Book Reviews

Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann. Writing the Caribbean in Magazine Time. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2021. 216p. Paper, $29.95 (ISBN: 9781978822429).

In this book, Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann traces the way literary magazines in the middle of the twentieth century created different senses of geographical belonging and affiliation for their readers. She explores how these journals created relations to locality and elsewhere that betrayed their desires for specific kin relationships. Seligmann accomplishes her ultimate goal of mapping polycentric networks of infrastructure, ideas, and literature for us that are worthy of study in their own right, without reference to the global centers of literary production where capital fuels larger infrastructures that we are constantly in danger of confusing for value.

At the center of the book is the concept of “location writing.” In chapter 3, “Gaceta del Caribe v. Orígenes in Cuba: Black Aesthetics as Battleground,” Seligmann focuses on the cultural combat between these two magazines. The former wants to work in close alignment with Black culture, which it rightly sees as closer to the Cuban reality. As Seligmann writes, “the Caribbean location enunciated by Gaceta del Caribe functioned strategically to covertly orient the national literary canon and the Communist Party in Cuba away from a Eurocentrist orientation toward the politics and aesthetics located in Black popular culture.” In other words, the title of the journal, its entries, and its constant geo-cultural references point to the Caribbean instead of Europe, doubling down on the relation to an Afro-descendant base. The latter, on the other hand, wants to look toward Europe, minoritizing the literature that finds kinship with the Black popular culture of its own surroundings. The journal does this mostly through an overvaluing of rarified language that points inward to a whitened refinement of the spirit, and outward to the European literary traditions of the time, overtly desiring to be recognized by them. Origenes, Seligmann shows, participates in the erasure of race and geographic affiliation to an actual Caribbean reality, precisely because this is the quintessential universalist move that we associate now with Eurocentrism and European literary and philosophical traditions. In this sense, Origenes does location writing by decentering its own location. In their opposing strategies, these two adversary magazines write into being a geographical imaginary that determines their literary output. They write or erase location, and those locations and erasures drive their writing in turn.

These world-building and kin-building strategies are masterfully excavated in the other chapters as well, each looking at a different language tradition, with the last chapter returning to the polycentric whole. In each of the chapters, as she does in the third, Seligmann reads both the whole journal and selected entries to gather her evidence. In chapter 1, she sets the methodological stakes for location writing, arguing that we should read the dominant trend in this period to be the move toward a pan-Caribbean identity, as Gaceta would have it, not Origenes. I was persuaded by this but was left wondering if studying other journals of the period, exhaustively going through the wider Caribbean, would yield a more mixed result. That’s work that remains to be done, and (in full disclosure) Dr. Seligmann and I are planning a digital archive of Caribbean literary and cultural magazines of the twentieth century that may help us answer that very question, among others. Surely the methodologies she lays out in this book will comprise our main toolkit. That said, Seligmann is always careful to point out how location writing of a Pan-Caribbean, decolonial affiliation will always be “incomplete,” and she is, of course, right.

In chapter 2, Seligmann looks at Tropiques, a journal founded in Martinique by poet Aimé Césaire, cultural critic Suzanne Césaire, and philosopher René Ménil in 1941, with a five-year run that would come to have an outsize influence that reaches our own time. This chapter delineates the first concrete example of “location writing” in action oriented toward a Pan-Caribbean identity, and imagined as a decolonial cultural project. Despite this orientation—and opposed to Gaceta and more in line with Origenes—Tropiques still imagines itself in a relationship with Europe and European traditions, even if contestatory. This analysis aligns with the explicit desire of the editors to join a Universal through an uplifting of their Particular circumstances. This Universal is not to be confused with the racist, exclusive Universal of European humanism, as Seligmann elegantly suggests, but is grounded instead in a reimagined Universal that already has room for the particularities of the Caribbean. This is location writing at its best. This is also the chapter where Seligmann introduces the centrality of infrastructural conditions in making, unmaking, or limiting the possibilities of location writing.

For me, reading this book as a former Digital Scholarship Librarian, and for the readers of this journal, Seligmann’s analysis of the role of publishing infrastructure—in particular the relatively feeble one of the Caribbean compared to centers of capital—opens up valuable avenues for debates about our collection practices and the networks implied by our growing digital practices. Her analysis connects the production of literature, beyond the simple material realities of print literary magazines, to the very concept these magazines have of themselves, the literature in their pages, and their audiences. In her book, publishing infrastructure is not an invisible and neutral container for content, but a force that actively shapes it. Seligmann captures this most concisely in her discussion of the journal Bim from its humble Barbadian origins to its status as a broad-based anglophone Caribbean journal: “I consider the infrastructural capacity of a magazine to generate literature to be shaped by the set of possible relations it may establish to other forms of literary infrastructure.”

In other words, these literary magazines cannot be understood fully until we place them in relation to the range of actual and relevant infrastructures they imply. If Origenes adopts a Eurocentric tack, it does so in relationship to European infrastructure. If Bim becomes West Indian, it does so in relation to the specifics of cross-Caribbean infrastructures. This astonishing insight opens the book to a librarian reading, especially for those libraries that see themselves today as the architects of a hybrid—digital and analog—cultural and historical record.

While Seligmann does not address libraries or archives directly in her discussion of infrastructural relations, she does provide useful concepts for us to carry on the conversation as stewards of one of the central infrastructures of world literature. These concepts emerge most clearly in chapter 5, when Seligmann departs from her “slow reading” of specific journals, turning to cartography to elucidate the location-making of the journals. Through a series of maps and careful analysis, she teases out three axes for cartographic location-making that can help us imagine literature that is not compelled to gravitate toward the centers of capital. These concepts are “authorship, circulation, and influence,” and Seligmann designs provocative maps from these to help us visualize the geographic imaginaries and realities at play in her book. For us, these three concepts serve as an invitation to imagine the many more axes that will help us be better partners, and perhaps even co-stewards, of these polycentric literatures around the world—always responsive to the idea that the moves we make will have a role to play in the future cultures that will matter to us.—Alex Gil, Yale University