native language, which results in a strongly hybrid text. The translation of this text into a language that is so intensely present in the original is a challenge. To understand how the construction of this translation is processed, this article tries to analize the strategies used to try to keep up with the translinguistic character of these narratives. In order to reach this objective, some theoretical references are used, concepts such as the foreignizing translation, by Lawrence Venuti; translingualism; and D'Amore's considerations on translations of texts originally written in Spanglish. The analysis makes it clear that the work of Achy Obejas was largely able to give the texts in Spanish the same hybrid character present in the original ones.

Lengua(je)s, branding, e identidad en la Gran Cuba: Dreaming in Cuban de Cristina García

Las metáforas conceptuales de puentes, fronteras, y otros espacios intermedios –las cuales forman lo que podríamos denominar ‘la ontología del guion’—prevalecen en las lecturas críticas de la producción artística de las hijas de la diáspora caribeña hispanófona en los EEUU. No obstante, en este artículo sostengo que las formas lingüísticas y los patrones discursivos que tienen lugar con frecuencia en estos textos no sugieren una carga de identidad lingüística ni el estado de hallarse entre lenguas y naciones, sino que crean una estética de la multiplicidad. A pesar de estar escritas mayoritariamente en inglés, estas obras se agrupan con una tradición literaria del Caribe hispanófono que cuestiona nociones estructuralistas de lengua e identidad, y perspectivas modernas de nación(alidad). En este artículo, expongo la necesidad de reconsiderar las conceptualizaciones de lengua y género en las construcciones de identidades locales, globales, y posnacionales en la Gran Cuba. Analizo cómo escritoras como Cristina García (y Achy Obejas, entre otras) reinterpretan la lengua a través de cruce lingüísticos, formando así una comunidad grancaribeña de práctica literaria que cuestiona los límites discursivos de las definiciones tradicionales de ‘lo americano’, ‘lo cubano’, ‘lo caribeño’, y lo cubano-americano’. Por medio de su branding lingüístico y sus componentes temáticos, estas novelas desestabilizan los imaginarios nacionales y archivos culturales predominantes tanto en la isla caribeña como en los EEUU, a la vez que problematizan el rol históricamente silenciado de las mujeres (escritoras), con un claro propósito de adquisición de poder.