Resumen

FERNANDEZ MERINO, Mireya. Nostalgia in the Narrative of the Caribbean Diaspora. Núcleo [online]. 2008, vol.20, n.25, pp.239-260. ISSN 0798-9784.

The literature of Caribbean writers still portrays the image of their islands of origin. These islands surface unevenly from fiction, and remind us how valuable they are for immigrants and people in exile from the different islands of the Caribbean. Memory recovers moments of childhood or youth, or the return to the place of origin, thus revealing the characters’ feelings about their homeland. The aim of this paper is to analyze the role played by nostalgia in Caribbean literature. The study includes representative works by Julia Álvarez, Angie Cruz, Junot Díaz, Oscar Hijuelos, Caryl Phillips, Nelly Rosario, and Esmeralda Santiago, writers born in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and St. Kitts. The analysis is based on the postulates which Svetlana Boym proposes in The Future of Nostalgia (2001) and which will help us determine the importance of this feeling in the narrative of these Caribbean writers.

Palabras clave : islands; nostalgia; narrative; Caribbean diaspora.