Inter-American approximations: Roberto Fernández Retamar, Frantz Fanon, and Paule Marshall

• Autor(a) principal: Coser, Stelamaris
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: spa
• Título da fonte: REVELL : Revista de Estudos Literários da UEMS
• Texto Completo: https://periodicosonline.uems.br/index.php/REV/article/view/7275
• topic: Caliban; “América mestiza”; Black; “Extended Caribbean”; Disalienation.; Caliban; América mestiça; negro; grande caribe; desalienação

Roberto Fernández Retamar´s “Caliban” (1971) expresses Cuban and Latin-American ideals in the struggle for freedom, asserting “nuestra América mestiza” (MARTÍ, 1891) and its power to react against the imperialism of old and new colonizers. In the fiction of U.S. writer Paule Marshall, however, Caliban is a black male character who has been disfigured and dehumanized by the colonization processes in Brazil, apparently reverberating ideas expressed by Frantz Fanon in Black skin, white masks (1952), whose original title was "An essay for the disalienation of Blacks”. Thus I bring together writers and texts that have approached America from different standpoints in the “Extended Caribbean” described by Immanuel Wallerstein, in a map reconfigured to include from New York to Rio de Janeiro, the city reinvented by Marshall in her novella “Brazil” (1961). Fanon´s early death occurred in the same year that “Brazil” was published, and ten years before “Caliban”. Crisscrossing dates, geographies and histories, languages and texts, this article pays tribute to Fernández Retamar and also to Marshall and Fanon, three remarkable names of a pioneering generation.