In this text, Frederic Jameson introduces the English translation of a collection of Roberto Fernández Retamar’s essays published under the title Caliban. Jameson, in his discussion of Retamar’s work, addresses three main themes. First he considers how Retamar provokes readers of the English translation to consider the question of politics and its relationship with poetry. In this vein, Jameson argues that Retamar has recovered the role of the “political intellectual” by accomplishing the task of being both a political poet and an esthete. As such, Retamar has displayed an equal commitment to both language and politics in his writings, and has worked as a promoter of culture, more generally, as the director of the Casa de las Americas in Havana. The second theme Jameson develops in this text is how Retamar charts “…the paradoxes and dilemmas of the dialectics of otherness” in the essays on the question of Latin American culture, on the “black legend” of Spanish Conquerors, and on literary criticism. In this discussion of the content of the book, Jameson considers, among other things, how Retamar argues for adding a radical “site-specificity” to the study and analysis of literature. Jameson addresses a third theme—how Retamar’s essays offer a useful response to the problems of “global” literature, and a comparative method for inflecting comparative and international studies of literature with politics.

The U.S. literary critic and Marxist theorist Frederic Jameson wrote this foreword for an English translation of Roberto Fernández Retamar’s essays which were published under the title Caliban in 1989 (the Spanish edition is dated 1971). Best known for developing Marxist theories of postmodernism (he published Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism in 1991), Jameson was interested in Latin American art and literature because, among other reasons, he admired its ongoing engagement in radical politics. In this text, Jameson explains at length why intellectuals in the United States should find Retamar’s work so compelling. For Jameson, Retamar exemplifies the Latin American tradition of the politically engaged and poet, as his intellectual enterprise is also related to the very real politics of the Cuban revolution. Jameson also admires the way Retamar addresses the problem of the “global system,” revealing the conflicts at play in a field where the cultural production of first, second, and third worlds is engaged in multiple, ongoing dialectical struggles. Jameson lauds Retamar’s work for revealing another possibility for comparative literary studies in which commonly shared “situations,” such as “capitalism” or “colonialism,” could be isolated for study. In sum, Jameson is looking at what he and his colleagues in the United States can learn from Retamar’s politically-engaged methods, and, more generally, how the experience of reading Retamar can reveal to First World readers how their identities have been formed by the dialectics of difference. His interest in these issues and his use of such terms as “center,” “other,” “First and Third World,” demonstrate that Jameson was participating in the post-colonial discourse in the United States, Europe, Latin America, and the Sub-Continent during the 1980s.