The Trope of Displacement, the Disruption of Space: Cuba, a Moveable Nation

Abstract

Migration, Søren Frank observes, is the defining characteristic of modern life (Salman). Focusing primarily on the work of Salman Rushdie, Frank examines the mutually dependent phenomena of migration, globalization, and cosmopolitanism. In “Step Across This Line,” he points out, Rushdie describes the migrant as a person “without frontiers,” an “archetypal figure of our age,” who somehow defies the laws of gravity. The migrant “perform[s] the act of which all men anciently dream,” Rushdie claims, “the thing for which they envy the birds; that is to say, we have flown” (qtd. in Frank, “Globalization” 111). Undergirding Frank’s exploration is a particular idea of weightlessness, first developed by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht in his seminal essay “A Negative Anthropology of Globalization.” In “Globalization, Migration Literature, and the New Europe” Frank observes that Gumbrecht “initially distills two key characteristics: the increasing amount of information available to practically all human beings”—a result of the electronic age and ever increasing access to social media—and the idea that “this information (and its circulation)” becomes increasingly “detached from particular physical spaces” (107). Inspired by Gumbrecht’s characterization of globalization as a growing spacelessness—with its attendant elimination of the dimension of space— Frank posits what he terms the “double movement of elimination and recuperation of space,” which points toward an idea of cosmopolitanism distinguished by a “growing independence of particular spaces,” which are simultaneously characterized by “reactions of inertia [that] make them reconnect with dimensions of space” (“Globalization” 110). Although traditional definitions of the cosmopolitan hint at the possibility of suspending the dimension of spatiality and allowing the paradoxical concept that one can simultaneously belong everywhere and nowhere—a kind of cultural or ethnic weightlessness, so to speak—post-1959 Cuban political discourse on both sides of