Colonial Migration and Theoric Awakening

Abstract

The preceding lines, written by the revered Dominican poet Pedro Mir, a native of San Pedro de Macoris, a city known for its baseball players and rhapsodic wordsmiths, come from Countersong to Walt Whitman, a 1952 poem that converses intertextually with Song of Myself by the towering American poet. There, the Antillean voice, rooted in its unbelievable archipelago of sugar and alcohol, aware of the long regional history of infamy that renders the nations of the hemisphere subservient to the powerful colossus to the north, launches a reformulation of Whitman’s personal “I” as a collective “us” that encompasses the peoples of the Americas. As the foregoing proemium would suggest, Mir only proceeds to assemble his cultural and historical vision after locating accurately his point of departure, his origin, the specified site of his particular human experience. Similarly, we in the human sciences can, I believe, identify the theoretical orientations that inform our scholarship in terms of a recognition of the precise place of our provenance. The procedence The procedence of an Antillean person inescapably will bear the mark of a colonial condition, a legacy of migration to the imperial metropolis, and the precarious organization of knowledge born of an unequal rapport with the centers of power in the world system.

Yo, un hijo del Caribe precisamente antillano. Producto primitivo de una ingenua criatura borinquen, a y un obrero cubano, nacido justamente, y pobremente, en suelo quisqueyano. Recorrido de voces, lleno de pupilas que a traves de las islas se dilatan, vengo a hablarle a Walt Whitman, un cosmos, un hijo de Manhattan. (I, a son of the Caribbean Antillean to be exact. The raw product of a simple Puerto Rican girl and a Cuban worker, born precisely, and poor, on Quisqueyan soil. Overflowing with voices full eyes wide open throughout the islands, I have come to speak to Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son.) Pedro Mir [1993:47]