En el Vórtice cel Huracán. Reescrituras Oblicuas del Caribe Hispano en los Discursos Literarios de Virgilio Piñera y Aída Cartagena Portalatín

Abstract

An oblique reading of the European canon constitutes the discursive center for present day Caribbean literature. In doing this, authors question Eurocentric representational codes of Caribbean identity while they create their own discourses in "a certain way", that is, from a certain perspective and by means of hybrid appropriation and synchretization of the very models that feed their imagination. As this analysis purports to show, writers Virgilio Piñera (Cuba) and Aída Cartagena Portalatín (Dominican Republic), by their rereading of the canon, establish in their works hybrid dialogs between the European There and the Caribbean Here. In that line, among the canonical cultural signifiers that the authors adopt, they privilege the appropriation of Greek myths. Piñera does this in his theater piece Electra Garrigó, and Cartagena in her novel Escalera para Electra. In Piñera's work, the main devices utilized are humor, irony, and parody of the text by Euripides, obtained by the used of "choteo", a particular brand of Cuban parodic humor in the manner of Bakhtin's carnavalization. This technique is employed along with the use of heteroglossia, which is utilized by Cartagena as well in her novel. In her work, the Dominican author constructs a parallel and intertextual reading of the same play by the Greek dramatist from the positionality of a female subject. Although with different strategies and in different literary genres, Piñera and Cartagena structure their literary discourses with themes that reflect their cultural identities from the synchretism of difference and from the perspective of a Caribbean subject. This dissertation confirms the efficacy of the discursive strategies they utilize on taking the female subject and the family as the axis of their contesting, unofficial readings of the history and cultural identity of the Caribbean.