Inventions of Caliban: Culture, Humanism, and Posoccidentalismo in Roberto Fernández Retamar

• Main Author: Carlos Aguirre Aguirre
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: University Library System, University of Pittsburgh 2020-08-01
• Series: Catedral Tomada: Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana
• Subjects: caliban; humanismo; différance; posoccidentalismo; cultura
• Online Access: http://catedraltomada.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/catedraltomada/article/view/424

The goal of this research is to analyze the different critical dimensions of the writing of Roberto Fernández Retamar. We are guided by the hypothesis that in the anti-colonial texts of the Cuban poet, one intuits a heterogeneous and non-essentialist reading of the Latin-American culture, which is embedded with the elaboration of a metaphoric concept of Caliban, able to disorganize the cultural dichotomies of the colonial modernity. In the first part, we verified how the particularity of “Caliban” consists in his capacity of resisting any cultural derivation and unilateral writing, being related with what Jacques Derrida defines as différence. Secondly, we reflect on the humanism developed by Fernández Retamar with the well-known trope: the anticolonial humanism conceived from a relationship of aggressiveness between the “own” and the “other”. Finally, we analyzed the impact of the notion “posoccidentalismo” suggested by the Cuban in his criticism of the Latin-American post colonialism. We agree with Caliban; a symbol is not an authority of the absolute. On the contrary, it is a tool that wants to undo scriptural and epistemic modes offered by the western culture, and that takes form, within the work of Fernández Retamar, in an anticolonial and post western humanism, which is still budding.