“The New Errancy: Unveiling Contemp. Migrant Literature in Cuba, the Dominican Rep, and Eq. Guinea”

Work-in-Progress talk with Alejandro Marin, PhD candidate, Romance languages, and 2025–26 Oregon Humanities Center Dissertation Fellow. Migration today is often framed as crisis, but literature reveals it as a site of creativity and resistance. Contemporary novels from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Equatorial Guinea portray movement across borders as an opportunity to forge new communities and reimagine belonging. My research examines how these texts challenge dominant narratives of displacement, offering fresh insights into diaspora, kinship, and the politics of memory. I focus on three authors, Karla Suárez (Cuba), Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel (Equatorial Guinea), and Loida Maritza Pérez (Dominican Republic), who write from migrant, exilic, or diasporic postions, foregrounding solidarity with contemporary migrants and reconfiguring our understanding of migration through their work. The New Errancy illuminates the aesthetic, political, and cultural elements incorporated into these narratives, providing a more dynamic view of migration. These authors portray non-biological family formations, evolving family dynamics across generations, gendered dimensions of mobility, transnational and diasporic identities, and circular migration that frames return as feasible and meaningful. I primarily draw on Édouard Glissant’s concepts of relation identity, circular nomadism, and errancy as rhizomatic practices; Stuart Hall’s theories on cultural identity and diaspora; Luisa Campuzano’s perspectives on uprooting and settlement; Michael Ugarte’s critique of rigid categories like emigrant, immigrant, and exile; Remei Sipi Mayo’s analysis of gender and migration; and Juan Flores’s reflections on diaspora to trace transnational cultural practices linking origin and destination communities.