Book Review: Culture, Nature, and the Other in Caribbean Literature
Stereotypes of Caribbean “nature” as lush and its people as exotic Others abound. For those who call the islands home, the region evokes more somber images that reflect the history of colonization and the environmental devastation that ensues. Close ecocritical readings of literary texts illuminate aspects of an encompassing nature inclusive of all Others within the Caribbean ecosphere. This book thus uses ecocritical lenses to examine Caribbean texts and provides a useful context to understand how Other(ed) natures have been scripted by bringing to light environmental concerns not patent in heteropatriarchal interpretations. It establishes patterns of coexistence and interdependence between the spiritual and palpable material worlds that surround the characters who populate Caribbean literature.
The following is an excerpt from the book review by the Journal of West Indian Literature:
“Culture, Nature, and the Other in Caribbean Literature appears to be the first ecological literary history of the francophone and Hispanophone Caribbean. In it, Mary Ann Gosser Esquilín employs an eco-feminist approach to analyse novels from Cuba, Haiti, Martinique, Guadaloupe, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic, dating from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century…Gosser Esquilín begins by invoking the stark contrast between the construction of the Caribbean qua tourist paradise and the region’s difficult past and present, marked by genocide, slavery, indenture, environmental destruction, and other linked forms of exploitation. These hard truths, Gosser Esquilín argues, constitute the ‘unlit’ side of tourism produced by the material and textual violence of colonialist heteropatriarchy that began when Columbus stumbled upon the New World…[and is] the author of the founding script of European modernity that legitimated the European slave trade and white supremacy, on the one hand, and the European land grab and exploitation of all non-human natural resources, on the other…One of the founding principles of Gosser Esquilín’s book is that Caribbean writers have long resisted and rescripted the Columbian vision of the New World…[and] highlighted the humanity and agency of Afro-Caribbean, Indigenous, and white female subjects, and exposed the interdependence of humans, other animals, and their environment. They portrayed Indigenous, Afro-Caribbean, and other non-European cosmologies with respect, as powerful and aligned. Through this framework, Gosser Esquilín uncovers a shared visions among radically different novels…A significant contribution.”
Culture, Nature, and the Other in Caribbean Literature: An Ecocritical Approach by Mary Ann Gosser Esquilín is part of the Cambria Latin American Literatures and Cultures Series headed by Román de la Campa, the Edwin B. and Lenore R. Williams Professor Emeritus of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania.
About the author: Mary Ann Gosser Esquilín is Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at Florida Atlantic University. She holds a PhD from Yale University, an MA from the Université de Provence I, France, and an AB from Bryn Mawr College. She has published in several journals, including Journal of Caribbean Literatures, Journal of Language and Sexuality, Centro, and Sargasso, and a chapter in the MLA’s Teaching the Literature of Climate Change.
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