Author: Miguel Arnedo-Gómez Publisher: Bucknell University Press ISBN: 1611487595 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 275
Book Description
The Cuban writer Nicolás Guillén has traditionally been considered a poet of mestizaje, a term that, whilst denoting racial mixture, also refers to a homogenizing nationalist discourse that proclaims the harmonious nature of Cuban identity. Yet, many aspects of Guillén’s work enhance black Cuban and Afro-Cuban identities. Miguel Arnedo-Gómez explores this paradox in Guillén’s pre-Cuban Revolution writings placing them alongside contemporaneous intellectual discourses that feigned adherence to the homogenizing ideology whilst upholding black interests. On the basis of links with these and other 1930s Cuban discourses, Arnedo-Gómez shows Guillén’s work to contain a message of black unity aimed at the black middle classes. Furthermore, against a tendency to seek a single authorial consciousness—be it mulatto or based on a North American construction of blackness—Guillén’s prose and poetry are also characterized as a struggle for a viable identity in a socio-culturally heterogeneous society.
Author: Devyn Spence Benson Publisher: UNC Press Books ISBN: 146962673X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 335
Book Description
Analyzing the ideology and rhetoric around race in Cuba and south Florida during the early years of the Cuban revolution, Devyn Spence Benson argues that ideas, stereotypes, and discriminatory practices relating to racial difference persisted despite major efforts by the Cuban state to generate social equality. Drawing on Cuban and U.S. archival materials and face-to-face interviews, Benson examines 1960s government programs and campaigns against discrimination, showing how such programs frequently negated their efforts by reproducing racist images and idioms in revolutionary propaganda, cartoons, and school materials. Building on nineteenth-century discourses that imagined Cuba as a raceless space, revolutionary leaders embraced a narrow definition of blackness, often seeming to suggest that Afro-Cubans had to discard their blackness to join the revolution. This was and remains a false dichotomy for many Cubans of color, Benson demonstrates. While some Afro-Cubans agreed with the revolution's sentiments about racial transcendence--"not blacks, not whites, only Cubans--others found ways to use state rhetoric to demand additional reforms. Still others, finding a revolution that disavowed blackness unsettling and paternalistic, fought to insert black history and African culture into revolutionary nationalisms. Despite such efforts by Afro-Cubans and radical government-sponsored integration programs, racism has persisted throughout the revolution in subtle but lasting ways.
Author: Teishan A. Latner Publisher: UNC Press Books ISBN: 146963547X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 368
Book Description
Cuba's grassroots revolution prevailed on America's doorstep in 1959, fueling intense interest within the multiracial American Left even as it provoked a backlash from the U.S. political establishment. In this groundbreaking book, historian Teishan A. Latner contends that in the era of decolonization, the Vietnam War, and Black Power, socialist Cuba claimed center stage for a generation of Americans who looked to the insurgent Third World for inspiration and political theory. As Americans studied the island's achievements in education, health care, and economic redistribution, Cubans in turn looked to U.S. leftists as collaborators in the global battle against inequality and allies in the nation's Cold War struggle with Washington. By forging ties with organizations such as the Venceremos Brigade, the Black Panther Party, and the Cuban American students of the Antonio Maceo Brigade, and by providing political asylum to activists such as Assata Shakur, Cuba became a durable global influence on the U.S. Left. Drawing from extensive archival and oral history research and declassified FBI and CIA documents, this is the first multidecade examination of the encounter between the Cuban Revolution and the U.S. Left after 1959. By analyzing Cuba's multifaceted impact on American radicalism, Latner contributes to a growing body of scholarship that has globalized the study of U.S. social justice movements.
Author: Ada Ferrer Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press ISBN: 0807875740 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 288
Book Description
In the late nineteenth century, in an age of ascendant racism and imperial expansion, there emerged in Cuba a movement that unified black, mulatto, and white men in an attack on Europe's oldest empire, with the goal of creating a nation explicitly defined as antiracist. This book tells the story of the thirty-year unfolding and undoing of that movement. Ada Ferrer examines the participation of black and mulatto Cubans in nationalist insurgency from 1868, when a slaveholder began the revolution by freeing his slaves, until the intervention of racially segregated American forces in 1898. In so doing, she uncovers the struggles over the boundaries of citizenship and nationality that their participation brought to the fore, and she shows that even as black participation helped sustain the movement ideologically and militarily, it simultaneously prompted accusations of race war and fed the forces of counterinsurgency. Carefully examining the tensions between racism and antiracism contained within Cuban nationalism, Ferrer paints a dynamic portrait of a movement built upon the coexistence of an ideology of racial fraternity and the persistence of presumptions of hierarchy.
Author: Anne Fountain Publisher: University Press of Florida ISBN: 0813063205 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 160
Book Description
"Essential reading for those who increasingly appreciate the enormous importance of Martí as one of the nineteenth century's most influential and most original thinkers."--John Kirk, coeditor of Redefining Cuban Foreign Policy "Fountain's wide-ranging, keen-eyed, and meticulously researched analysis covers the gamut of race relations that Martí's work probed."--Esther Allen, translator of José Martí: Selected Writings "An engaging, comprehensive, and well-balanced book on Cuba's national hero José Martí. Anne Fountain's chapters on Martí's vision of blacks are an indispensable source of information for anyone interested in the topic."--Jorge Camacho, author of José Martí: las máscaras del escritor A national hero in Cuba and a champion of independence across Latin America, José Martí produced a body of writing that has been theorized, criticized, and politicized. However, one of the most understudied aspects of his work is how his time in the United States affected what he wrote about race and his attitudes toward racial politics. In the United States Martí encountered European immigrants and the labor politics that accompanied them and became aware of the hardships experienced by Chinese workers. He read in newspapers and magazines about the oppression of Native Americans and the adversity faced by newly freed black citizens. Although he'd first witnessed the mistreatment of slaves in Cuba, it was in New York City, near the close of the century, where he penned his famous essay "My Race," declaring that there was only one race, the human race. Anne Fountain argues that it was in the United States that Martí--confronted by the forces of manifest destiny, the influence of race in politics, the legacy of slavery, and the plight and promise of the black Cuban diaspora--fully engaged with the specter of racism. Examining Martí's complete works with a focus on key portions, Fountain reveals the evolution of his thinking on the topic, indicating the significance of his sources, providing a context for his writing, and offering a structure for his works on race. Anne Fountain is professor of Spanish and Latin American studies at San José State University and the author of José Martí and U.S. Writers.
Author: Takkara K. Brunson Publisher: University Press of Florida ISBN: 1683403851 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 214
Book Description
Illuminating the activism of Black women during Cuba’s prerevolutionary period Association of Black Women Historians Letitia Woods Brown Book Prize In Black Women, Citizenship, and the Making of Modern Cuba, Takkara Brunson traces how women of African descent battled exclusion on multiple fronts and played an important role in forging a modern democracy. Brunson takes a much-needed intersectional approach to the political history of the era, examining how Black women’s engagement with questions of Cuban citizenship intersected with racial prejudice, gender norms, and sexual politics, incorporating Afro-diasporic and Latin American feminist perspectives. Brunson demonstrates that between the 1886 abolition of slavery in Cuba and the 1959 Revolution, Black women—without formal political power—navigated political movements in their efforts to create a more just society. She examines how women helped build a Black public sphere as they claimed moral respectability and sought racial integration. She reveals how Black women entered into national women’s organizations, labor unions, and political parties to bring about legal reforms. Brunson shows how women of African descent achieved individual victories as part of a collective struggle for social justice; in doing so, she highlights how racism and sexism persisted even as legal definitions of Cuban citizenship evolved.
Author: Kehbuma Langmia Publisher: Anthem Press ISBN: 1839989971 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 278
Book Description
This book examines the conundrum that has haunted the Black and White ancestry for ages on what supremacy actually means. Is it Black or White supremacy? Granted, the term White supremacy has occupied the sociopolitical, cultural and economic discourse for ages, but what does that really imply? All other ancestries on planet earth have been coerced to believe that conformity to Euro-American lifestyle is the way to become ‘civilized’ on planet earth. But the term civilization owes its genesis to the African cultural and educational achievements in Egypt. Consequently, Black ancestry, the first human species on planet earth, should lead mankind to cultural and epistemological supremacy but that has always been met with skepticism.This book examines this debate, especially between the Black and White ancestry.
Author: D. Poey Publisher: Springer ISBN: 1137382821 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 177
Book Description
Salsa is both an American and transnational phenomenon, however women in salsa have been neglected. To explore how female singers negotiate issues of gender, race, and nation through their performances, Poey engages with the ways they problematize the idea of the nation and facilitate their musical performances' movement across multiple borders.
Author: Ruth Behar Publisher: University Press of Florida ISBN: 168340288X Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 346
Book Description
Handmade in Cuba is an in-depth examination of Ediciones Vigía, an artisanal press that published exquisite books crafted from simple supplies during some of Cuba’s most dire economic periods. Vividly illustrated, this volume shows how the publishing collective responded to the nation’s changing historical and political situation from the margins of society, representing Cuban culture across the boundaries of race, age, gender, and genre. In this volume, poets and scholars reflect on the unique artistic direction of Rolando Estévez, who oversaw the creation of over 500 handmade books and magazines between 1985 and 2014. They highlight the beautiful designs and unusual materials selected, including fabric, metals, wood, feathers, and discarded items. Through diverse perspectives, including an interview with Estévez himself, the essays showcase the unlimited inventive possibilities of books as objects, as sculptural pieces, and as installations. Even in the age of technology, Estévez generated enormous excitement and admiration for these hand-crafted books, and this volume offers the first inside view of this important alternative publishing space. Contributors: Ruth Behar | Juanamaría Cordones-Cook | Gwendolyn Díaz | Erin Finzer | William Luis | Nancy Morejón | Kim Nochi | Carina Pino Santos | Kristin Schwain | Elzbieta Sklodowska
Author: Alejandro de la Fuente Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1316832325 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 663
Book Description
Alejandro de la Fuente and George Reid Andrews offer the first systematic, book-length survey of humanities and social science scholarship on the exciting field of Afro-Latin American studies. Organized by topic, these essays synthesize and present the current state of knowledge on a broad variety of topics, including Afro-Latin American music, religions, literature, art history, political thought, social movements, legal history, environmental history, and ideologies of racial inclusion. This volume connects the region's long history of slavery to the major political, social, cultural, and economic developments of the last two centuries. Written by leading scholars in each of those topics, the volume provides an introduction to the field of Afro-Latin American studies that is not available from any other source and reflects the disciplinary and thematic richness of this emerging field.
Author: Miguel Arnedo-Gómez
Author: Devyn Spence Benson
Author: Teishan A. Latner
Author: Ada Ferrer
Author: Anne Fountain
Author: Takkara K. Brunson
Author: Kehbuma Langmia
Author: D. Poey
Author: Ruth Behar
Author: Alejandro de la Fuente