‘Barrabás came to us by sea’: Absence and Presence in Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits

In Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, framed by the same sentence – Barrabás came to us by sea –, her narrative style evidences the dialectics of absence and presence. The present is inexorably connected to the absent and the absent is paradoxically discernible in the present. This dialectics is evident in the novel’s presentation of Chile (Latin America), its treatment of the ‘invisibility’ of blacks, the virtual erasure of Indians, and the ‘disempowerment’ of women. In each of these instances, there is a significant interaction between presence and absence that is an important aspect of the novel’s intercultural structure. The character of Barrabás is especially important in the manner that it points to a conjunction of worlds – both the known and the unknown – and facilitates a widening of the magic sphere in The House of the Spirits

The reinvention of meaning: Cultural imaginaries and the life of the sign

My dissertation explores the role of memory and identity in the reinvention of meaning in three cultural-ideological zones: Africa and the Caribbean, Europe, and the Americas. Focusing on the sign as the axis of meaning and on the grounding of signs in distinctive cultural-ideological imaginaries, I argue that while the sign acquires its first life within specific cultures or ideologies, its added life is realized within a larger semiosphere or meaning-spectrum. The locus of meaning shifts through a process of reinvention in which the elastic nature of the sign is stretched or reconfigured via multiple cultural-ideological intersections in the motion of what I call the traveling sign. The idea of the traveling sign pivots on the fact that signs travel, both in their home societies and beyond, along the lines of difference often rooted in historical relations. In this motion, the market or economic relations is especially important because signs usually follow the market route. But the mobility of the sign, while suggestive of infinity or the infinitude of new meanings, is often limited or shaped by cultural-ideological perceptions. My study is thus hinged on how meaning is reinvented through \u27global\u27 contact and how it is restructured in the sphere of the imagination. My case studies are the works of Christopher Okigbo, Derek Walcott, James Joyce, Federico Garçia Lorca, William Faulkner, and Isabel Allende. My methodology is especially informed by the recognition of the importance of historical and socioeconomic relations in the motion of the traveling sign. In traversing the three cultural-ideological zones, primarily via literary examples, my exploration examines the historical structure of meaning behind and within selected literary examples; the associative links among these structures within approximate semiospheres mapped, differently, according to history or geography; the relation between these structures across semiospheres; and the correlation of past and present structures as historical antecedents and contemporary manifestations

Reflections. Are We Global Yet? Africa and the Future of Early Modern Studies

For the past twenty years, early modern scholars have called for more scholarly attention to people and places outside of Europe. An impressive increase in literary research on non-European texts has resulted, and I describe positive aspects of this trend, using the MLA International Bibliography database. However, research on African-language literatures has declined since 2003 or has continued to flatline at nothing. A radical antiracist solution is needed, for no field can succeed with Africa as a lacuna. I call on all early modern scholars, regardless of their language knowledge, to cite at least one early modern African-language text in their next publication. I describe five such in this article, a tiny sample of the thousands of written texts that Black Africans across the continent composed in African languages before 1830. Asking early modern scholars to embrace the uncomfortable practice of “token citation” will enable these texts to circulate in the realm of knowledge and further efforts to diversify and broaden the field