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Black Costa Rica. Pluricentrical Belonging in Afra-Costa Rican Poetry

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Black Costa Rica. Pluricentrical Belonging in Afra-Costa Rican Poetry The book youhold in your hands is an interdisciplinarystudy on diasporalit- eracy in Afro-Central America. An ex- ploration through variousimaginingsof times past, this study is concerned with howoxymoron, metonymy, and multilin- gualism deploypluricentrical belonging. Black Costa Rica By exploring theinterlockingofmultiple rootsthat have developed on account of routes, rhizomatic historical imagina- tions areunearthed heresoastoimag- ine an other Costa Rica. ABlack Costa Rica. BLACK COSTARICA sio va Pluricentrical Belonging in Afra-Costa Rican ola Ra Pa Poetry Paola Ravasio Würzburg University Press ISBN 978-3-95826-140-2 Paola Ravasio Black Costa Rica Paola Ravasio Black Costa Rica Pluricentrical Belonging in Afra-Costa Rican Poetry Dissertation, Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg Graduierten Schule für die Geisteswissenschaften, 2018 Gutachter: Prof. Dr. Brigitte Burrichter, Prof. Dr. Heike Raphael-Hernandez Impressum Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg Würzburg University Press Universitätsbibliothek Würzburg Am Hubland D-97074 Würzburg www.wup.uni-wuerzburg.de © 2020 Würzburg University Press Print on Demand Coverentwurf: Leonardo Ureña ISBN 978-3-95826-140-2 (print) ISBN 978-3-95826-141-9 (online) DOI 10.25972/WUP-978-3-95826-141-9 URN urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-202981 Except otherwise noted, this document – excluding the cover – is licensed under the Creative Commons License Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0 The cover page is licensed under the Creative Commons License Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 We all need histories that no history book can tell, but they are not in the classroom – not the history classrooms, anyway. They are in the lessons we learn at home, in poetry and childhood games, in what is left of history when we close the history books with their verifiable facts. Michel-Rolph Trouillout, Silencing the Past Meinem Papa Battista Ravasio zugeeignet. (Monza 10.08.1938 – San José 21.05.2015) Custu libru esti po Maria Bonaria, sa mamma mia. Content PREFACE ........................................................................................................................... 1 The Journey Begins ...................................................................................................... 3 “I’m Just a Girl” ...................................................................................................................................... 8 Ask Away… .......................................................................................................................................... 1 5 Structure of the Book . ....................................................................................................................... 1 6 The Scope of it All .............................................................................................................................. 1 9 P ART I – PROLEGOMENA ................................................................................................... 21 Towards a Definition of Historical Imagination ....................................................... 23 The Supranational, Outernational, and Infranational Historical Imagination ...... 27 The Supranational . ............................................................................................................................. 2 7 The Outernational .............................................................................................................................. 3 3 The Infranational ................................................................................................................................ 3 5 Pluricentrical Belonging ............................................................................................. 37 Against ‘Hybridity’ ............................................................................................................................. 4 2 Is it ‘Pluricentrical’ or ‘Acentrical’ Belonging? .......................................................................... 4 5 P ART II – BECOMING AFRO-COSTA RICAN . .......................................................................... 49 Imagining Costa Rica: “We are Different, We are White” ........................................ 51 Amnesias and Selections ................................................................................................................. 5 2 Inventing an Exceptional and Exemplary Costa Rica ............................................................ 5 5 Crafting Social Cohesion: Erasing Mestizaje . ............................................................................ 57 Dwelling in Displacement in Limón, Costa Rica ....................................................... 63 The Dialectics of Race and Nation ............................................................................. 75 Costa Ricans Speak Out… and Against . ..................................................................................... 7 9 Elite Racism . ................................................................................................................................... 7 9 Working-Class Racism . ............................................................................................................... 8 1 ii | CONTENT PART III – THE FOLLOWING IS A STORY OF THE PAST ............................................................ 87 Dlia McDonald – This Train is Bound to Glory .......................................................... 89 A Literary Introduction to Limón . ................................................................................................. 98 From Heaven to Hell ............................................................................................................... 100 “En vacaciones íbamos a Limón” . .............................................................................................. 103 The Eternal Recurrence .......................................................................................................... 112 Spatializing Time Past ................................................................................................................... 114 The Octopus . .............................................................................................................................. 116 Architecture of Time Past . ..................................................................................................... 122 And Thus… ....................................................................................................................................... 125 Shirley Campbell – The Memory of Skin: Traces of People Without History . ....... 127 The Skin-History Metonymy and the Marginalization of Blacks in Limón ................. 131 Let Us Discover Our Skin… and Our History .................................................................. 135 Are There Truly No Laws That Oppress Life? .................................................................. 140 The Advocation of an InfraHistory . ........................................................................................... 146 The Postmemory of a Nonhistory ...................................................................................... 148 De-Colonial Violence – “De frente” & “El encuentro” .................................................. 154 The Veil – “Nuestra Historia” & “Desde Siempre” . ......................................................... 158 The Advocation . ........................................................................................................................ 164 The Black-Woman-Mother Triad ............................................................................................... 165 The Disappearance .................................................................................................................. 166 “¡Mira mamá, un mono!” ........................................................................................................ 169 The Triad ...................................................................................................................................... 173 Traces of People with History ..................................................................................................... 180 Eulalia Bernard – The Telling of an InfraNational Linguistic History ................... 183 “Limón on the Raw”: The Sociolinguistic Background of Bernard’s Multilingualism ....................................................................................................... 190 Unequal Languages ................................................................................................................ 201 On the Path Towards Language ................................................................................................ 205 Linguistic Terrorism ................................................................................................................. 208 Political Poetics of Language ............................................................................................... 216 CONTENT | iii The Cacao People ............................................................................................................................ 218 We Cacao Man ........................................................................................................................... 220
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