Unbecoming Blackness

Unbecoming Blackness PDF Author: Antonio Lopez
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814765491
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book

Book Description
2014 Runner-Up, MLA Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies In Unbecoming Blackness, Antonio López uncovers an important, otherwise unrecognized century-long archive of literature and performance that reveals Cuban America as a space of overlapping Cuban and African diasporic experiences. López shows how Afro-Cuban writers and performers in the U.S. align Cuban black and mulatto identities, often subsumed in the mixed-race and postracial Cuban national imaginaries, with the material and symbolic blackness of African Americans and other Afro-Latinas/os. In the works of Alberto O’Farrill, Eusebia Cosme, Rómulo Lachatañeré, and others, Afro-Cubanness articulates the African diasporic experience in ways that deprive negro and mulato configurations of an exclusive link with Cuban nationalism. Instead, what is invoked is an “unbecoming” relationship between Afro-Cubans in the U.S and their domestic black counterparts. The transformations in Cuban racial identity across the hemisphere, represented powerfully in the literary and performance cultures of Afro-Cubans in the U.S., provide the fullest account of a transnational Cuba, one in which the Cuban American emerges as Afro-Cuban-American, and the Latino as Afro-Latino.

Unbecoming Blackness

Unbecoming Blackness PDF Author: Antonio Lopez
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814765491
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book

Book Description
2014 Runner-Up, MLA Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies In Unbecoming Blackness, Antonio López uncovers an important, otherwise unrecognized century-long archive of literature and performance that reveals Cuban America as a space of overlapping Cuban and African diasporic experiences. López shows how Afro-Cuban writers and performers in the U.S. align Cuban black and mulatto identities, often subsumed in the mixed-race and postracial Cuban national imaginaries, with the material and symbolic blackness of African Americans and other Afro-Latinas/os. In the works of Alberto O’Farrill, Eusebia Cosme, Rómulo Lachatañeré, and others, Afro-Cubanness articulates the African diasporic experience in ways that deprive negro and mulato configurations of an exclusive link with Cuban nationalism. Instead, what is invoked is an “unbecoming” relationship between Afro-Cubans in the U.S and their domestic black counterparts. The transformations in Cuban racial identity across the hemisphere, represented powerfully in the literary and performance cultures of Afro-Cubans in the U.S., provide the fullest account of a transnational Cuba, one in which the Cuban American emerges as Afro-Cuban-American, and the Latino as Afro-Latino.

Unbecoming Blackness

Unbecoming Blackness PDF Author: Antonio Lopez
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814765475
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 287

Get Book

Book Description
2014 Runner-Up, MLA Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies In Unbecoming Blackness, Antonio López uncovers an important, otherwise unrecognized century-long archive of literature and performance that reveals Cuban America as a space of overlapping Cuban and African diasporic experiences. López shows how Afro-Cuban writers and performers in theU.S. align Cuban black and mulatto identities, often subsumed in the mixed-race and postracial Cuban national imaginaries, with the material and symbolic blackness of African Americans and other Afro-Latinas/os. In the works of Alberto O’Farrill, Eusebia Cosme, Rómulo Lachatañeré, and others, Afro-Cubanness articulates the African diasporic experience in ways that deprive negro and mulato configurations of an exclusive link with Cuban nationalism. Instead, what is invoked is an “unbecoming” relationship between Afro-Cubans in the U.S and their domestic black counterparts. The transformations in Cuban racial identity across the hemisphere, represented powerfully in the literary and performance cultures of Afro-Cubans in the U.S., provide the fullest account of a transnational Cuba, one in which the Cuban American emerges as Afro-Cuban-American, and the Latino as Afro-Latino.

Translating Blackness

Translating Blackness PDF Author: Lorgia García Peña
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478023287
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 199

Get Book

Book Description
In Translating Blackness Lorgia García Peña considers Black Latinidad in a global perspective in order to chart colonialism as an ongoing sociopolitical force. Drawing from archives and cultural productions from the United States, the Caribbean, and Europe, García Peña argues that Black Latinidad is a social, cultural, and political formation—rather than solely a site of identity—through which we can understand both oppression and resistance. She takes up the intellectual and political genealogy of Black Latinidad in the works of Frederick Douglass, Gregorio Luperón, and Arthur Schomburg. She also considers the lives of Black Latina women living in the diaspora, such as Black Dominicana guerrillas who migrated throughout the diaspora after the 1965 civil war and Black immigrant and second-generation women like Mercedes Frías and Milagros Guzmán organizing in Italy with other oppressed communities. In demonstrating that analyses of Black Latinidad must include Latinx people and cultures throughout the diaspora, García Peña shows how the vaivén—or, coming and going—at the heart of migrant life reveals that the nation is not a sufficient rubric from which to understand human lived experiences.

Diasporic Blackness

Diasporic Blackness PDF Author: Vanessa K. Valdés
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438465130
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 204

Get Book

Book Description
Examines the life of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg through the lens of both Blackness and latinidad. A Black Puerto Rican–born scholar, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (1874–1938) was a well-known collector and archivist whose personal library was the basis of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. He was an autodidact who matched wits with university-educated men and women, as well as a prominent Freemason, a writer, and an institution-builder. While he spent much of his life in New York City, Schomburg was intimately involved in the cause of Cuban and Puerto Rican independence. In the aftermath of the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898, he would go on to cofound the Negro Society for Historical Research and lead the American Negro Academy, all the while collecting and assembling books, prints, pamphlets, articles, and other ephemera produced by Black men and women from across the Americas and Europe. His curated library collection at the New York Public Library emphasized the presence of African peoples and their descendants throughout the Americas and would serve as an indispensable resource for the luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance, including Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. By offering a sustained look at the life of one of the most important figures of early twentieth-century New York City, this first book-length examination of Schomburg’s life suggests new ways of understanding the intersections of both Blackness and latinidad.

The Afro-Latino Memoir

The Afro-Latino Memoir PDF Author: Trent Masiki
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469675285
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 253

Get Book

Book Description
Despite their literary and cultural significance, Afro-Latino memoirs have been marginalized in both Latino and African American studies. Trent Masiki remedies this problem by bringing critical attention to the understudied African American influences in Afro-Latino memoirs published after the advent of the Black Arts movement. Masiki argues that these memoirs expand on the meaning of racial identity for both Latinos and African Americans. Using interpretive strategies and historical methods from literary and cultural studies, Masiki shows how Afro-Latino memoir writers often turn to the African American experience as a model for articulating their Afro-Latinidad. African American literary production, expressive culture, political ideology, and religiosity shaped Afro-Latino subjectivity more profoundly than typically imagined between the post-war and post-soul eras. Masiki recovers this neglected history by exploring how and why Black nationalism shaped Afro-Latinidad in the United States. This book opens the border between the canons of Latino and African American literature, encouraging greater intercultural solidarities between Latinos and African Americans in the era of Black Lives Matter.

Dancing with the Revolution

Dancing with the Revolution PDF Author: Elizabeth B. Schwall
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469662981
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 319

Get Book

Book Description
Elizabeth B. Schwall aligns culture and politics by focusing on an art form that became a darling of the Cuban revolution: dance. In this history of staged performance in ballet, modern dance, and folkloric dance, Schwall analyzes how and why dance artists interacted with republican and, later, revolutionary politics. Drawing on written and visual archives, including intriguing exchanges between dancers and bureaucrats, Schwall argues that Cuban dancers used their bodies and ephemeral, nonverbal choreography to support and critique political regimes and cultural biases. As esteemed artists, Cuban dancers exercised considerable power and influence. They often used their art to posit more radical notions of social justice than political leaders were able or willing to implement. After 1959, while generally promoting revolutionary projects like mass education and internationalist solidarity, they also took risks by challenging racial prejudice, gender norms, and censorship, all of which could affect dancers personally. On a broader level, Schwall shows that dance, too often overlooked in histories of Latin America and the Caribbean, provides fresh perspectives on what it means for people, and nations, to move through the world.

The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature

The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature PDF Author: Sarah Quesada
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316514358
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 303

Get Book

Book Description
Interweaving the influential voices of African, Caribbean, and Latinx authors, this book challenges eurocentric notions of World Literature.

The Racial Politics of Division

The Racial Politics of Division PDF Author: Monika Gosin
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501738259
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book

Book Description
The Racial Politics of Division deconstructs antagonistic discourses that circulated in local Miami media between African Americans, "white" Cubans, and "black" Cubans during the 1980 Mariel Boatlift and the 1994 Balsero Crisis. Monika Gosin challenges exclusionary arguments pitting these groups against one another and depicts instead the nuanced ways in which identities have been constructed, negotiated, rejected, and reclaimed in the context of Miami's historical multiethnic tensions. Focusing on ideas of "legitimacy," Gosin argues that dominant race-making ideologies of the white establishment regarding "worthy citizenship" and national belonging shape inter-minority conflict as groups negotiate their precarious positioning within the nation. Rejecting oversimplified and divisive racial politics, The Racial Politics of Division portrays the lived experiences of African Americans, white Cubans, and Afro-Cubans as disrupters in the binary frames of worth-citizenship narratives. Foregrounding the oft-neglected voices of Afro-Cubans, Gosin posits new narratives regarding racial positioning and notions of solidarity in Miami. By looking back to interethnic conflict that foreshadowed current demographic and social trends, she provides us with lessons for current debates surrounding immigration, interethnic relations, and national belonging. Gosin also shows us that despite these new demographic realities, white racial power continues to reproduce itself by requiring complicity of racialized groups in exchange for a tenuous claim on US citizenship.

Invisibility and Influence

Invisibility and Influence PDF Author: Regina Marie Mills
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477329145
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book

Book Description
A rich literary study of AfroLatinx life writing, this book traces how AfroLatinxs have challenged their erasure in the United States and Latin America over the last century. Invisibility and Influence demonstrates how a century of AfroLatinx writers in the United States shaped life writing, including memoir, collective autobiography, and other formats, through depictions of a wide range of “Afro-Latinidades.” Using a woman-of-color feminist approach, Regina Marie Mills examines the work of writers and creators often excluded from Latinx literary criticism. She explores the tensions writers experienced in being viewed by others as only either Latinx or Black, rather than as part of their own distinctive communities. Beginning with Arturo (Arthur) Schomburg, who contributed to wider conversations about autobiographical technique, Invisibility and Influence examines a breadth of writers, including Jesús Colón; members of the Young Lords; Piri Thomas; Lukumi santera and scholar Marta Moreno Vega; and Black Mexican American poet Ariana Brown. Mills traces how these writers confront the distorted visions of AfroLatinxs in the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean, and how they created and expressed AfroLatinx spirituality, politics, and self-identity, often amidst violence. Mapping how AfroLatinx writers create their own literary history, Mills reveals how AfroLatinx life writing shapes and complicates discourses on race and colorism in the Western Hemisphere.

Black Women, Citizenship, and the Making of Modern Cuba

Black Women, Citizenship, and the Making of Modern Cuba PDF Author: Takkara K. Brunson
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 1683403851
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 214

Get Book

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.