Nostalgic Networks of Intimate Writing: Diaristic and Epistolary Discourses in the Nineteenth-Century Spanish Caribbean

Fall 2022 GGR Recipient

Elizabeth Mirabal Llorens (Spanish, Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese)

The preliminary hypothesis of my project is that nostalgia was deployed as a literary artifact by traveling subjects from the Caribbean in their intimate discourses. My objective is to interrogate certain diaries and epistolaries, especially from the nineteenth century Spanish Caribbean, to elucidate what the uses of nostalgia in texts written in situations of exile or displacement were. I plan to explore to what extent this feeling shared by individuals marked by mobility in the archipelagic region became an expressive device in the face of multiple losses, in dialogue with theories of affect and the cultural history of emotions.