Caribbean Inhospitality

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.

"In her deeply perceptive, critically adroit study, Belisle reexamines the Caribbean’s long-standing 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 versus 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 postcolonial and neoliberal Caribbean spaces." - Jossianna Arroyo-Martínez (author of Caribes 2.0: New Media, Globalization, and the Afterlives of Disaster)

• Introduction: On the Aesthetics of Caribbean Inhospitality1          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 Rico3          Freelancing Personhood: Living of the Books in the Outer Spaces of Cuban Writing4          Altered States: Bordering the Inhuman in RenÉ PhiloctÈte’s Le peuple de terres mÊlÉes and Pedro Cabiya’s Malas hierbasCoda: Love beyond SovereigntyAcknowledgmentsNotesIndexIntroduction: In the World, Not of It: On the Aesthetic of Caribbean Inhospitality 11 Deliberative Misdirection: The Non-Sense of Caribbean Community in Annalee Davis’s Migrant and Ana Lydia Vega’s “Jamaica Farewell” 232 Disoriented Citizenship: Misreading Puerto Rico in the Uncosmopolitan Elsewhere 513 Freelance Personhood: Living Off the Books in the Outer Spaces of Cuban Writing 794 Altered States: Bordering the Inhuman in RenÉ PhiloctÈte’s Le Peuple des terres mÊlÉes and Pedro Cabiya’s Malas hierbas 112Coda: Loving Beyond (Sovereignty) 143Acknowledgments 147Notes 151Index 000