Being and Blackness in Latin America: Uprootedness and Improvisation (review)

The African diaspora brought upwards of ten million slaves to Spanish and Portuguese America, where they were deprived of their freedom and their own voices until well past the colonial period. Even today the nature of being "black" in Latin America is an amorphous and poorly understood topic, complicated by plastic and permeable racial nomenclature and by collective mythologies that transform visceral racism into surreal projections of pseudo-pluralism. The entrance of writers and artists of African descent into the heart of the discourse has done nothing to simplify matters; to the contrary, the debate has only intensified, nuanced from country to country, straddling the rural-urban continental divide, and intertwined with socio-historical perspectives on race and class. In Being and Blackness in Latin America, Patricia Fox weaves a dense and complex fabric of intertextual scrutiny in search of a justification for the subtitle: uprootedness and improvisation. More than a work of literary or cultural criticism, the book is a journey through a labyrinth of perspectives and proposals, a three-dimensional kaleidoscopic array of ideas punctuated at every point by literary, cultural, and critical references.

The eight-chapter monograph is divided into two equal halves: "Coming to terms" and "Coming to (cultural) consciousness." In the first four chapters, Fox explores the concepts of uprootedness, time, place, and improvisation. Rejecting the notion that uprootedness—taken as the sequel to the Middle Passage—rendered Africans and their descendents merely passive spectators to their own destiny, Fox argues for a rich dialectic of resistance and creativity. Forcibly displaced from their African homelands, slaves and their descendents did not drift aimlessly but rather constructed real and virtual spaces that could not have been extrapolated from the circumstances of captivity and dispersion. Some of the spaces were physical—the ethnically-circumscribed cabildos, naciones, and other mutual aid organizations, and the numerous maroon communities, known as palenques, manieles, cumbes, and quilombos. To the many literary references can be added the continued vigor of maroon-born creole languages, such as the Palenquero language of Colombia's Palenque de San Basilio, and the unique speech of the Afro-colonial congos of Panama's Caribbean coast, which combines creole language structures and deliberate manipulations of sounds and semantics, the legacy of slaves who masked their intentions from oppressive masters by inventing a "black Spanish" that could be understood only by initiates into this subversive culture. Even in remote central Bolivia, the scene of the first massive importation of African slaves to Spanish America (beginning in 1530), some isolated black settlements continue to speak a unique Afro-descended transform of colonial Spanish, as uniquely different from the metropolitan language as any Caribbean creole speech. These linguistic manipulations, in daily speech and in literary creation, exemplify the improvisation that lies at the heart of the black experience in the Americas. Frederic Jameson's declaration of an end to temporality is also presaged in the Afro-Hispanic context, merging ancient cosmologies and ultra-modern accommodations. Thus the first half of the book deconstructs the ill-begotten image of the post-slavery Afro-American, setting the scene for the remaining chapters, in which the "new" black consciousness is more fully fleshed out.

Music—particularly drums and drumming—have traditionally been associated with African and Afro-diasporic culture, as has an emphasis on orality. All too often this takes the form of trite stereotyping that reduces black people to chattering wind-up dolls. This process is amply represented in Iberian literature, beginning with Portuguese song-books from the mid-fifteenth century and continuing well into the new millennium in many Latin American countries. Few if any of the texts attributed to black characters were produced by authors of African descent, and even fewer are the texts in which black personages do not speak a hopeless jumble of pseudo-linguistic babble, fixated only on infantile pleasures. In Latin American nations where black populations suffer discrimination and official invisibility, popular culture co-opts...