This essay examines the aesthetics and politics of one of the key figures in the emergence of the Caribbean anti-imperial imaginary in the nineteenth century: the Afro–Puerto Rican activist Ramón Emeterio Betances (1827–98). Through a critical interpretation of Les deux Indiens (1857), a romantic novella about the conquest of Puerto Rico, and “A Cuba Libre” (1871), a biographical essay about Haiti’s first president, Alexandre Pétion, the author explores Betances’s vision of Caribbean unity and its connections to race, gender, republicanism, and decolonization.
Ramón Emeterio Betances, Puerto Rico, Caribbean, decolonization, anticolonialism, Caribbean literature
Copyright © 2020 by Small Axe, Inc.
2020
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