María Zambrano’s Caribbean Imaginings: Philosophy from Island to Continent and Back

Maria Zambrano’s (1904–1991) meditations from her exile in Puerto Rico and Cuba are fraught with the ambivalence experienced by those displaced and forced out of their homeland. As it has been widely demonstrated, all situations of exile and migration are inherently traumatic. In this chapter, the author delves into what she calls Zambrano’s hybrid philosophical essays—“Isla de Puerto Rico” (1940) and “El Tiempo y la Verdad” (pub.1963) as well as in her book The Agony of Europe (1945)—a new modernist genre that the Spanish philosopher cultivated during her 45 years of exile. In Zambrano’s descriptions of her Puerto Rican idealized insular environment, she moves from the solitude of the island to the nostalgia of today, delves into The Agony of Europe (1945), and enquires into the origins of the “America Hispana” and the Pan-American proposals by contemporary intellectuals and politicians. In an attempt to set her Caribbean philosophical essays in a productive dialogue with her major philosophical projects and her intellectual-emotional exilic condition, the author revisits key Zambranian ideas such as solitude, loss, nostalgia, time, truth, and poetic reason.