Dystopian forms to destroy and rethink the Caribbean motif in two Cuban fictions of the 21st century

Abstract

This paper proposes to read Caribbean literature, and specifically 21-Century Cuban narratives, as living, open, ever-moving, multi-vectorial entities in continuous relation/feedback with the world, following the works of authors such as Ottmar Ette, Edouard Glissant, Antonio Benítez Rojo, and Nancy Calomarde. Drawing from these Caribbean scholars, we examine the matrixes, dislocations, tropes, and literary representations of the Cuban and the Caribbean in two recent dystopian fictions by Cubans Anisley Negrín and Jorge Enrique Lage, which choose to leave Havana as the epicenter of the trans-post-national narrative and become uncomfortable or difficult to assimilate into the canon and literary criticism of the island, because they never tire of questioning the binarisms, commonplaces, false transparencies, and schizophrenia of this multi-faceted, overflowing artifact, spread all over the world, which is, today, Cuban culture.