Part of review forum on “The Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature” by Sarah Quesada
Sarah Quesada’s The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature offers an important shift in Latin American and Latinx literary studies by privileging understudied regions of the African archive. Moving away from Eurocentric and traditional narratives, the book seeks to reconfigure our understanding of established global frameworks—including the transnational, the cosmopolitan, and world literature—through a lens that distinctly emphasizes the Atlantic system’s impacts in Africa. In doing so, Quesada offers a fresh perspective on the intertwined legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and literature within the Latin America-Africa axis.
Several responses to the book have highlighted its eloquently articulated methodology of “reading sites while visiting texts” (23). This seemingly counterintuitive proposition, far from just wordplay, guides Quesada through both real and speculative trails of memorialization linking both continents. For scholars trained in cultural studies, the practice of “reading sites” sounds familiar. Borrowing from literary theory, poststructural thinkers and cultural studies scholars engaged with the broader social world as shaped by language and other symbolic mediations. For Quesada, “textuality” and the practice of “reading” are crucial to resisting and dismantling power dynamics. Yet, the practice of “visiting texts,” closely associated in the book to the notion of “textual memorials,” carries different and novel implications. The author’s rich engagements with Michel DeCerteau, as well as in-depth reflections on notions of space, illuminate connections between moving through physical spaces and navigating historical temporalities. But how do you visit a text? And how does the act of visiting them, in this context, differ from dwelling or being rooted in them? What makes one act preferable to the other?
Because of these and other methodological explorations, in Quesada’s work the definition of “archive” stretches beyond conventional boundaries. The archive itself expands, ceasing to be a delineated space, an inside detached from what might be deemed non-essential. Rather, it encompasses a vast network of practices, physical memorials, traces, and places. It is also a living repository of practices, beliefs, habits, and dispositions. It can be present in a monument, a tree, a painting, or even a single word. Crucially, it is an archive that actively challenges and resists its potential disappearance. It responds, it talks back against its own erasure.
I’m curious about how Quesada’s understanding of the archive might have evolved during her research and writing. How did she come to confront the problem of the archive? Could the “physical memorials” of the slave trade be integrated into a broader, more expansive understanding of the archive? Or do they serve as a counter-archive, pushing back against the narratives of official history? How does a scholar’s approach evolve in light of these increasingly fluid notions of archives, memory sites, and textual monuments?
An exploration of the archives of African colonization not only combats the forces that have historically distanced Latin America from Africa but also interrogates the traditional divide between empirical and critical-theoretical methodologies. Given this context, what new methodologies surface? And how might our scholarly work support broader practices of “unlearning” the historical whiteness of Latinidad, of the transnational, of world literature, of mestizaje?
Quesada’s work underscores the need for the continued exploration of diasporic exchanges, urging us to delve deeper into the past and present archives of Latin-Africa.
