Her roots and branches are protean in true Caribbean fashion. Indiana’s biography, like her music and fiction, is notoriously hard to summarize. 2 Although Achy Obejas’s beautiful translation of Papi introduced anglophone readers to Indiana’s fiction, English speakers are the poorer for their limited access to Indiana’s incredible catalog, of which Papi and Tentacle, her two best-known novels, are just a tiny glimpse into an artist who is not only one of the most important writers in the region but also a writer whose multimodal, intersectional, border-crossing work captures the essence of Caribbeanness. One of a rarefied group of Caribbean novelists who are also musicians, 1 Indiana, at only forty-two, is a veritable international electro-merengue star and author of five novels: La estrategia de Chochueca ( Chochueca’s Strategy 2000 ) Papi ( Daddy 2005) Nombres y animales ( Names and Animals 20 13) La mucama de Omicunlé and Hecho en Saturno ( Made in Saturn, 2018).
Achy Obejas, 2018)-she is well known in the hispanophone Caribbean and broader hemisphere as a performance artist, musician, and prolific novelist. Reading and hearing each other’s work in workshops, at colloquia, and in informal discussions have widened our perspectives from the still-siloed academic departments and disciplines in which we must work, allowing us to see the submarine unity, even the tentacles and sargassum that connect us in an expansive Caribbean.Īlthough Rita Indiana (born Rita Indiana Hernández Sánchez) is known in anglophone Caribbean circles mostly for her novels in English translation- Papi (trans. Founded by Charlotte Rogers (UVA) and Kaiama Glover (Barnard) in 2017, the network brings together junior and senior Caribbean scholars from Africana studies, American studies, architecture, English, history, Spanish, and religious studies, among others.
In this issue of sx salon, the discussion of the novel by three University of Virginia colleagues offers a glimpse of what the Greater Caribbean Studies Network at UVA has afforded us. The novel, which was published in English translation as Tentacle in 2018, is at once a work of dystopic science fiction (set in a future Dominican Republic where hi-tech surveillance and machinery allow the state to vaporize plague-ridden Haitians) climate fiction, or cli-fi (an already fatal 2024 tsunami washes biological weapons into the Caribbean Sea) speculative time travel (contact with a Santería deity sends characters back in time) and queer fiction (opening with a gender-transition surgery) as well as a meditation on contemporaneity in art, colonial history, race in the DR, and more. Rita Indiana’s La mucama de Omicunlé ( Omicunlé’s Maid), the first Spanish-language book to win the grand prize at the Caribbean Writer’s Association Awards (in 2017), is one such work. It is a treat when a new work of literature emerges that sparks enthusiasm in and critical engagement by scholars from multiple disciplines.
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