In a time where the humanities, ethnic studies, books, and even knowledge itself are being banned, regulated, and attacked, it is essential for us to consider how necessary it is to create and nourish spaces to think, share ideas, and collaborate. These discursive and material spaces become important tools in the subversion of colonization, displacement, and the status quo. Simultaneous to being discarded as unimportant, literary and cultural works and ethnic studies writ large, are being policed as vectors for dissent. As the common refrain notes, ‘you can’t have it both ways’; that is, the humanities and ethnic studies cannot be simultaneously unimportant and so dangerous that they must be restricted.
In fact, what this conundrum reveals is that literary, cultural, and ethnic studies are powerful and potentially transformative and that they are dangerous to the ongoing project of nation-building and detrimental to the foundational myths that continually overdetermined what is “truth” and what memories we should keep of historical and contemporary events. What becomes clear in this confounding colonial arithmetic is that writing is perhaps one of the most important and enduring forms of communication and consciousness building (to say nothing of the juggernaut that is the oral tradition as a mechanism for the transference of history). Taken seriously, responsive writing is a ceremony that sutures phenomenological and ontological experiences in an effort to bear down on epistemology. As Sylvia Wynter reminds us in “The Ceremony Must Be Found After Humanism,” our writing responds and turns away from the “chaos roles” we have been assigned in colonial modernity, which allows us to redefine and name ourselves anew.
Now more than ever, we need more spaces to share and reflect, spaces where we can think together about the issues that most preoccupy us and our constitutive communities. RicanWritings is such a place. Following the legacy of CENTRO’s electronic magazine “CENTRO Voices”, RicanWritings aims to foster critical conversations by, about, and for the Puerto Rican experiences and communities.
We are products and inheritors of overlapping histories of dispossession, colonialism, enslavement, and resistance. It is no coincidence that we inaugurate RicanWritings on October 14, 2024, Indigenous Peoples Day, which here in New York means attending to the histories and lived experiences of the Lenape, holding space to consider our Afro-Indigenous lineages, and considering the many ways in which we willingly and unwillingly participate in ongoing forms of Indigenous erasure and disenfranchisement. Our stories are deeply interlocked and acts of relationality and solidarity within and beyond the container of this nation-state are imperative for the liberatory, decolonial, and ethical futures of which we dream. Caribbean thinkers like M. Jacqui Alexander, Edouard Glissant, Antonio Benitez Rojo, Mayra Santos Febres, Aurora Levins Morales, and Jose Luis Gonzalez exemplify how writing in relation is a radical act that pushes us forward and away from provincial and hyper-individualistic western sciences. I urge you to think of RicanWritings as a vehicle for relationality, a digital space for insurgent and critical writing that seeks to subvert exception and foreground the amplification of Puerto Rican and relational ethnic studies as a field, theory, and practice.
Puerto Ricans have long since put pen to page in insurgent and reflective ways to document their living conditions, political realities, and aspirations. Boricua material culture, political thought, and criticism are essential to collective consciousness building. As we tend to the past, we must also think about our future as a research institute and as a resource in Puerto Rican and diasporican communities. It is likewise a time to dream big and forge new and well-worn pathways in CENTRO’s scholarly, creative, and community endeavors. RicanWritings is one such place where we can make space for multiple voices to be read and shared.
Works Cited:
Alexander, M. Jacqui. Pedagogies of crossing: Meditations on feminism, sexual politics, memory, and the sacred. Duke University Press, 2006.
Benítez-Rojo, Antonio. The repeating island: The Caribbean and the postmodern perspective. Duke University Press, 1997.
Glissant, Édouard. “Poetics of Relation.” U of Michigan P (1997).
González, José Luis. “El país de cuatro pisos.” El país de cuatro pisos y otros ensayos (1980): 9-44.
Morales, Aurora Levins. Medicine stories: Essays for radicals. Duke University Press, 2019.
Wynter, Sylvia. “The ceremony must be found: After humanism.” Boundary 2 (1984): 19-70.