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.
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
Introduction: In the World, Not of It: On the Aesthetic of Caribbean Inhospitality 1
1 Deliberative Misdirection: The Non-Sense of Caribbean Community in Annalee Davis’s Migrant and Ana Lydia Vega’s “Jamaica Farewell” 23
2 Disoriented Citizenship: Misreading Puerto Rico in the Uncosmopolitan Elsewhere 51
3 Freelance Personhood: Living Off the Books in the Outer Spaces of Cuban Writing 79
4 Altered States: Bordering the Inhuman in René Philoctète’s Le Peuple des terres mêlées and Pedro Cabiya’s Malas hierbas 112
Coda: Loving Beyond (Sovereignty) 143
Acknowledgments 147
Notes 151
Index 000
