Part of review forum on “The Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature” by Sarah Quesada
In the first place I would like to congratulate and thank Sarah because her book really means a lot for scholars who, like me, have been trying to expand literary spaces beyond national and linguistic boundaries, and more specifically across South-South axes of comparison. Sarah’s book is a milestone in the development of a truly transdisciplinary scholarship that masterfully brings into conversation different literary traditions, archives, temporalities, and geographies of knowledge. The book engages with timely debates on Afro-Atlantic cultural legacies, the commodification of heritage tourism, and the essentialization of ethnic identities.
My reading focuses on the notion of “African Heritage” that is at play in Sarah’s book, as the key element that the study repeatedly claims to rehabilitate through the “visiting of textual memorials” along with the “reading of memorial sites” of the UNESCO Slave Trade Route in Africa. Both texts and sites serve as monuments that preserve a lost memory of Latin-Africa that the author seeks to reconstruct. The African Heritage bridges the two Atlantic shores through the literary works of globally acknowledged Latinx writers and spatially encoded footprints of the slave trade. I want to reflect on the prominent place that literary works hold in preserving and reasserting the memories of a disrupted history.
Indeed, Sarah’s “textual memorials” raise critical questions about the “positionality of speech,” that Afro-Brazilian author Djamila Ribeiro defines as the located and embodied dimension of someone’s remembering or writing (originally published in Portuguese, O lugar da fala [Letramento, 2017], it has a forthcoming translation in English: Where We Stand: Speech, Place, Justice [Yale University Press, 2024]). For many Afro-diasporic writers, literature has been a means to counter the erasure of their histories and their contributions within national and global contexts. In a certain way, these voices also challenge the dominant narratives represented in the works analyzed in The African Heritage. For most of the mestizo authors included in the book, who have been elevated to the canon of World Literature, the African referent appears as a simplified and distant signifier. Quesada identifies and analyzes four core forms of textual and spatial memorialization articulating the Latin-Africa connection: fear, commodification, obliteration, and archival distortion.
As a matter of fact, these four figures highlighted in each of the chapters of the book, reflect how the African Heritage is not fully incorporated as part of the cultural fabric of Latin American identity, but rather as a differentiated externality. As Sarah herself argues, “there is an impossibility of seeing Africa in its particularity, as affected by coloniality occurring in Africa and stubbornly driven on into the twentieth century” (207). This seems to be a very contentious aspect for the prospect of reasserting the memories embedded in texts as much as in touristic sites.
In his famous essay “Who needs ‘identity’?” (1997), Stuart Hall contends that identities are the result of discursive and performative practices: “They arise from the narrativization of the self” (4). The rehabilitation of an African Heritage makes part of this bigger endeavor of retelling and reshaping the distorted images inherited through colonial discourse. As critical scholars, I believe we must inquire about the agency of that process, or rephrasing Hall’s words, we need to ask who needs and reclaims that heritage?
In recent years, we have witnessed a proliferation of literary works authored by Afro-diasporic writers. Some of them, like Mayra Santos Febres, Dahlma Llanos Figueroa, Ana Maria Gonçalves, or Conçeição Evaristo, count among the most acclaimed contemporary Latin American and Caribbean writers. In their works, the notion of “ancestrality” and “heritage” is closely linked to the preservation of collective memories of communities and subjects that have been historically rendered invisible. Their names might not have been inscribed into the records of World Literature, yet their texts have certainly contributed to re-member the disjointed body of Latin-Africa. The Diaspora plays a crucial role in the rehabilitation of that heritage, as they do not only produce it by retelling history in their own terms; furthermore, they embody it.
Sarah’s book contributes greatly to expanding the Black Atlantic archive, bringing to the forefront the Latin-African connection, often overlooked both in area studies as well as within broader paradigms of analysis, such as World Literature. Looking forward to the future development of this transdisciplinary avenue that the study offers, I wonder in what ways are Diasporic voices integrated into this transregional dialogue, and how do they shape and rethink the notion of an African heritage?
