Writing Secrecy in Caribbean Freemasonry

Addressing the transnational relationships of Freemasonry, politics, and culture in the field of Latin American and Caribbean literatures and cultures, Writing Secrecy provides insight into Pan-Caribbean, transnational and diasporic formations of these Masonic lodges and their influences on political and cultural discourses in the Americas.

"Jossianna Arroyo has written an innovative, thought-provoking, smart, and much-needed examination of the history of Caribbean and Afro-Caribbean diasporic Freemasonry. The scholarship that has gone into this work is superior. Examining a crucial, if under-studied and difficult-to-penetrate subject, this book not only contributes to the study of Afro-Caribbean thought, it redirects the field." - Nancy Raquel Mirabal, San Francisco State University, USA

"In this well-researched, engagingly-argued, and deeply-personal study, Jossianna Arroyo illuminates the field of Caribbean intellectual history by offering the connection to Freemasonry as yet another area within which to explore the links between political ideologies, aesthetic projects, and thought production in the Antillean region and its diasporas. Showing the recurrence of political and intellectual figures from Puerto Rico, Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic who practiced a sort of Masonic transnationalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Writing Secrecy in Caribbean Freemasonry opens new and fertile ground for deepening our understanding of intra-Caribbean cultural ties." - Silvio Torres-Saillant, Syracuse University, USA

"Jossianna Arroyo's insightful analysis dissects the multiple intersections among esoteric Masonic rituals, literature, and politics in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic, as well as their diasporas in the United States, during the second half ofthe nineteenth century. Arroyo ably blends a close reading of various biographical, literary, journalistic, and archival sources with an interpretation of the broader significance of Freemasonry for the cultural politics of the Hispanic Caribbean. I learned a lot from Arroyo's wide-ranging and fine-grained consideration of many authors inspired by Masonic thought and practices to develop their own critiques of the dominant racial and colonial ideologies of their time." - Jorge Duany, author of Blurred Borders: Transnational Migration between the Hispanic Caribbean and the United States (2011)

Jossianna Arroyo is an associate professor of Latin American and Caribbean Literatures and Cultures at The University of Texas at Austin.