Lydia Cabrera and the Construction of an Afro-Cuban Cultural Identity by Edna M. Rodriguez-Mangual (review)

202 The Latin Americanist Spring 2006 of particular value to historians, who will find the details of the historicalevents valuable. In conclusion, the book is very interesting and definitely worth the read, and it providesan interestingand new way to look at that period of Caribbean history. It seems that the use of fire in protest, and its accidental and deliberate use, does not vary considerablyfrom region to region. The Chicagofire that leveled the city in October 1871had a similarif not greaterimpactonthat city than did the Port of Spain fire more than two decades later. The use of fire as a tool of protest is still alivetoday;we are constantly being bombarded with burningof flags and effigies. Richardson’s link to the past is an important piece to understanding the fires of the present and the future. RoHan Williams Departmento f PoliticalScience Michigan State University Lydia Cabreraand the Constructionof anAfro-Cuban Cultural Identity. By Edna M. Rodriguez-Mangual. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004, p. 199, $24.95. Lydia Cabrera’s works constitute an indispensablecomponent of the intricate and sometimes controversialpuzzle, known as Cubanness.Her contributionis so crucialthat without it studies about Cuba, the Caribbean, and the configuration of the whole Hispanic-Africanculture would be incomplete. Edna M. Rodriguez -Mangual’s text aims to fill the void in the knowledge concerningthis importantauthor. Lydia Cabreraand the Constructiono f anAfio-Cuban Cultural Identity approaches Cabrera’s writing seeking to highlight how her representationof Cuba contradictsthe traditionalway of imaginingthe island and its culture. Rodriguez-Mangual focuses on how the discoursesof power intertwinewith the discoursesof personal and national identity.The author offersa seriousqualitative analysis of Cabrera’s texts using a multidisciplinary set of tools in which she combines cultural, post-colonial, and postmodem studieswith conceptsof anthropologyand literarytheory. She focuses on the polemic borders between anthropology and literaryfiction as textual genres. The study begins by analyzing Fernando Ortiz’s works because Rodriguez-Mangual insists in defining Cabrera’s value Book Reviews 203 mainly as that of having overcome Ortiz’s contribution to cultural studies. There is a section critiquing the most valuable and known of Ortiz’s definitions:transculturation.The author defines it as “[. ..] a process of cultural exchange in which members of two differentsocietiesassimilateculturalpatternsfrom eachother each other” @. 28) but his actual concept describes a process in which multiple cultures exist in one given society and begin to get mixed up in a progression, which results in a new national culturalidentitycomposedof elementstaken from the variousand formerly distinguishablecultures present prior to the process of transculturation.This slight differencein the concept could carry the reader to t r y to understand the Cuban process of transculturation using therelationshipbetween differentraces in United States as a pattern, which would prompt an erroneous point of view of a very different cultural phenomenon. Moreover, RodriguezMangual ’s analysis of Ortiz writings places too much emphasis on the content of Ortiz’s first ethnographic works, even though Ortiz himself acknowledgesthe strongpositivistand Lombrosian influences of this initial stage and apologizes for the use of such flawed paradigms. Another thing that can be confusing about Ortiz’s legacy is the misinterpretationof his refusal to abandon the country, after Castro’s revolution in 1959, in comparison with Cabrera’s exile. The reader could easily assign to Ortiz an attitude of acceptance and moral support towards the regime, therefore establishing an identification of his anthropological discourse and the cultural rhetoric of the Cuba government.However, this interpretationof Ortiz’s situation is not necessarily true, and in any case it is not necessary to draw attention to Cabrera’s indisputable talent and importance, something that Rodriguez Mangual easily achieves in her later chapters. The study demonstratesthe originality of Cabrera’s anthropological work by highlighting how she changes the positions in reference to subject-objectin the testimonial narrative, which depicts black Cubans as the subject and the white ones as the “other”. This narrative shift gives birth to an alternative construction of Cuban culture. The author also points out another of Cabrera’s important contributionswhen she accents how Cabrera ’s work blurs the boundaries between literaryand ethnographic discourses in a valid representationof culture. The final chapters of the book advance to the study of Cabrera’s literary...