Escritura afropuertorriqueña y modernidad

Santiago-Díaz’s monograph on Afro-Puerto Rican, Vieques writer Carmelo Rodríguez Torres, the most sophisticated literary analysis of race, diaspora, modernity, and imperialism I have read in a while, documents how the ellipsis has been at the center of the literature produced in Vieques’ unique neocolonial conditions. This is certainly a partial assessment, framed by my own limits, focus, and preferences, but it does suggest that the best works in the field have tended to combine social and rhetorical questions in dynamic, innovative ways. In mapping the relations between real and symbolic dimensions, they have also tended to share a local character, an object-driven embeddedness that makes some earlier—and current—debates on “Latin America” appear a bit byzantine and unfruitful.  

—Idelber Avelar, Tulane University