Literature in the contact zone: Emily Apter’s ‘A new comparative literature’ and Achy Obejas’s ‘Sugarcane’

This article analyses the poem ‘Sugarcane’, by the Cuban American writer Achy Obejas, in reference to Emily Apter’s essay ‘A new comparative literature’. The connections between these two writings, including their links to certain aspects of Caribbean literary and cultural theory, are explored. The theoretical arguments of Edouard Glissant in particular are considered, Apter and Obejas being put into conversation with Glissant and other theorists such as E. K. Brathwaite in order to discuss the classification of Obejas’s text as a literature of the contact zone. As part of this classification, the ways in which Obejas’s poem elucidates Apter’s project of rupturing the links between language, nation and identity are examined.