Foreword
Richard Rosa

The name "avant-garde" that came to define a series of iconoclastic and radical artistic movements in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century entails many tensions and even contradictions that could be traced to the meaning of the word itself. The word, which has a spatial dimension, referring to being ahead as part of an advancing military force, simultaneously becomes a temporal one, as in being ahead in time. And yet, being ahead here also implies transcending a condition of temporality, advancing beyond its constraints and conditions; but the word also reasserts that condition. Further, the avant-garde emerges as a movement that is essentially European, but at the same time one that reappears, replicates, and is reproduced elsewhere, everywhere. It reveals the idiosyncratic nature of its origin, but also its cosmopolitan signature; the different movements are rooted in "national" venues, while at the same time claiming a universal, cosmopolitan status. This is why the avant-garde has been an important point of reference for recent trends focused on "world literatures": the "avant-garde" has even become a measure for determining how close to recognition by literary institutions a particular (national) tradition is. The "avant-garde" can be described as a radical rupture and a burst of disenchantment, but can also be constructed as a consecrating, mystifying gesture, both a destabilizing and a policing force. Hence, it reveals the paradoxical environment in which it emerged. The active, messianic gesture that is emblematized in the typical "manifesto" is countered by the erasure of the line separating art from everyday life, its dissolution into the biological and even the physical.

To study the avant-garde (as a literary, artistic, and cultural movement) is to navigate through those many contradictions and perhaps risking deactivating the political potential behind them. This is particularly true with regards to what has been called "peripheral" or "global" avant-garde movements, happening in sites where the "denial of coevalness" was such a fundamental colonial strategy. And of course, it is particularly challenging when we are confronted with the Atlantic insular space that is the object of this book by Francisco-J. Hernández Adrián.

As in other parts of what is now called the Global South, literary and art histories, associated with the managerial nation-state and its narrative of modernity and modernization, attempt to administrate and accommodate cultural production in the Caribbean to a predetermined script. Many of these narratives restricted their scope to the relationship between the European producers, their products, and their after-effects in the region, or they focused primarily on adjusting local aesthetic innovations to a World or Global paradigm, where they could circulate and be consumed as stable representatives of their respective polis or ethnos. Less attention was granted to the multiple political and economic connections between the islands themselves or the complex cultural articulation between islands and metropolis. The Atlantic insular spaces link Europe with Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America, and were historically determined by experiments with global, mercantile capitalism, slave trade, land grabbing, the plantation system, extractive economies, and then more recently by the extractive tourist industry that capitalizes on the biopolitical view imposed by colonizers. During the timespan of the historical avant-garde, the region became a site of experimentation with a new kind of governing debt intersected by racial capitalism that would then be extrapolated to the rest of the world. An area marked by historical upheavals, yet resistant to unitary narratives that suppress its diversity, and resistant as well to the temporal policing implied in every literary and art history. Periodization, we could say, comes to die on the shores of these islands in the Atlantic.

Hernández Adrián's approach to a diverse and fascinating corpus of Caribbean and Atlantic avant-garde texts is far from conventional. It certainly fits within the critical tradition established by an impressive group of authors who in recent years have recast the way in which Caribbean and Atlantic literature has been read. Spearheaded by Édouard Glissant's concepts of relation, errancy, and the archipelagic, Michel-Rolph Trouillot's reworking of the archive, and Sylvia Wynter's rearticulation of the flesh/spirit dichotomy, authors such as David Scott, Paul Gilroy, and Gary Wilder, among others, have moved beyond the physical and political constraints imposed by the imperial nation-state by asserting the important insular nature of these societies. On Tropical Grounds: Avant-Garde and Surrealism in the Insular Atlantic builds upon these conceptual innovations in order to read and interpret literary works and images that communicate their insular nature. In each chapter, the author puts together a group of texts that engage or miss each other, that try to reach to other islands and then form archipelagos and gravitate towards new forms of complicity and empathy.

Chapter 1 is, perhaps, a radical example. In it, Hernández Adrián combines different media and materials that range from the 1937 German film La Habanera, written by Gerhard Menzel (a famous Nazi screenwriter) and directed by Douglas Sirk (who fled Nazi Germany after this film), which is staged on the island of Puerto Rico but filmed in Tenerife, Canary Islands, during the Spanish Civil War; a critical essay by canonical poet and essayist Pedro Salinas; the poetry of two writers from the Canary Islands (Josefina de la Torre, Domingo López Torres) and one of the most important representatives of pure poetry in Cuba (Mariano Brull), as well as the ideas of jurist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt, whose important works spanned the period of the avant-garde. All these references converge on the idea of the island, and the condition of tropical insularity, articulated in diverging and even opposite directions. In hindsight, we can say that these materials all point toward a polarization that was present at the origin of the historical avant-garde but also notable at the political and cultural development of the insular Atlantic. On the one hand the articulation of a regulative order, a mechanistic self-referentiality, and then, on the other, the decisionism, the assertive modality that has a certain messianism behind it. This first chapter of the book focuses in part on how the three insular writers, de la Torre, López Torres, and Brull, fit or do not fit into a "Republic of letters" as understood in the avant-garde, but also how this ideal is conditioned by colonial conceptions of space, the tropics, and capitalist investments. The works of these three writers, in different ways, short-circuit the disciplining gaze or voice coming either from the images of the German film or from Pedro Salinas's critical essay, and they do so in different ways. In the case of de la Torre, her early book of poetry defied stereotypes of the tropics found not only in the Nazi film, but also in the introductory essay by Salinas, who invokes traditional colonial notions of the island which he tries to impose upon her work. In contrast, Domingo López Torres builds his littoral poetics around images of precariousness and dispossession grounded on his insular condition. López Torres develops what Hernández Adrián calls a littoral sensorium that is based on an insular immediacy and a "solar perspective." In contrast, in the poetry of Mariano Brull, the utmost representative of elite, lettered culture in Cuba, who navigated between Afro-Cubanism and "pure poetry," the island is viewed as a vanishing point, a dislocation, a space of pure potentiality, where the image of a child appears as a locus of enunciation. In Brull's poetry, landscapes become vehicles of transcendence, but they also refuse a specific historic or ethnic content. In all these works, and despite their differences, we see a movement where the drive to turn the island into a target and object of artistic or aesthetic experimentation, economic exploitation, exoticizing gaze, political discipline, or biopolitical regulation, is intersected, appropriated, and countered by a voice, a material, a nature that suspend or bracket its effectiveness. In that sense the avant-garde is not exempt from the same colonial aspirations present in other epistemological, political, or economic projects coming from Europe, but at the same time, it provides some of the strategies that will be useful to undermine its most overwhelming effects. Two distinctive sets of memories associated to conquest and plundering or to work and resistance are deployed against each other in continuous friction. At the end, the insular avant-gardists present their search for a generative locus of political affirmation and creative agency against the stereotypical representation of insularity seen in the film by Sirk.

Hernández Adrián connects Mariano Brull's Eurocentric universalism/cosmopolitanism, particularly the fantasies of maritime expansion present in his poems, to Hispanism as a civilizational ideology that had become hegemonic in the region by the 1920s and 1930s. Hernández Adrián highlights the role that Hispanism had as a specific imperial, colonial, and postcolonial project and how it intersects and collides with...