Performance and Personhood in Caribbean Literature: From Alexis to the Digital Age by Jeannine Murray-Román

Abstract

Reviewed by: Performance and Personhood in Caribbean Literature: From Alexis to the Digital Age by Jeannine Murray-Román Thelma B. Jiménez Anglada Jeannine Murray-Román. 2016. Performance and Personhood in Caribbean Literature: From Alexis to the Digital Age. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press. 244 pp. ISBN: 9780813938486. Performance and Personhood in Caribbean Literature: From Alexis to the Digital Age must be classified as an act of bravery. In this book Jeannine Murray-Román sets out to write a critique about performance in literature, two areas of inquiry—literary and performance studies—that are at constant odds with each other. While the study of literature sits, albeit uncomfortably, at the center of authoritative borders, performance studies thrive on defying disciplinary lines, and tends to resist easy descriptors. In this sense, it shares one of the main characteristics of its object of study: the ephemerality that is at the crux of performance. This transient nature of performance stands in stark contrast to the widely perceived immutability of literature. Performance studies decidedly shifts the sight away from what is traditionally considered to be the text and its discourse, and re-centers it on the endlessly shifting shapes of the body and its contours. Yet, this is precisely what Jeannine Murray-Román sets out to do in Performance and Personhood, where she seeks an answer to the following question: “Why is the representation of performance so pervasive in Caribbean literature?” (1). Unlike most examinations of contemporary Caribbean literature, Murray-Román’s is not restricted by either the language or the imagined geo-political divisions that partitioned the Antilles (and its study) as an aftermath of colonialism. Performance and Personhood would rather navigate the region freely: it transits with ease through the literature of Cuba, Martinique, Jamaica, Guyana, Guadeloupe, Haiti, and Puerto Rico, looking for common threads in their textual representations of performance. From this exploration, performance is situated as the harbinger of dissimilar and non-normative communities within which an undeniable humanity—or personhood—can be built. The formation of personhood in contemporary Caribbean literature emerges together with two other essential elements. According to Murray-Román, performance allows for the articulation of communities that transcend the limitations of everyday reality. With the lifting of these restrictions, temporality becomes altered and distended. Once the linearity of time is broken, historical pasts may be reimagined in narrations that disrupt entrenched versions of history. Projections towards [End Page 181] the future are also rendered transformed in this disjointed temporality. In other words, performance opens up a space in which possible futures may be either discarded or kept, according to their suitability. The main theoretical framework on which Murray-Román’s argument is built, like her objects of study, remains steadfastly in the Caribbean. To sustain its claims, Performance and Personhood relies heavily on Frantz Fanon’s notion of the dance circle. “Le cercle de la dance,” as Fanon calls it in Les damnés de la terre, constitutes a crucial locus for the study of the colonial world (57). His description of the circle is both a reminder of Fanon’s deep understanding of colonial subjectivity, and of the ways in which this category is conceptually ideal for Murray-Román’s analysis of embodied expressions in contemporary Caribbean literature. “La relaxation du colonisé,” writes Fanon, “c’est précisément cette orgie musculaire au cours de laquelle l’agressivité la plus aiguë, la violence la plus immediate se trouvent canalisées, transformées, escamotées. Le cercle de la danse est un cercle permissif. Il protège et autorise” (57–58).1 The dance circle is a finite site of protected freedom, where coloniality is suspended. Read through the Fanonian concept, the textual representations of embodied practices become intelligible in Performance and Personhood. Although at times the rationale behind this book’s structure is not as clear as it could have been, its five chapters do provide convincing evidence to Murray-Román’s claims. The organization of these chapters, says Murray-Román, responds to the ebbs and flows of the Fanonian circle. Unfortunately, what works well in the corporeality of performance, is not...