Date of Award

Spring 2026

Document Type

Open Access Thesis

Department

Languages, Literatures and Cultures

First Advisor

Jorge Camacho

Abstract

One of the broad questions this essay examines is how literature represents Caribbean cultural identity. This essay continues the conversation of how Caribbean cultures are formed, depicted, and defined in twentieth-century literature, specifically, in Alejo Carpentier’s Écue-Yamba-Ó and Maryse Condé’s Traversée de la mangrove. Although the novels are published within about fifty years from one another, both writers consider the question of what Caribbean cultural identity may look like. Carpentier’s Écue-Yamba-Ó follows the life of Menegildo, an Afro-Cuban man who works in the sugar plantations, who ends up killing a Haitian man. In his first novel, Carpentier writes from a distant yet observant narrator about Afro-Cuban cultures and its influences. On the other hand, Condé’s Traversée de la mangrove narrates from different characters who consider their interaction with the dead Francis Sancher, an outsider migrant in Guadeloupe. Written from different perspectives, both novels question what Caribbean identity might mean, whether in a Cuban or a Guadeloupean sense. Through theoretical frameworks of Geertz’s Interpretation of cultures and Glissant’s Poetic of Relation and Caribbean Discourse, this essay connects Carpentier’s first novel with Condé’s through its depiction of its Caribbean migrant, which reveals the complexity of attempting to define cultural identities within nationalized spaces. The representation of intermobility in the Caribbean, therefore, problematizing previous definitions of Caribbean identity as a “melting pot”, or like Fernando Ortiz describes as “transculturation”. Instead, this essay demonstrates how relational Caribbean identity can be. Carpentier’s distant narrator  acknowledges the tension between Afro-Cubans and Afro-Caribbean; meanwhile, Condé’s collective focus on the dead Caribbean Migrant allows for response from the community. Moreover, by analyzing Caribbean migrants in both novels, the conceptualization of Caribbean identity is no longer fixed on “transculturation”, rather their representations and presences in the Caribbean offers new possibility of meanings.

Rights

© 2026, Gisselle Lopez

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