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ABSTRACT "La Cuba Secreta" (1948) has been a germinal text for the study of exiled Spanish writer María Zambrano's work on national, poetic, and subjective identity formation. In this essay, I focus specifically on the apego (attachment) she feels for Cuba in order to explore how affective relations, for Zambrano, could potentially avoid the violent hierarchies imposed by Enlightenment values. I analyze the sites where apego signals an intersubjective immersion as a mode of radically anti-Enlightenment relationality. However, while the sticky relation between Zambrano and the island might avoid Rationalism's destructive subject-object boundaries, it is also tethered to the destruction of subjectivity occasioned by the island's racial and colonial traumas. Ultimately, I suggest that Zambrano's apego is a compelling example of relations for the field of Transatlantic Studies that wishes to avoid the hierarchies of modernity while still bringing to the surface the traumas and violence of racism and colonialism.
María Zambrano had been in exile after the Spanish Civil War for a little more than a year by the summer of 1940. Her latest stop in Puerto Rico, where she had been invited to give a series of lectures and summer classes, inspired a reflection on the special welcome she had felt from the Caribbean islands. Published in 1941, Isla de Puerto Rico: nostalgia y esperanza de un mundo mejor celebrates Puerto Rico as the potential savior of a West now at war: the island shared the "Hispanic" and "North American" traditions that could guide Europe out of a violent modernity plagued by war. Without a critical acknowledgment of the island's history of colonialism, Puerto Rico allows Zambrano to reflect on the trope of the island as a place that has held onto a prerationalist, premodern past and is therefore more adept at dealing with a reality that Enlightenment positivism has destructively fragmented. At one point, she claims that Spain, too, is "isla más que península ibérica" ("Isla" 4-5). For Zambrano, the idea of Spain takes shape within an insularity in affective, prerationalist potentiality. This conflation of the insular and peninsular effectively recenters Spain within Zambrano's construction of Puerto Rico's global significance. It also shows how, for Zambrano, certain bodies are reflective of each other: Spain and Puerto Rico are intimately intertwined within...