Photographs/Identity: Eduardo Lalo’s Insularism

• In Event: Textos híbridos: transmedialidad, materialidades y ensamblajes

Abstract

From Antonio Pedreira’s Insuralismo(1934) to Antonio Benítez Rojo’s The Repeating Island(1992), the ground for thinking Caribbean identity and specificity has been the central problematic. Indeed, at present, the tropes of the sea, the border and that of boundlessness continuously frame the question of identitarian foundations, or conversely work to disavow the possibility of the latter. In either case, the relation between the representation of cultural foundations and the purported Caribbean reality remains tied to a dialectic of anti-foundationalism and the desire for fixed identitarian boundaries. Drawing upon what Puerto Rican writer Eduardo Lalo in his 2002 book, Los países invisibles [The Invisble Countries], calls “tirania insularista (y Occidentalista),” to refer to the mechanisms by which already-established images of otherness are presently expounded, I argue that Lalo’s photographic novel, donde(2002), undermines both the gesture to represent the specificity of Puerto Rican identity and the move to claim an anti- or non-foundational stance on the matter.
My reading of Lalo’s text, Los países invisibles, and the photographs in donde shows that Lalo’s work generally concerns the notion of the image as excessive to identity and the attempt to represent a determinate reality. As Lalo positions his work against Puerto Rican insular discourses that have fixed the contours of Puerto Rican identity, his photographs challenge the notion of indexicality and mark the limit-point of representation and of what can be signified. At stake in Lalo’s work is the place of literature and photography against the backdrop of the tyranny of visual and cultural commodity.

Author

• Ana C Baez