Language(s), branding and identity in the Greater Cuba: Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban

Abstract

The pervasive conceptual metaphors of bridges, borders and other in-between spaces –forming what we may call ‘the ontology of the hyphen’– have traditionally prevailed in the readings of the artistic production by the daughters of the Hispanophone Caribbean diaspora in the US. However, I maintain that the linguistic forms and discursive patterns evident in some of these texts are not suggestive of burden of linguistic identity or the state of being between languages and nations, but rather perform an aesthetics of multiplicity within their own right. Although written mostly in English, these works group together with a Hispanophone Caribbean literary tradition to fundamentally question traditional structuralist notions of language and identity, and Modern views of nationhood. In this article, I argue for a much-needed reconsideration of language and gender in the constructions of local, postnational, and global identities in the Gran Cuba. I explore the ways in which writers such as Cristina García (and Achy Obejas, among others) reinterpret language through practices of language crossing, thus creating a grancaribeña community of literary practice that contests the linguistic boundaries of US, US-Latina, US-Caribbean or Cuban discourses as traditionally defined. Through both their language branding and thematic components, these novels destabilize national imaginaries and cultural archives of both the US and the Caribbean island, problematizing the traditional silenced role of women, and women writers specifically, with a clear purpose of power acquisition.