Suspicions about the Idle Storyteller: Manuel Ramos Otero

Abstract

Engaging with a generalized perception of lack of free time exacerbated in the current neoliberal order, this article examines leisure/idleness (otium) in Manuel Ramos Otero’s “Vivir del cuento” (1987). Scholarship about otium through a cultural, historical, and philosophical lens offers numerous examples of its censure, and even criminalization, in the contexts of coloniality or postcoloniality. I take as my starting point two intertwined views-the production of the Caribbean by imperialistic discourses as a place of “laziness” versus its history of exploitation-as well as the rearticulations in Puerto Rican national discourses of this suspicion about the alleged “vagancia” that affects the region. Focusing on the literary product, which Hannah Arendt classifies as “work”, although it offers no “useful” product, I identify in Ramos Otero a questioning of productivity as a means of constructing a liberatory political program and the exploration of otium as free expression.