Testing the Limits: Achy Obejas’s Badagry Diaspora and the Atlantic World (B)order

• In Event: Re-Membering Ourselves: Afro-Atlantic Praxes of Memory, Pleasure, and the Sacred

Abstract

At the turn of the millennium, a racialized memorializing era materialized globally yet unevenly across the contemporary Atlantic World: West Africa’s Atlantic heritage tourism industry flourished vis-à-vis the United States’ and Latin America’s relatively weaker federal representation of slavery and the Slave Trade’s effects. Considering the suppression of these histories within Hemispheric studies and the Latino/a Americas, what is the role of contested and dialectical space within counter-hegemonic Latina/o narratives? This paper presents the case of Cuban-American Achy Obejas’ queer novel Ruins (2009) as an example of Atlantic “textual memorialization” specifically, and the far-reaching diasporic limits of latinidad in general. While the novel confronts the effect of both Spanish coloniality and 19th century U.S. Imperialistic subjugation, it does so through the articulation of a metaphorical West African memorial within our hemispheric borders. Yet, informed by the politics of public memory in West Africa, the novel mirrors this problematic: the inspiration for this imagined space is a Tiffany lamp whose chromatic projections (a material representation of the commodity-driven capitalist culture of the United States) lead the protagonist to forge a strong, yet highly romanticized connection to the African continent. At the same time, the rescuing of the lamp’s “remains”—the ruins—metaphorically comment on approaches to a decolonized and relational history between Sub-Saharan Africa and Latinidad’s cultural history. The resulting narrative stages the desire of belonging against the limits of redemption, simultaneously driving latinidad into diasporic dimensions beyond the limits of Hemispheric studies.

Author

• Sarah M Quesada, University of Notre Dame