Caribbean Inhospitality

The Poetics of Strangers at Home

By Natalie Lauren Belisle

SERIES: Critical Caribbean Studies

Rutgers University Press

The Caribbean has a global reputation for extending unparalleled hospitality to foreign guests. Yet local citizens express feeling alienated from the Caribbean nations they call home. Here, Natalie Lauren Belisle probes the relationship between these incompatible narratives of Caribbean life. Departing from tourist-centered critiques of the Caribbean’s visitor economy, Belisle instead gives primacy to the political life of the Caribbean citizen-subject within a broader hospitality regime. Reading literary, cinematic, and digital texts that traverse the Spanish, Anglophone, and Francophone Caribbean, Belisle interprets citizens’ estrangement through misdirected political deliberation and demonstrates that inhospitality is institutionalized through the aesthetic, reproducing itself in the laws that condition belonging and membership in the nation/state. Ultimately, Caribbean Inhospitality recasts the decay of nation/state sovereignty in the postcolonial Caribbean within the contours of neoliberalism, international relations, and cosmopolitanism.

In her deeply perceptive, critically adroit study, Belisle reexamines the Caribbean’s longstanding image as a place of hospitality, arguing that the region is constituted as welcoming for the visitor even as its nations deny those conditions to their own citizens. Through a brilliant, broad-reaching analysis, she shows how this inhospitality registers as an aesthetic dimension, making visible forms of displacement that unsettle the meaning of home for Caribbean subjects. A key text for understanding the Caribbean’s paradoxical position in our current moment. Emily A. Maguire, author of Tropical Time Machines: Science Fiction in the Contemporary Hispanic Caribbean

By doing a critical reading of the dynamics of tourist economies and displacement, local vs. international, in literary, cultural, performative, and philosophical texts, Natalie Belisle offers an insightful look at the disputes between home, citizen, art, and space that define 'uninhabitable hospitality' in contemporary Caribbean societies. A tour de force and a great contribution to the study of agency and the redemptive power of art and the human in post-colonial and neoliberal Caribbean spaces. Jossianna Arroyo-Martínez, author of Caribes 2.0: New Media, Globalization and the Afterlives of Disaster

NATALIE LAUREN BELISLE is an assistant professor of Spanish and comparative literature at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. This is her first book.

Introduction: On the Aesthetics of Caribbean Inhospitality
1          Deliberative Misdirection: The Non-Sense of Caribbean Community in Annalee Davis’ Migrant Discourse and Ana Lydia Vega’s “Jamaica Farewell”
2          Disoriented Citizenship: Misreading Puerto Rico
3          Freelancing Personhood: Living of the Books in the Outer Spaces of Cuban Writing
4          Altered States: Bordering the Inhuman in René Philoctète’s Le peuple de terres mêlées and Pedro Cabiya’s Malas hierbas
Coda: Love beyond Sovereignty
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

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