ECHOES ACROSS THE ANTILLES

This exhibition Echoes Across the Antilles seeks to highlight writers that have enriched the literary and intellectual production in the Caribbean region (insular and continental) during the 20th, and 21st centuries. The exhibited books transform the Antilles into a place for imagination, drawing from the concept of “poetics of Relation” by the Martinican writer, Edouard Glissant. Against all essentialisms and binarism, Glissant’s poetics of Relation is a political act. It is an invitation to consider new conceptions of the world going beyond our relational system. By transiting through different places, genres, authors, epochs, and languages, this exhibition invites us to relink, relate, and question our notions about the written work, and the region. Just as “echoes” move, reverberate, and break silences, this book exhibition is a call to imagine the Antilles -and ourselves- through sensitivity.

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The exhibition compiles a very small selection of twenty-four books from the Latin American and Caribbean Collection at the University of Florida’s Smathers Library. Eighteen different territories are represented in this exhibition: Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, Aruba, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Barbados, Nicaragua, British Guyana, Belize, Suriname, Curaçao, Jamaica, Colombia. Works written in Spanish, Haitian Creole, English, French, and Papiamentu are here presented.

 

Maricarmen Torres Medina

Curator / MA Center for Latin American Studies