Decolonizing Diasporas

Front matter

RADICAL MAPPINGS OF AFRO-ATLANTIC LITERATURE

Decolonizing Diasporas

Decolonizing Diasporas

Contents

List of Illustrations xi Acknowledgments xiii Note on Language and Translation xxi Preface xxiii Introduction

Relations 1 Chapter 1

Intimacies 31 Chapter 2

Preface

How do we map relations? About twenty miles off the coast of West Africa lies the island of Bioko, one of the most important insular territories of Equatorial Guinea, the only Spanish-speaking nation-state in sub-Saharan Africa. There, in the capital city of Malabo, a salt-whipped bronzed plaque reads: “En memoria a los cubanos deportados en el siglo XIX a la isla de Fernando Po / 28 de mayo de 1869 / Embajada de Cuba en Guinea Ecuatorial.” This plaque, dedicated to the memory of Cubans deported to Fernando Pó, Bioko’s colonial-era name, marks an important and understudied history between Hispanophone Africa and the Hispanophone Caribbean.

In 1845, the Spanish Crown's Royal Order 13 saw to it that emancipated slaves from Cuba—Blacks and mulattos—be deported to the island of Fernando Po to labor in the newly solidified colony of Spanish Guinea.! By

Fig. 1. Cuban deportee memorial in Malabo, Bioko, Equatorial Guinea.

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1865, these emancipados had been joined by political activists and dissidents from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines who were “disappeared” from their homes and deported to Bioko’s penal colony. It was not, however, until thirty years later, in 1898, when Spain lost the Spanish-American War and by extension Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines—its last remaining colonies in the Americas and the Pacific—that Spain turned its full imperial attention to its remaining African colonies. In “Rethinking the Archive,” Benita Sampedro Vizcaya notes: “In the aftermath of 1898, when Spain lost what remained of its credibility as a global force and imperial anxieties passed through one of their most critical phases, the scramble for Africa by the European powers left little to appropriate. Equatorial Guinea would become, along with Morocco, the essential locus for covering the economic and psychological trauma and contributing to the formation of a public imperial imaginary.”? The shift that left Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines in the imperial hands of the United States likewise ushered in an age of renewed colonial interest, extraction, and exploitation in Spanish Guinea, as it was then known.’

While each of these Caribbean island nations faced different political outcomes under U.S. imperial rule and later independence, protectorate, or commonwealth statuses, 1898 marks an important political, social, and

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

PUERTO RICO

Fig. 2. Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic.

Preface xxU economic shift that bears on contemporary realities. I would be remiss if I failed to note that the year 1898 had a significant impact on the place from which I am writing, the state of Michigan, which is on the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary lands of the Anishinaabeg—the Three Fires Confederacy of the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatami peoples.’ As legal scholars Wenona Singel and Matthew Fletcher explain, the Burt Lake Anishinaabeg resistance to forcible removal in 1898 was followed by continued harassment in 1899, and culminated in the violent “burn out” of the Indian Village on Burt Lake in 1900. Notwithstanding these forceful histories and ongoing forms of dispossession, “Indian and Indian tribes have never forgotten their sacred homelands, and continuously seek to restore their lands.”° Colonial legacies of dispossession and violence go far beyond and before 1898. Thus, while this book focuses on the Hispanophone Afro-Atlantic, I understand these histories as overlapping with the forceful removal, dispossession, and other forms of oppression faced by Indigenous, Black, and people of color around the globe. These are the palimpsests of oppression and resistance to which we must bear witness.

In the case of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and Spanish-speaking Africa, it is not only the legacy of Spanish colonial rule that connects these islands but also histories of war, dictatorship, migration, and defiance. The histories, and very often the imaginaries, of these islands and their diasporas often overlap in generative and complex ways. Spanish Guinea did not become Equatorial Guinea until it was administratively decolonized in 1968. Thus, as Spain shifted from fascism to democracy after 1975, Equatorial Guinea shifted from colonial rule to a fifty-year-long autocratic government.‘ In 1968 Equatoguineans elected their first president, Francisco Macias Nguema. By 1970, Macias had made Equatorial Guinea a single-party state, and within six months he had declared himself president for life. Effectively a dictatorship, his repressive rule saw the deaths of thousands of Equatoguineans and political dissidents, the displacement of the Bubi (the autochthones of the island of Bioko, which is central to political power), the severing of political ties with Spain and the West, and the ousting of anyone who had been educated under Spanish colonial rule. Many of those young students, like authors Remei Sipi Mayo and Donato Ndongo Bidyogo, were unable to return to Equatorial Guinea, and watched the nation transition from colony to democracy to dictatorship from their exile in Spain.

These oppressive maneuvers drove a surge of Equatoguineans into exile in Spain and led others to migrate to the neighboring nations of Gabon and Cameroon. Those who survived and remained in Equatorial Guinea suffered from malnutrition, state-sponsored terror, and coercive treatment from paramilitary and state power representatives—what Achille Mbembe has called “private indirect government.”” This ethnic and ideological cleansing was intended to purge any political opposition, and to remove the memory of colonial-era rule. Macias went so far as to outlaw the word “intellectual.”* xxvi Preface

CAMEROON

BIOKO

EQUATORIAL A f GUINEA

RÍO MUNI

ELOBEY CHICO

CORISCO

GABON

ANNOBON

Fig. 3. Equatorial Guinea.

During this time, many writers and teachers (among others) fled the country and were unable to return. The years of Macias’s reign have been called the “years of silence,” referencing both the silencing of writers and intellectuals and the extensive and demoralizing political and social silencing of the people of Equatorial Guinea. As such, literary poetics written from exile, as Benita Sampedro Vizcaya argues, “was one of the most forceful forms of resistance during the years of silence, especially under Francisco Macias Nguema.”?

In August 1979 Teodoro Obiang, Macías's nephew and lieutenant, led a coup d'état, overthrowing his uncle and sentencing him to death by firing squad. Obiang became the second president of Equatorial Guinea and remains in power today. Obiang is now the longest-serving dictator in Africa, and the world's second-longest-serving political leader. His regime, though seen as less repressive than Macías's before him, remains an oppressive, ethnocentric, and autocratic rule with no free press, radio, or other outlets. The discovery of offshore oil reserves in the 1990s ensured Equatorial Guinea's rise on the global stage. Contemporarily, it is considered one of the wealthiest nations on the continent of Africa. But the wealth from the oil boom is distributed extremely unequally; the majority of the population lives in destitute

Preface xxvii poverty, many without access to clean water. The oil boom and subsequent financial windfall further complicate the nation’s human rights violations, in light of the Equatoguinean government's relationship with international oil corporations and countries like the United States, which has consumed more than one-third of Equatoguinean oil. Furthermore, there are currently hundreds of Cuban medical doctors, professors, and others working in Equatorial Guinea as part of international political and solidarity efforts between their countries."

Due to the repressive political climate within Equatorial Guinea, resistance movements, much of the country's oppositional thought, and literary poetics that address postcolonial corruption, cultural resurgences, and liberatory strivings are produced in exile and diaspora in Spain.” The literary corpus of Equatorial Guinea falls primarily into the categories of colonial literature and contemporary works of poetry, drama, fiction, short stories, essays, music, and other artistic expressions. Contemporary works by Equatoguineans who were born in or came of age in Spain reveal their struggles with racial and ethnic belonging and their complex ties to a homeland made impossible by dictatorship and coloniality. These literatures also reflect affective and material relationships with other immigrants, African, Caribbean, and otherwise, in Spain.” The literature and cultural production of Equatorial Guinea, while preoccupied with the homeland, political economies, interethnic relations, and the everyday injustices of private indirect government, are likewise diasporic and transnational in their focus. As Marvin Lewis argues, “the capital of Equatorial Guinean literature” is in “the heart of every Guinean, whether in Spain, in France, or in Equatorial Guinea,” because after the successive dictatorships, “a dislocation of the literary frontier is verified, and each author remains ‘wherever he best finds himself, from wherever he writes for his country.” * Overall, however, Equatoguinean literatures written in diaspora and exile represent a broad range of concerns that are fundamentally linked in many ways to the literary corpus of Latinx Caribbean peoples in exile and diaspora. It bears mentioning that these literatures are rarely put into relation to each other.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the 1960s would also usher in a new era for Latinx Caribbean peoples in the Americas. For example, by 1963 over 215,000 elite and middle-class Cubans had fled Cuba after the 1959 revolution. Given the status of special refugees and aid in the form of U.S. subsidies, these Cuban exiles joined earlier waves of Cuban immigrants to the United States and necessarily transformed the cultural landscape of southern Florida.'* During this same time and for decades afterward, Cuba underwent political, social, and cultural changes and suffered an embargo that would see it pitted as a political showcase vis-a-vis Puerto Rico.'* Cuban migration to the United States would exponentially increase later in the twentieth century, as other middle-class Cubans in the 1970s, Marielitos in the 1980s, Balseros in the 1990s, and continuing waves of migration in the 2000s left the island by the thousands.

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Fig. 4. “Let the Geographies Sink In”: Afro-Atlantic Hispanophone Diasporas: Latinx Caribbean migration to the United States (New York highlighted) and Equatorial Guinean migration to Spain (Madrid highlighted).

Likewise, though a significant number of Puerto Ricans had been immigrating to the United States since the early twentieth century, dispossession and occupation after the Spanish-American War, coupled with efforts to rapidly industrialize the island through capitalist designs for a whiter middle class, meant that by 1960 there were over 600,000 Puerto Ricans living in New York City and hundreds of thousands more in Chicago, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and other locales throughout the continental United States and Hawaii. Puerto Rican immigrants were seen as a source of cheap labor and worked on rural farms and in factories in densely populated urban centers.!” Waves of migration steadily increased throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, an era marked in Puerto Rico by economic depressions and deindustrialization driven by corruption, corporate tax evasion, ongoing dispossession, and the island’s colonial (or commonwealth) status vis-a-vis the United States. The island’s current fiscal crisis, due to the odious debt Puerto Rico has “accrued”—upwards of seventy billion dollars—can be tied to its commonwealth status and has propelled another wave of population dispersal which rivals that of the twentieth century. The year 2015 marked a historic moment in Puerto Rican migration history: there were officially more

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Puerto Ricans living in the United States than on the island. The onslaught of Hurricane Irma and then of Hurricane Maria in September 2017 destroyed much of the island’s infrastructure, leaving millions without electricity, running water, or access to basic goods. FEMA and the U.S. and Puerto Rican governments’ massive mishandling of recovery efforts after Hurricane Maria made for an unnatural yet predictable disaster that counted over 4,000 dead in its wake. It has also led tens of thousands to flee the island to cities like Orlando, Florida.'*

The 1960s also proved to be a critical decade in the history of the Dominican Republic, as Rafael Trujillo’s more than thirty-year rule came to an end with his assassination in 1961. In 1963, the democratically elected president Juan Bosch was overthrown after just two years in power. In 1966, after almost two years of military rule, Joaquin Balaguer was elected president. His twelve-year presidency, predicated on political repression, was reprised throughout the twentieth century, as he was reelected in 1986, 1990, and 1994. Thus, between 1961 and 1986, over 400,000 Dominicans fled to the United States, while another 44,000 migrated to the neighboring island of Puerto Rico. Political and economic instability likewise drove Dominican immigration to the United States throughout the 1990s and 2000s. A 2014 study from the CUNY Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies found that Dominicans had become the single largest foreign-born immigrant group in New York City.”

The decades following the 1960s saw a surge in literary poetics, arts, and musical genres in the diasporic populations of these nations. For example, the Nuyorican Poets Movement of the 1960s and 1970s radically changed the literary landscape of Latinx and U.S. literature and aesthetics. These groundbreaking decades saw working-poor and immigrant populations reflect their experiences as colonial subjects, immigrants, and racialized peoples in new and syncretic forms. This era also saw the formation of radical political Latinx organizations, neighborhood associations and grassroots activism, and, facilitated by bilingual education programs, an influx of Latinxs to colleges and universities. This growing number of people of color in the university system and their demands to see Eurocentric education decolonized and transformed led them to create new fields of thought that took seriously the knowledges, contributions, and cultural productions of people of color in the United States and the Third World. These new fields would not be like the area studies programs before them, which were often funded by and linked to U.S. military intelligence efforts, but rather, sought to transform Eurocentric knowledge production writ large.

In 1968 and 1969 the Third World Liberation Front, a coalition of Black, Latinx, and Pilipino student groups at San Francisco State University and the University of California at Berkeley, led the longest student strike in U.S. history. Their demand to decolonize the white supremacist curriculum and other structures within higher education led to the formation of ethnic studies,

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African American studies, Native American studies, Puerto Rican and Chicano studies, Latino studies, Asian American studies, Women's and Gender studies, and other such fields all over the United States. While this is by no means an exhaustive history, I do hope to mark some of the relations between migration, political resistance, and the movements that sought to transform knowledge practices. While I am wary of engaging in teleological narratives that flatten these dynamic histories and decolonizing projects, Iam nevertheless committed to offering some of the important overviews and linkages that make this book possible.

With regard to Equatorial Guinea, the scholarship of these critical historical crossings resides primarily in the field of Hispanic studies and to a lesser extent in African studies, with Ibrahim K. Sundiata and Benita Sampedro Vizcaya underscoring the importance of the nineteenth-century deportations to penal colonies and Michael Ugarte, Elisa Rizo, and others engaging the salience of Equatoguinean literatures.” Furthermore, linguistics and sociology scholarship tracks the varieties of Spanish, including linguistic borrowings from Antillean Spanish, in the language practices of Equatorial Guinea.” In Decolonizing Diasporas, I aim to expand the ways we map these crossings between Spanish-speaking Africa and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean through a sustained meditation on their diasporic and exilic poetics. As Katherine McKittrick argues in Demonic Grounds, “Geographies of domination, from transatlantic slavery and beyond, hold in them the marking and the contestation of old and new social hierarchies.” Thus, I contend that putting into relation the preoccupations and reflections that emerge in post-1960s literary and cultural productions offers us a radical remapping of Afro-Atlantic Hispanophone subjects. This kind of relational project sees an often-ignored corpus of work as sites through which we can indict oppression, resist domination, and imagine decolonizing strategies. In mapping these imaginaries across these bodies of literature, I have found that, although distinct, they reflect similar preoccupations, experiences, and liberatory strivings. And although the historical, contemporary, literary, and ontological relations between Equatorial Guinea and the Hispanophone Caribbean islands—Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic—are rarely discussed in the context of Black, Latinx, and Hispanophone studies, I believe that such a study offers critical implications for these fields.

The connections between these poetics are not imagined. For example, we find intertextual dedications lauding Negrismo, a Cuban precursor to the Negritude movement, in the poetry of Equatorial Guinea.? One example is a 1993 poem published in the literary journal El Patio, a Hispano-Guinean cultural magazine. In it, the Equatoguinean poet and critic Carlos Nsue Otong offers an elegy to Nicolás Guillén, one of the foremost Afro-Cuban poets and political activists of the late twentieth century. Nsue Otong writes:

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Quisiera tejer mi palabra / con esta emoción que me embarga y hacerla volar presurosa / a Cuba, mitad africana.

Guillén Nicolás, compañero: / labré con mi canto corona, Maestro, Cantor y Poeta / salud a tu egregia persona.

Robé el acento africano, / poeta soñé en la noche

y era canto pregonero / al ritmo sonoro del bronce.

Recibe mis versos, Guillén, / mi ritmo, mi metro, mi rima nativos del Africa madre / en viaje allá por Antillas.”4

I wish to weave my word / with this emotion that overcomes me and make it fly swiftly / to Cuba, half African.

Guillén Nicolás, comrade: / I crafted with my highest song, Teacher, Singer and Poet, / a greeting to your eminent persona.

I stole the African accent, / I dreamed of a poet in the night

and it was the people’s song / set to the sonorous rhythm of bronze. Receive my verses Guillén / my rhythm, my meter, my rhyme natives of Mother Africa / en route over there through the Antilles.

Here, Nsue Otong praises Guillén’s lyrical virtuosity, establishing a link to his African ancestry, “nativos del Africa madre,” and broadly hails Afro- Caribbean peoples as being “en viaje alla por Antillas.” Through this elegy, Nsue Otong contends that Cuba is “mitad africana,” and pleads that Guillén receive his poetic verses, “mi ritmo, mi metro, mi rima.” What, then, do we make of this ode, of this “viaje,” and of these long historical and contemporary poetic crossings between Equatorial Guinea, the Hispanophone Caribbean, and their diasporas? What can a mapping of these relations illuminate?

Decolonizing Diasporas

Peoples do not live on exception.

Relation is not made up of things that are foreign but of shared knowledge.

—Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation

Decolonizing Diasporas makes a critical move toward engaging the relations between Equatorial Guinea, comprised of five islands and a small continental swathe, and the Latinx Caribbean islands of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic, through a study of their diasporic and exilic literary productions. Rather than an exhaustive linguistic, historical, or sociopolitical study, Decolonizing Diasporas is suggestive in its remapping of diasporic Afro- Atlantic literary and cultural aesthetics. Each chapter builds on a particular theme that emerges as a shared preoccupation within the analyzed works. In it, I critically engage eleven novels, a series of visual/sonic works, poetry, essays, and a short story. Through this undertaking, Decolonizing Diasporas engages topics such as the intimacies of colonial domination and erotic freedom practices; the act of faithful witnessing; the phenomena of dispossession, or what I call destierro; the possibilities of a reparation of the imagination; and visions of Black futurities as apocalypsos. In conceiving this project, my aim is to render legible what these texts offer to subjects who resist ongoing forms of colonialism, as intellectuals, as post/colonial subjects under coloniality, as organizers and activists, and as peoples who necessarily document oftenunacknowledged sets of histories. By studying diasporic Afro-Puerto Rican, Afro-Dominican, and Afro-Cuban literary texts and cultural productions in relation to those emerging from Equatorial Guinea and its diaspora, I track the relationship between Afro-Atlantic Hispanophone subjects. I argue that these multilingual and insurgent works push the boundaries of decolonial thought by offering radical perspectives from the underside of the Afro-diaspora.

This project of relationality across Afro-Atlantic Hispanophone diasporas is made possible through the work of decolonial thinkers and decolonial and women of color feminists, who have continually framed literature as a critical space in which to create coalitions and relations across difference, to imagine radical liberatory futurities, and to reimage the human. These thinkers, including Audre Lorde, Michelle Cliff, Sylvia Wynter, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Chela Sandoval, Vanessa Valdés, and Laura E. Pérez, take seriously the cultural productions of those rendered invisible by coloniality. As part of this tradition, I propose that we see the works of the Afro-Atlantic Hispanophone diaspora as archives of indictment and as liberatory discourses that fashion and imagine what I call “worlds/otherwise” (the subject of chapter 5). Decolonizing Diasporas maps decolonial poetics through a sustained engagement with the multiple perspectives, experiences, histories, and lived realities of different peoples living under various conditions of colonialism (including settler colonialism, coloniality, and manifold modes of domination and extraction) as well as the radical resistance and imaginations they use to counter these structures of oppression.

In using the term “Afro-Atlantic” I am necessarily hailing the term “the Black Atlantic,” which Paul Gilroy defines as a “rhizomorphic, fractal structure of the transcultural international formation.” What Gilroy coined “the Black Atlantic world” includes the “historical conjunction—the stereophony, bilingual, or bifocal cultural forms originated by, but no longer the exclusive property of, blacks dispersed with the structures of feeling, producing, communicating, and remembering that I have heuristically called the black Atlantic world.”* Gilroy urges cultural historians to use the Atlantic as an analytic beyond metaphor, and to consider it “one single, complex unit of analysis in this discussion of the modern world and use it to produce an explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective.”? The use of the term “Hispanophone” in relation to the Afro-Atlantic is not to demarcate solely Spanish/Castilian language cultural productions, but rather to engage the complexities within the field of global Hispanophone studies. In their introduction to the special issue on “Global Hispanophone Studies” of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Adolfo Campoy-Cubillo and Benita Sampedro Vizcaya argue that using the term “Hispanophone” is an “invitation to branch out beyond the traditional archives of Hispanism, engaging with some of the dispersed geographies, cultural and linguistic traditions . . . It is also a determination to break away from the overarching Iberian/Latin American binary and to embrace other communities, histories, experiences and repertoires.”* Throughout this book I use the term “Hispanophone” to signify the political and linguistic geographies of the Afro-Latinx and Equatoguinean diaspora in a way that is not restricted by linguistic borders, points of origin, or distant homelands. In fact, the examination of these Afro-Atlantic Hispanophone cultural productions in relation to one another complicates language practices because they are written in Spanish, English, and Spanglish as well as French, Yoruba, and various Indigenous languages such as Ndowe, Fang, and so on.

In engaging what has ostensibly been one of the most important concepts of the twentieth century, I am also calling attention to what M. Jacqui

Alexander calls “the Crossing,” which alludes to the told and untold histories of the Middle Passage and pushes us to consider the relations that emerge in the wake of these histories of modernity. The “Crossing” is likewise a pedagogy that disrupts the binaries inherent to modernity and “interrupt[s] inherited boundaries of geography, nation, episteme, and identity that distort vision [and] enable an understanding of the dialectics of history, enough to assist in navigating the terms of learning and the fundamentally pedagogic imperative at its heart: the imperative of making the world in which we live intelligible to ourselves and to each other.”*

In his landmark book Poetics of Relation, Édouard Glissant traces the possibilities of relationality, beginning with the Middle Passage and the endless crossings of the Atlantic. Enslavement, a “debasement more eternal than apocalypse,” is but the beginning of relations, and Glissant aptly centers the Caribbean as a site through which to examine the multiple and overlapping ways that modernity connects and disconnects peoples across the globe. For Glissant, the effects of the abyss—the ship, the ocean, and life at the “edges of a nonworld”—are intergenerational and shared experiences that “made us, the descendants, one people among others.” As such, he contends that “peoples do not live on exception. Relation is not made up of things that are foreign but of shared knowledge. This experience of the abyss can now be said to be the best element of exchange.”* Living in the chasm of the abyss and its aftermath requires ways of reckoning. For Glissant, poetry and poetics become a technology that bears witness to the known and unknown terrors that we live and share. Relations are thus political and require both a reckoning with the longue durée of our histories as well as a commitment to seeing relations and disjunctures across the Black Atlantic and across the world.

Throughout Decolonizing Diasporas, I use the term “Afro-Atlantic” rather than “Black Atlantic” as a way to call attention to how “Afro” as a prefix has been used throughout the Caribbean and Latin America to signal or claim afrodescendencia, or Afro-descendance. As Agustín Laó-Montes notes, “[“Afro”] has been used on the southern side of the American hemisphere since at least the early twentieth century,” and using this term would “allow us to analyze the differences and particularities, as well as the articulations and common ground of the manifold histories of the African diaspora in the Americas.”* Joseba Gabilondo argues that the term “Hispanic Atlantic” is a useful vector of analysis when considering historical and contemporary migrations to Spain from Latin America and Africa, as well as Spain's enormous economic and political investments in Latin America (second only to those of the United States). Gabilondo argues that this “two-way flow of capital and bodies across the Atlantic brings to the fore a host of political and historical problems that have not been fully addressed by either Latin Americanists or Hispanists.” This “underscores a new reading of modernity that goes back to the Spanish colonization of the Americas.”” I add the prefix

“Afro” to the term “Hispanic Atlantic” in order to more directly address the ways that Atlantic modernities are contingent upon forms of racialization and domination that are most often expressed through modes of anti-Blackness. Using the prefix “Afro” also allows for Africa to be central to the configurations of Atlantic circuits, especially in light of my focus on Caribbean and African islands and their diasporas.*

My emphasis on diasporic perspectives is also purposeful, as this concept helps to fracture national, regional, and racial cartographies.? Laó-Montes argues that theorizing Afro-diasporic perspectives “can allow us to rethink self, memory, culture, and power beyond the confines of the nation as a unit of analysis (and the dominant form of political community), and to develop a politics of decolonization beyond mere nationalism.”* This is not only true of Afro-Latinx Caribbean literature, but is also an important node within Equatoguinean literature. Marvin Lewis notes that after national independence and two successive dictatorships that saw the exile of over a third of the country's population, “the capital of Equatorial Guinean literature was now neither Santa Isabel (Malabo) nor Madrid, but rather the heart of every Guinean, whether in Spain, in France, or in Equatorial Guinea. Because from that moment on, a dislocation of the literary frontier is verified, and each author remains ‘wherever he best finds himself) from wherever he writes for his country.” 1!

While anthropologists were some of the earliest to discuss theories of diaspora, cultural and literary theorists have offered invaluable dimensions to diaspora studies. In fact, Kim Butler argues that “much of diaspora experience is unwritten: it is inscribed in the creative arts, material culture, and oral traditions.” As such, I start with the imaginary, looking at diasporic cultural works in relation to one another as a way to expand what we can know about diaspora studies. Diaspora is likewise a literary contact zone.” Building on the work of Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Marisel Moreno, I see diasporic literary and cultural productions that “reflect on the postcolonial and neocolonial cultural exchanges” and “address the continuities that can be observed between the literature” of homelands and diasporas.'* Samantha Pinto’s concept of ‘difficult diasporas’ dislocates conceptual notions of belonging, dispersal, and furtive returns, while subverting the notion of linearity and of being able to trace oneself or others back to points of origin or homelands.’ Diaspora as an analytic reveals structures, relationships, and phenomena that are instrumental to understanding modernity. Antonio Benítez-Rojo's foundational study argues: “If someone had to define, at once, the meta-archipelago’s historical novel and its folk narrative, using just two words, these would be, unquestionably: revealer (to reveal and re-veil in Spanish) violencia.”** I contend that these diasporic Afro-Atlantic Hispanophone literatures reveal not only violence, but also insurgent forms of resistance and the radical potential of Afro-futurities.

Relations 5 The Peripheral

Building on the works of Silvio Torres Saillant and Ramona Hernández, in Decolonizing Diasporas I argue that the aesthetic productions of these Hispanophone Afro-Atlantic subjects are “peripheral,” or better yet, “ peripheralized,” and are situated at the far extremes of already marginalized peoples, nations, and histories." I am particularly interested in how a sustained meditation on peripheralized literatures allows us to glimpse often-ignored sets of knowledges and experiences, and offers a radical remapping of diasporic Afro-Atlantic Hispanophone cultural productions. I conjure a “periphery” here to highlight the ways in which both Afro-Latinx and Afro-Hispanic literature and cultural productions remain at the edges, or the periphery, of already marginalized texts and experiences.

For example, if African literature is marginalized in relation to literary Eurocentricity, then Equatorial Guinea, surrounded by Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone nation-states and literature, stands alone as the only Spanish-language literature in sub-Saharan Africa. Although much Equatoguinean literature is produced in exile in Spain, these literary works are not necessarily considered part of the Spanish canon. When examined, Equatoguinean literature is often discussed as a reflection of a colonial past or as a signifier of the legacy of Spanish democracy. Benita Sampedro Vizcaya has argued that “it is particularly unsettling to note that, in the construction of (trans-)Atlantic paradigms from the Spanish and Latin American standpoints, Africa, and its multiple intersections with both Europe and the Americas, has frequently been absent. If and when Africa actually makes an appearance, it is often under the (useful but nonetheless limited) rubrics of migration, diaspora, or creolization.”** In these contexts, the literature, narratives, and experimental works produced by Equatoguineans represent the periphery of the margin. I believe that Latinx Caribbean literature is similarly positioned.