It is a rare gift and true honor to have my book read and discussed by such brilliant scholars. I am grateful. Their analysis and interpretations have opened intellectual and scholarly spaces ripe for further investigations. I am inspired by their questions, challenges, and encouragement for expansive and greater discussions on so many fronts. In many ways, that was my intention. To open discussion, challenge our understandings of archives, to theoretically play with the unknowing, unthinkable and the impossible, and to find comfort in the crevices where our histories often lie in waiting. As Lorrin Thomas writes, “Like a novel set during the tiempo muerto, this book seeks to sharpen the focus on the hard-to-see but momentous shifts in social and political arrangements that have happened in times of quiet” (Thomas: 1). I wrote Suspect Freedoms for several reasons: to write a history that both examined the early history of Cubans in the United States and position it as an intrinsic and critical part of US history. I wanted to challenge what constitutes US history without resorting to the narrative politics of inclusion, so prevalent in popular historical thinking. This meant theorizing US history, along with territoriality and geographies as fraught and broken. I embraced fragmented chronologies, inconvenient geographies, and wrought archives. How else to excavate unwanted visibilities? How else to tell stories that were never meant to be told? In her reading of Suspect Freedoms, Guadalupe Garcia rightly deduces that one of the key issues the book grapples with is the relationship among “discourse, space, and nation, territoriality and belonging” (Garcia: 1). For me, there was no other way. During the early 19th century, Cubans migrated to a United States that was in the making. Seen as “unfinished,” the United States government was ruthless in their continual efforts to conquer, confiscate, and illegally take land. Cuba was a long-standing colonial temptation, an unrivaled possibility for extending US slavery. The obsession with land greatly influenced how Cubans configured themselves and scripted nation within the diaspora. To understand the need to continually narrate diasporic spaces as sites of nation-building, as well as the disparate geographic possibility of annexation and independence, I looked to the idea of rhetorical geographies (the scripting and imagining of space). In questioning such usage, Garcia wonders “whether oppositional discourses and rhetorical geographies can not only be transferred back to 805813 CDY0010.1177/0921374018805813Cultural DynamicsAuthor’s Response research-article2018

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档案困境和可能性

如此出色的学者阅读和讨论我的书，真是难得的礼物和真正的荣幸。我很感激。他们的分析和解释为思想和学术开辟了成熟的空间，可供进一步研究。他们的问题，挑战和鼓励使我在许多方面进行了广泛而广泛的讨论，这使我感到鼓舞。在很多方面，这是我的意图。要展开讨论，请挑战我们对档案的理解，从理论上应对未知，不可想象和不可能的事物，并在我们历史经常等待的缝隙中找到安慰。正如洛林·托马斯（Lorrin Thomas）所写的那样：“就像通俗小说中的一本小说集一样，这本书的目的是使人们更加关注在安静时期发生的难以理解但重大的社会和政治安排变化”（托马斯：1） 。我写《可疑自由》的原因有几个：写一部既回顾了美国古巴人的早期历史又将其定位为美国历史的内在和关键部分的历史。我想挑战构成美国历史的内容，而不必诉诸于包容性的叙事政治，因为在普遍的历史思想中如此盛行。这意味着理论化美国历史，以及充斥着破碎的领土和地理。我接受了零散的时间顺序，不便的地理位置和锻造的档案。还要如何挖掘不需要的可见性？还有其他如何讲故事的内容？瓜达卢佩·加西亚（Guadalupe Garcia）在她的《可疑自由》（Usspect Freedoms）一书中正确地推断出，这本书着力解决的主要问题之一是“话语，空间与民族，领土和归属”之间的关系（加西亚：1）。对我而言，别无他法。在19世纪初期，古巴人移民到了美国。被视为“未完成”的美国政府在不断努力征服，没收和非法夺取土地方面是无情的。古巴是长期的殖民诱惑，是扩大美国奴隶制的无与伦比的可能性。对土地的痴迷极大地影响了古巴人如何在散居国外的国家中配置自己和编写脚本的国家。为了理解有必要不断地将散居的空间描述为国家建设的场所，以及吞并和独立的不同地理可能性，我研究了修辞地理学的概念（空间的脚本和想象）。在质疑这种用法时，