Carpentier tightly crafted and controlled the content and form of his works as well as his own official biography to fit the needs of the Cold War intellectual climate and publishing world. After his death in 1980, attention turned to other Cuban writers such as José Lezama Lima and Severo Sarduy, who had been ostracized in Cuba for their homosexuality and neobaroque writing. But over the last decades, Carpentier’s works have seen a renaissance amongst scholars invested in postcolonialism, the environmental humanities, and new paradigms of world literature. This panel will present a new critical assessment of Carpentier, building on current discussions of world literature in the context of the Global South.
Ingrid Robyn’s “Antillean Surrealism. The Marvelous in José Lezama Lima and Carpentier” will argue that Carpentier’s concept of the real marvelous was inspired both by the surrealist idea of the marvelous, and by local discussions on poetry and the nature of the image. The author traces this trajectory by comparing Carpentier’s work to that of José Lezama Lima and his Orígenes group of poets in Havana in the 1940s. She further compares the aesthetics of the marvelous with the modernist poetics of T.S. Eliot and others, who appeared in translation in Orígenes. Her thesis is that Carpentier’s real marvelous was from the beginning a transnational concept, launched from Cuba, but informed and adapted from a confluence of ideas.
Charlotte Rogers’s paper on “Carpentier’s American Tropics: Ecological World-Building as World Literature” will study the middle phase of Carpentier’s career, when he made his mark as a writer of the Latin American “real marvelous.” Rogers studies the innovative depictions of Latin American and Caribbean ecologies in his novels as well as in his chronicles and essays. In The Kingdom of this World, she argues, Carpentier draws on Afro-Caribbean belief systems to present the flora and fauna of the Américas as a rich source of decolonizing revolutionary power. In the later novel Los pasos perdidos, Carpentier grapples with the effects of extractivism on the South American landscape, which Rogers interprets as a turning point in the author’s career and his conceptualization of the role of Latin American nature in the context of world literature. Drawing on contemporary theories from the environmental humanities, Rogers will address questions of human and more-than-human world-building, unruly New World ecologies, and environmental degradation in Carpentier’s work.
Anke Birkenmaier’s paper on “Carpentier’s Auto-Fiction” in turn will explore Carpentier’s late fiction and posthumous memoirs. She proposes to read his late novels and personal writing as modalities of auto-fiction attuned to evolving discussions on the relationship between literature and Cuban revolutionary culture during the Cold War. Birkenmaier will argue that the crafting of Carpentier’s “official” biography, alongside his engagement, in his fiction, with José Lezama Lima and Severo Sarduy’s neobaroque aesthetics, contributed to his promotion of a “revolutionary world literature” that reflected a narrowing sense of Cuban national identity and yet a critical probing into a Global South history and aesthetics.
Our discussant Sarah Quesada has extensively written about Global South solidarities in her recent book on The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature (2022) where she questions the often Eurocentric dynamics of world literature, advancing a “Latin-African axis” of works referencing each other across the Atlantic. She is well poised to comment on Carpentier’s exploration of the Global South in his novels, his innovative approach to nature, and the reclaiming of a postcolonial Baroque in his later works and will open up the discussion towards the literary and theoretical stakes of writing world literature from the margins.