Etnografía, literatura y proyectos nacionales en el Caribe insular hispánico

Abstract

In my dissertation, I explore the links between literature and ethnography in the Hispanic Caribbean during the last decades of the Spanish empire and the period of nascent cultural nationalism from the early 19th century to the first decades of the 20th century. While most of the studies on Caribbean ethnography focus on its connection with European scientific paradigms, my dissertation moves away from this predominant approach by addressing its clear continuities with the rhetoric of travel and costumbrista literatures of the 19th century. I argue that travel and costumbrista literatures and their visual traditions played a key role in the constitution of modern discourses on race, in the articulation of ethnography as a scientific domain and in developing identitarian narratives for the nations of the Hispanic Caribbean.

Even as empires used ethnographic practices to expand their political and commercial powers in their colonies, nationalist, cultural and literary projects in Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico were also shaped to a significant degree by ethnographic discourse. The combination of ethnography and literature, or what I call ethnographic literature, enabled local intellectuals to shape new models of social organization and imagine alternative communities and identities. Ethnographic literature became a central epistemological tool to formulate and critique a biopolitics of Antillean populations.

By discussing at length travel literature by authors such as Alexander Von Humboldt and Frederica Bremer and costumbristas sketches, fictions and lithographies by Cirilo Villaverde and Victor Patricio Landaluze, among others, I explore how these foreign and local observers organize a visual field vital to ethnography, draw the racial typologies which will predominate in the discipline and constitute the genealogy of the ethnographer. Their narratives turn out to be a hidden tropological and epistemological threshold for the 20th century academic field of ethnography.