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form of domination in times of globalization, also challenges the old dualism of colonizer versus colonized. With a note of lucid reproach, Van Haesendonck remarks that even Bhabha, who worries about global dynamics, refers neither to Martinique nor to the Caribbean as a whole in his introduction to the new edition of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1954). For that matter, Bhabha does not include a discussion of the Caribbean in either Nation and Narration (1990) or The Location of Culture (1994). Instead he focuses, as Hardt and Negri do, on the global reach of contemporary imperialist ethics. Bhabha fails to see the history of the Caribbean as the history of the construction of empire.
Along the same lines, Asima Saad Maura contends that, since the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898, Puerto Rico has occupied a liminal space between Spain, a ghostly empire with a burdensome Hispanic-Catholic past, and the more tangible Anglo-Protestant presence of the United States. Saad Maura focuses on two twentieth-century authors, René Marqués and Luis López Nieves, each of whom gives a different portrayal of the “true” meaning of invasion and empire formation, yet who both implicitly emphasize the similarities between, on the one hand, the Spanish colonization of the island and the treatment of the Taino and, on the other hand, North American conquering methods of (for instance) the Puerto Rican other.
Like the Caribbean, Central America has been the site of ongoing phases of empire building since the arrival of Europeans in the Western hemisphere. Whereas agents of the Spanish crown colonized the region, Great Britain and the United States vied for possession of the isthmus well into the twentieth century. Ana Patricia Rodríguez reads Central America by its literature—European travelogues, anti-imperialist literary manifestos, agricultural-production and canal-zone novels, testimonios of resistance, and more recent texts responding to the crises caused by globalization —so as to unearth the weighty narrative of empire. She also makes a plea that Central America be added to the records of global empire, by reason of the region’s history as the locus of foreign military, economic, and political interventions and its key position in the global market economy at the outset of the new millennium.