Racial Experiments in Cuban Literature and Ethnography

Cover

Download PDF (105.4 KB)
 

Title Page, Copyright

Download PDF (37.2 KB)
 

Contents

Download PDF (31.7 KB)
 

Acknowledgments

Download PDF (62.8 KB)
pp. vii-ix

This book only exists thanks to the help of numerous individuals and institutions. I was able to conduct research for this project in Cuba and Miami thanks to a King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center Summer Travel Grant and a Tinker Field Research Grant. In Cuba, Alexander...

Introduction: A Folklore for the Future: Race and National Narrative in Cuba

Download PDF (184.2 KB)
pp. 1-28

In these lines from a 1935 poem entitled “Canción negra sin color” (Black Song without Color), Afro-Cuban poet Marcelino Arozarena captures the paradoxical treatment of black Cubans in Cuba (and Cuban literature) of the time. Black Cubans are present within the national space...

1. Locating Afro-Cuban Religion: Fernando Ortiz and Lydia Cabrera

Download PDF (211.5 KB)
pp. 29-62

When thinking of how Cubanness came to be defined, perhaps no voice is as consistently (and insistently) present as that of Fernando Ortiz. Ortiz was a public intellectual in the full sense of the term. Born into a well-to-do Creole family in Havana, he was raised in Cuba and Spain...

2. Beyond Bongos in Montmartre: Lydia Cabrera and Alejo Carpentier Imagine Blackness

Download PDF (244.9 KB)
pp. 63-103

“Tata Cuñengue, . . . simiente del Solar del Arará donde más de un nieto de capitanes generales fue a pedir que le confeccionaran un embó en tiempos de la colonia, vive ahora, con todo esplendor, en el mismo corazón de Montmartre” (“La Rue Fontaine” 295). [Papa Cuñengue, . . . founder...

3. The National Art of Signifyin(g): Nicolás Guillén and Lydia Cabrera

Download PDF (225.0 KB)
pp. 104-142

In his 1928 essay Indagación del choteo (Investigation of the Choteo), Cuban scholar Jorge Mañach analyzes a form of humorous wordplay known in Cuba as choteo. A kind of spontaneous burla (joking or poking fun), the choteo is fundamentally performative in nature, improvised wordplay...

4. Gender, Genre, and Ethnographic Authority: Lydia Cabrera and Zora Neale Hurston

Download PDF (186.8 KB)
pp. 143-172

In the previous chapters of this book, I have looked at the ways in which Cuban writers drew from different ethnographic and literary strategies to include ideas of blackness in their reimaginings of the nation. My intention has been to understand how Cuba’s particular postcolonial...

Epilogue: Textual Straits: Race and Ethnographic Literature since the Cuban Revolution

Download PDF (125.5 KB)
pp. 173-188

The overthrow of Cuban president and dictator Fulgencio Batista in January of 1959 and the triumph of the 26 of July Movement and its charismatic leader Fidel Castro initiated a radical restructuring of many aspects of Cuban society. Determined to do away with the systemic inequalities in...

Notes

Download PDF (170.6 KB)
pp. 189-208

Selected Bibliography

Download PDF (135.8 KB)
pp. 209-225

Index

Download PDF (104.5 KB)
pp. 227-237

About the Author

Download PDF (27.0 KB)
pp. 238-