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American Mediterraneans: A Study in Geography, History, and Race

2023; Penn State University Press; Volume: 60; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/complitstudies.60.4.0789

1528-4212

Charlotte Rogers,

Cuban History and Society

“Le monde entier s’archipélise” Édouard Glissant writes in Treatise on the Whole-World (“The whole world is becoming an archipelago,” my translation. Traité du Tout-Monde. Paris: Gallimard, 1997, 164). As sea levels rise, this late-twentieth-century pronouncement is taking on a literal significance to match its conceptual import—what is the coast of southern Louisiana, for example, if not a growing chain of islands atop an increasingly submerged continental shelf? Recent literary and historical studies of the hemispheric Americas are expanding to explore the porous, shifting membrane between the continental and the insular in a variety of productive ways. Works such as Archipelagic American Studies edited by Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Stephens (Duke University Press, 2017), The Nineteenth Century and the Latino Continuum: Literature, Translation and Historiography by Carmen Lamas (Oxford University Press, 2021), Ada Ferrer’s Cuba: An American History (Scribner, 2022), and the volumes in the Liverpool University Press series American Tropics: Towards a Literary Geography, edited by Maria Cristina Fumagalli, Peter Hulme, Jak Peake, Owen Robinson, and Lesley Wylie, take transnational, multilingual, and geographically expansive comparative approaches to the region. Into this blossoming and heterogeneous field comes Susan Gillman’s American Mediterraneans: A Study of Geography, History, and Race, a brief yet wide-ranging study that traces the peripatetic and uneven history of the titular concept first articulated by Alexander von Humboldt in his Relation historique, part of the renowned 30-volume series Voyage aux régions équinoxales du noveau continent, whose publication began in 1805. The questions that animate Gillman’s book are why writers, geographers, artists, and scholars compared the land- and waterscapes of the Americas to the Mediterranean and how these comparisons inform and are informed by matters of race. She calls the pattern “a kind of foundational and repeating comparison at the heart of writing the Americas” (xi), one she examines in detail in an “unruly archive” (35) that includes nineteenth-century maps and geographical treatises, 1890s California visual culture, place-names, and popular novels and 1940s Caribbean and US Gulf Coast literary and political writings.Taking Humboldt as her starting point, Gillman defines the correlations of diverse places and cultures of the Americas to those of the Mediterranean as a method of “conjectural comparativism” (vx) that is distinct from the translatio imperii orientation of European colonizers because it is multidirectional, speculative, and translational, offering the possibility of connectivity rather than hierarchy across peoples, regions, and languages. As Gillman recognizes, Humboldt is not the only figure to propose this kind of rhizomatic thinking that ultimately frees the Americas from center-periphery binarisms: Glissant’s poetics of relation and Fernando Ortiz’s transculturation both receive consideration, though José Vasconcelos’s La raza cósmica (1925, “The Cosmic Race”) and Antonio Benítez Rojo’s La isla que se repite (1989, The Repeating Island) are notable in their absence. The book is largely concerned with the paratextuality of the term “American Mediterranean” and its implications, focusing on translations, prefaces, prologues, footnotes, adaptations, and reception history, all centered on the amorphous afterlives of Humboldt’s approach. Given the centrality of the Genettian paratext to Gillman’s project, it is fitting that this book features a “Preface,” an “Introduction,” and a Part I dedicated to setting up theoretical stakes and providing historical context before self-reflexively zooming in and out on particular figures, moments, and works in Parts II, III, and IV. While this structure leads to an abundance of forward gesturing and occasional repetition, it does stitch together an innovative network of texts, many of whose authors use the phrase “American Mediterranean” “sparingly” or not at all (22). How their small-m mediterraneanizing approach intersects with the process of racialization in the Americas is the shifting, fugitive centerpiece of the work.Part II immerses the reader in the world of nineteenth-century scholars, historians, and geographers Jedidiah Morse, Élisée Reclus, Ellen Churchill Semple, and Frederick Jackson Turner. Gillman traces how they grapple, not always successfully, with geographic determinism as part of the “racial baggage that comes with Humboldt” (14). For Gillman, Semple’s Humboldtian focus on the future of the American Pacific and her problematic reputation, based in the racializing dimensions of her environmental determinism, illustrate the complexity as well as the “limits of the approach” of the disjunctive comparative thinking under consideration in American Mediterraneans.Part III takes up this notion of a Pacific Mediterranean in 1890s tourism, popular culture, place-names, and architecture that touted California as “Our Italy” with a climate free from “tropical malaria” while flattening out the distinctions between Spanish, Mexican, and Indigenous heritage and culture (68). Jumping from California to Cuba, Gillman also revisits her earlier article-length discussions of Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884), José Martí’s translation of that work, and Roberto Fernández Retamar’s essay on it, in which she credits Martí with gesturing toward a “multidirectional trans-American genealogy” in calling Ramona “nuestra novela” before he published his best-known essay “Nuestra América” in 1891 (American Mediterraneans 92; “Otra Vez Caliban/Encore Caliban: Adaptation, Translation, Americas Studies,” American Literary History 20, no. 1/2, Twenty Years of American Literary History: The Anniversary Volume (Spring-Summer, 2008),187–209). She expands her focus on Ramona to encompass how real estate developer Abbott Kinney, famed for promoting southern California as the “Venice of America,” served as Jackson’s unacknowledged translator from Spanish to English in their research and co-authorship of the 1883 Report on the Conditions and Needs of the Mission Indians, much of whose import was lost on audiences of the wildly popular Ramona novel.The discussion of Spanish-language materials in this book is marred by errors and omissions that indicate Gillman relies on translations rather than original source materials for her analyses. It is ironic that American Mediterraneans replicates the “inequality of languages” the author rightly observes in earlier literature from across the hemisphere (109). In a book that often emphasizes “unrecognized translations and invisible translators” (72), Gillman gives credit where it is due by thanking her former graduate student, now Professor David Luis-Brown, for translating Fernández Retamar’s essay on Martí’s Ramona from Spanish to English for her. In the rest of the book, she cites from Spanish-language works in their published English translations and occasionally includes the original text parenthetically. However, Gillman stumbles over the use of double last names in Spanish: Fernández Retamar appears in the index under Retamar rather than Fernández Retamar. In a section dedicated to Spanish ecological terminology, “ciénagas” (rendered without the accent mark) is mistranslated as “springs” when it actually means “swamps” (62). On the other hand, Gilman cites accurately from the French versions of Humboldt’s writings. These telling infelicities detract from the scholarly authority of this slim volume and raise questions of how contemporary American Studies may still suffer from its own inequality of languages.The detrimental consequences of reading only or predominately in translation are most evident in Part IV, which takes on several textual networks based in the Greater Caribbean during the 1930s and 1940s. In a section that brings together Alejo Carpentier, W. E. B. Du Bois, and C. L. R. James, Gillman calls Carpentier “the originator of ‘el Mediterráneo Caribe,’ his Mediterranean of the West, coined in the famous preface to his 1949 El reino de este mundo […] Carpentier is known for his poética del Mediterráneo Caribe, so called in homage to this invented oceanic name, used once, paratextually, in the El reino prologue” (121). Gillman goes on to examine Carpentier’s prologue’s “unusually ephemeral textual history of appearing and disappearing” (121–2). She notes that it was re-published in a revised and expanded form in Spanish in a 1967 compilation of Carpentier’s essays and translated into English only in 1995; at the same time, some versions of El reino de este mundo, both in the original and in English translation were published without the prologue. Gillman calls this history “a story of paratexts within paratexts” typical of the “American Mediterranean locators” (122).This extended discussion contains multiple inaccuracies. Carpentier is not particularly known for coining the phrase “poética del Mediterráneo Caribe,” nor did that phrase appear in the original prologue to El reino de este mundo in 1949. Moreover, the prologue to Reino was first published as an essay titled “De lo real maravilloso americano” on April 18, 1948, in Carpentier’s “Letra y Solfa” column in the newspaper El Nacional in Caracas, a fact first brought to light by Roberto González Echevarría in the 1970s (“Isla a su vuelo fugutivo,” Revista Iberoamericana 86, (enero-marzo), 1974). Carpentier is best known for establishing that phrase, “lo real maravilloso americano” (the American marvelous real), as a precursor to magical realism, a term first used in German by Franz Roh in 1925 to describe art and much later applied to works by Caribbean and Latin American authors like Gabriel García Márquez. The section of Reino’s prologue containing the expression “poética del Mediterráneo Caribe” was only added for the 1967 version in the edited collection Tientos y diferencias; it was that version that was later translated into English in 1995.This would be a simple bibliographical quibble for literary historiographers, if it were not for the fact that Gillman has missed Carpentier’s and, more broadly, Latin American authors’ much deeper textual engagements with Humboldt and other nineteenth-century travelers. In his landmark Myth and Archive: A theory of Latin American narrative (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), González Echevarría describes how the scientific texts of Humboldt and others had a “revolutionary impact on Latin American societies” (102) that is evident in later literature, including when the character Melquíades mentions Humboldt by name in Cien años de soledad (1967, One Hundred Years of Solitude). Carpentier’s more than 3,000 essays and newspaper articles, few of which have been translated into English, reveal that he was an assiduous reader of Humboldt. In a July 31, 1956, article in Venezuela’s newspaper El Nacional called “Una página de Humboldt” (“A page from Humboldt,” n.p.), Carpentier, who had a Spanish translation of the Relation historique in his home in Caracas, specifically cites Humboldt’s concept of a Caribbean Mediterranean: Desde que el perfeccionamiento del arte del navegante y la actividad creciente de los pueblos comerciantes han acercado las costas de los dos continentes; desde que La Habana, Rio de Janeiro y el Senegal nos parecen apenas menos distantes que Cádiz, Esmirna y los puertos del Báltico, vacila uno en llamar la atención del lector sobre el trayecto comprendido entre las costas de Caracas y la Isla de Cuba. El Mar de las Antillas es como la cuenca del Mediterráneo; y si consigno aquí algunas observaciones sacadas de mi diario náutico, es por no perder el hilo de la relación de mis viajes.(Since the improvement of the art of navigation, and the increasing activity of commercial nations, have drawn the coasts of the two continents nearer to each other; since the Havannah [sic], Rio de Janeiro, and Senegal scarcely appear to us more distant that Cadiz, Smyrna, and the ports of the Baltic, we hesitate in calling the attention of the reader to a passage from the coast of Caraccas [sic] to the island of Cuba. The Caribbean Sea is like the basin of the Mediterranean; and if I here note some observations drawn from my nautical journal, it is that I may not lose the thread of my narrative.)(Von Humboldt, Alexander, and Aimé Bonpland. Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, during the Years 1799–1804. Translated by Helen Maria Williams, 6. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Book X, Chapter XXVII, 801–2.)Carpentier goes on to liken Humboldt’s assessment of progress in nineteenth-century navigation to the boom in aviation occurring in Latin America in the 1950s, both of which dramatically diminished travel times between islands and continents. Humboldt was therefore at the forefront of Carpentier’s mind during the 1950s, and especially while he was writing Los pasos perdidos, (1953, The Lost Steps), a novel that recounts a Latin American intellectual’s journey through the tropical forests of South America. Los pasos perdidos seeks to retrace the lost steps back to and beyond a Humboldtian era of exploration even as oil drilling was encroaching into the Venezuelan plains and plane travel was shortening travel times throughout the hemisphere and to Europe. To my mind, Carpentier’s mobilization of Humboldt and the Caribbean Mediterranean is not so much about failed revolutions (the case Gillman makes for C. L. R. James and others), but rather about their shared interest in how the ecology and cultural traditions of the Americas could enrich their writings at distinct historical moments when colonization and resource extraction were profoundly changing the hemisphere.Overall, the admirable breadth of this book exceeds its depth. The focus on paratexts, which in Gillman’s skillful writing trace fascinating irregular trajectories, nonetheless makes the engagement with the substance of some of the literary works themselves and their accompanying scholarship a present absence. It is my hope that more hemispheric American studies by scholars well-versed in Indigenous as well as the colonial languages of the region will emerge to fill in the gaps.