Part of review forum on “The Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature” by Sarah Quesada

Among the many contributions Sarah Quesada’s The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature offers, its methodology stands out. Quesada’s methodology allows us to uncover the dense and sprawling textual and extratextual register of synchronic and diachronic ties linking the Americas to Africa. Until recently, scholarly work bringing these two geographies into conversation often identified Europe as both a symbolic and a concrete spatial-temporal mediator of such encounters. And yet, as Quesada’s work shows us, there exists a more direct cultural circulation between Latin America and Africa. Quesada’s book provides a remarkable answer to the problem of methods adequate for excavating the “textual memorials” to the distant and proximate Latin American memories of Africa (20). This method is central to the book’s substantial critical interventions: to demonstrate the fundamental Africanity at the core of key Latinx and Latin American literary texts, that appear in unexpected ways “akin to the ways in which the UNESCO Slave Route memorializes an excision that originated in Africa” (20).

Quesada’s methodology incorporates on-site fieldwork at UNESCO Slave Route Heritage sites in Ouidah, Benin, Badagry, Nigeria, Gorée, Senegal, and the Dr. David Livingstone trail in Malawi, with attention to space, architecture, and geography; curatorial description and oral histories shared by guides; and inscriptions and other techniques of memorialization. Drawing from Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (2008), she proposes that these examples of empirical evidence become the mechanisms that enact visitors’ affective connection to the sites, serving as the basis for reconstituting a lost collective around them. This affective connection becomes her hermeneutic lens for reading the futuristic iteration of the Haitian zombie in Dominican-American Junot Díaz’s 2012 story “Monstro,” the neoliberal inheritance of a colonial commodification of Africa and Latin-Africa in Cuban-American Achy Obeja’s 2009 novel Ruins, the traces of Colombian Gabriel García Márquez’s journalism about Cuba’s intervention in Angola and his investment in a lost Latin-African community of solidarity in his 1981 novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and the Afro-Atlantic haunting of the vestiges of the American Southwest’s plantocracy in Chicanos Tomás Rivera’s 1975 poem “Searching at Leal Middle School” and Rudolfo Anaya’s 1972 novel Bless Me, Ultima. These works are read in combination with other knowledges produced in and about Africa, oral history, colonial archive, and journalism among them. Quesada analyzes fleeting moments, easily overlooked images and references, stylistic innovations, and toponymic symbolism. She finds that each of these texts resurrects some iteration of life-giving force, some constitution of African-centered community as a series of challenges to the “fear,” “commodification,” “obliteration,” and “distortion” of Africanity in Caribbean and Latinx memory.

By reading material in and surrounding these Slave Route Heritage sites as representation—fiction drawn from history and lived experience—her book shows us how these materials reestablish, via affect, a community founded in knowledge produced in Africa, and thus a living register of African epistemology in Latinx and Latin American literature. Quesada’s book thus offers us one path through the problem of a logocentric culture by showing us how we can incorporate and read with material that is both non-literary and by its nature extra-textual, in her use of field observations and archival material as the interpretive codes to contemporary works. Quesada’s book thus responds to the larger question of the location of the literary, and its aesthetic and social functions: that is, Latin American and African literature’s commodification, the conditions of its production, its linkages to publishing circuits located in the Global North, and subsequently to the tastes of these readerships, and often its limited circulation among the communities of origin of its authors. The literary works cannot be understood, and indeed do not exist, in isolation from these other materials.

Quesada’s method offers a model of how to read these other physical, visual, and experiential memorials not just alongside but in the literary. This method allows her to create a beautifully expansive understanding of these discrete textual moments that reveal African presence not as generalized, deterritorialized, and dehistoricized, but in the local and the particular, resulting in an analysis that is all the more revealing.