PUENTES SOBRE EL ARCHIPIÉLAGO / BRIDGES ACROSS THE ARCHIPELAGO. Multiculturalidad y multilingüismo en el Gran Caribe / Multiculturalism and multilingualism in the Greater Caribbean

The volume offers an interdisciplinary reflection on multiculturalism and multilingualism in the Greater Caribbean, understood as a relational space historically shaped by the circulation of people, languages, objects, imaginaries, and forms of power. The Caribbean region provides a privileged vantage point from which to examine the dynamics of contact, exchange, conflict, and cultural reworking that have accompanied colonial and postcolonial processes and that continue to shape contemporary relations. From this perspective, the Caribbean is also considered an epistemological space from which to interrogate modernity, coloniality, diaspora, and inequality. Particular attention is therefore devoted to the linguistic dimension: colonial, Creole, and vernacular languages are approached as spaces of negotiation, appropriation, and resistance, in which traces of domination intertwine with strategies through which local communities resignify their cultural experiences. Multiculturalism is thus examined beyond a simplified understanding of diversity, in light of the forced encounters, historical hierarchies, and processes of creolization that have generated multiple and unequal cultural configurations. Divided into two sections — “Languages, Practices, and Cultural Circulation” and “Writings, Memories, and Poetics” — the volume brings together studies that, from historical, linguistic, literary, and cultural perspectives, examine phenomena of circulation, representation, identity construction, and memory within Caribbean and diasporic spaces. Taken as a whole, they propose reading the Caribbean as a critical space for analysing the relationships between mobility, difference, power, and cultural production in the contemporary world.