Título en inglés.

Abstract

Contextualizing her work within the Caribbean prose that has resignified the region during the 20th century, this article explores the essays of Puerto Rican writer Marta Aponte Alsina, in dialogue with the work of Édouard Glissant and Kamau Brathwaite, particularly their concepts of Rélation and tidalectics, respectively. I argue that Aponte Alsina shares crucial reflections with Glissant and Brathwaite for the formulation of political and symbolic alternatives in the Caribbean, specifically in relation to the concept of insularity, the sea, the small scale, "literature of connections," and the "intimate" narrations/histories. Thus, Aponte Alsina‘s thought and poetics—as much as Glissant‘s, Brathwaite‘s and other Caribbean thinkers and writers—constitute an affirmative re-conceptualization of our archipelagos‘ "smallness," register of the submarine histories that unite us, and an affirmation of the archipelagos‘ inherent multiplicity. Such perspective amounts to a radical transformation of our regional imaginary, which I consider an indispensable requirement for political and material change in the Caribbean.