Rhythms of Locality. A Travel through Caribbean Performances and Literature

Abstract

The paper aims to give an insight on various concepts created and developed within the Caribbean literary context, in order to find some strategic elements capable of allowing us reframe the idea and meaning of locality. The necessity of such an operation lies in the urgency of rethinking the political dimension of locality due to its reactionary and repressive use by alt-right and fascist movements, in particular in Europe and the US. In this vein, concepts such as “polyrhythm”, “metaarchipelago” (Benítez Rojo), “tidalectics” (Brathwaite), “poetics of relation”, “creolization”, “transnation” and “commonplace” (Glissant), become of strategic use as a way of opening up the idea of locality, which we aim to conceive precisely as a kind of social openness. Beside this conceptual reframing of locality, developed through the analysis of Benítez Rojo and Kamau Brathwaite’s rhythmical concepts, the reader can find, on the one hand, the concept of performance as the very engine of such a reframing, and, on the other end, an attempt to show how the concepts we analyse are deeply intertwined with those of Deleuze and Guattari, in particular multiplicity, difference and repetition, and rhizome. This article has been produced in the context of the International Research Project Real Smart Cities, which has received funding from the European Union Marie Sklodowska Curie Action (MSCA), program RISE/Horizon 2020, agreement n. 777707.