Carnival and National Identity in the Poetry of Afrocubanismo

Carnival and National Identity in the Poetry of Afrocubanismo PDF Author: Thomas F. Anderson
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813063175
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
“Traces the ways that Cuban poets dealt with issues of national identity, reflected in their views of Afrocubanismo, often in response to historical changes in public and official opinions on the most visual manifestation of Afro-Cuban culture: carnival.”—Choice “Uncovers a wealth of literary texts, primarily poems, that chart the impact of las comparsas, Afro-Cuban festival dances, on mainstream Cuban life. . . . Investigates the ways in which the relationship between racial and ethnic divisions, and between castes and classes, created a literary movement full to the brim with emotional and sensational resonances.”—Wasafiri “Underscores the sociopolitical and historical contexts of these poems which have shaped the literary production and message of the Afrocubanismo movement. . . . A tour de force.”—Callaloo “Successfully plumbs the position of the Afro-Cuban performer and brings into sharp relief the way politicians historically sought to affect all elements of Cuban culture.”—New West Indian Guide Carnival and National Identity in the Poetry of Afrocubanismo offers thought-provoking new readings of poems by seminal Cuban poets, demonstrating how their writings affected the development of a recognizable Afro-Cuban identity. Thomas Anderson examines the long-running debate between the proponents of Afro-Cuban cultural manifestations and the predominantly white Cuban intelligentsia, who viewed these traditions as “backward” and counter to the interests of the young Republic. Including analyses of the work of Felipe Pichardo Moya, Alejo Carpentier, Nicolás Guillén, Emilio Ballagas, José Zacarías Tallet, Felix B. Caignet, Marcelino Arozarena, and Alfonso Camín, this rigorous, interdisciplinary volume offers a fresh look at the canon of Afrocubanismo and offers surprising insights into Cuban culture during the early years of the Republic.

Carnival and National Identity in the Poetry of Afrocubanismo

Carnival and National Identity in the Poetry of Afrocubanismo PDF Author: Thomas F. Anderson
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813063175
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Get Book Here

Book Description
“Traces the ways that Cuban poets dealt with issues of national identity, reflected in their views of Afrocubanismo, often in response to historical changes in public and official opinions on the most visual manifestation of Afro-Cuban culture: carnival.”—Choice “Uncovers a wealth of literary texts, primarily poems, that chart the impact of las comparsas, Afro-Cuban festival dances, on mainstream Cuban life. . . . Investigates the ways in which the relationship between racial and ethnic divisions, and between castes and classes, created a literary movement full to the brim with emotional and sensational resonances.”—Wasafiri “Underscores the sociopolitical and historical contexts of these poems which have shaped the literary production and message of the Afrocubanismo movement. . . . A tour de force.”—Callaloo “Successfully plumbs the position of the Afro-Cuban performer and brings into sharp relief the way politicians historically sought to affect all elements of Cuban culture.”—New West Indian Guide Carnival and National Identity in the Poetry of Afrocubanismo offers thought-provoking new readings of poems by seminal Cuban poets, demonstrating how their writings affected the development of a recognizable Afro-Cuban identity. Thomas Anderson examines the long-running debate between the proponents of Afro-Cuban cultural manifestations and the predominantly white Cuban intelligentsia, who viewed these traditions as “backward” and counter to the interests of the young Republic. Including analyses of the work of Felipe Pichardo Moya, Alejo Carpentier, Nicolás Guillén, Emilio Ballagas, José Zacarías Tallet, Felix B. Caignet, Marcelino Arozarena, and Alfonso Camín, this rigorous, interdisciplinary volume offers a fresh look at the canon of Afrocubanismo and offers surprising insights into Cuban culture during the early years of the Republic.

Carnival and National Identity in the Poetry of Afrocubanismo

Carnival and National Identity in the Poetry of Afrocubanismo PDF Author: Thomas F. Anderson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813035581
Category : Black people in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The poetry associated with Afrocubanismo has been of great interest to academics since the movement began in the late 1920s. Thomas Anderson's detailed analysis infuses new life into the study of these remarkable works. Focusing on the representations of carnival and its comparsas (carnival bands and music), Carnival and National Identity in the Poetry of Afrocubanismo offers thought-provoking new readings of poems by seminal Cuban poets, demonstrating how their writings on and about these traditions both contributed to and detracted from the development of a recognizable Afro-Cuban identity. This volume is the first to examine, from a literary perspective, the long-running debate between the proponents of Afro-Cuban cultural manifestations and the predominantly white Cuban intelligentsia who viewed these traditions as "backward" and counter to the interests of the young Republic. Including analyses of the work of Felipe Pichardo Moya, Alejo Carpentier, Nicolás Guillén, Emilio Ballagas, José Zacarías Tallet, Felix B. Caignet, Marcelino Arozarena, and Alfonso Camín, this rigorous, interdisciplinary volume offers a fresh look at the canon of Afrocubanismo and offers surprising insights into Cuban culture during the early years of the Republic.

Uniting Blacks in a Raceless Nation

Uniting Blacks in a Raceless Nation PDF Author: Miguel Arnedo-Gómez
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 1611487595
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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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.

Ilê Aiyê in Brazil and the Reinvention of Africa

Ilê Aiyê in Brazil and the Reinvention of Africa PDF Author: Niyi Afolabi
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137598700
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Ilê Aiyê's unifying identity politics through Afro-Carnival performance, is embedded in its dialectical relationship with the rest of Brazil as it takes ownership of its oppressed status by striving for racial equality and economic empowerment. Against this complex background, performative theory offers significant new meanings. In ritualistically integrating Bakhtinian categories of free interaction, eccentric behavior, carnivalistic misalliances, and the sacrilegious, Ilê Aiyê anchors its social discourse on showcasing the black race as a critical agency of beauty, pride, wisdom, subversion, and negotiation. Ilê Aiyê carnival is not only racially conscious, it heightens the conflicts by dislocating the very establishment that invests in its cultural politics. In fusing the sacred, the profane, the performative, the musical, with the political, Ilê Aiyê succeeds in indicting racism, ironically sacrificing the very power it pursues. Despite these limitations, Ilê Aiyê creatively engages alternative dialogues on Brazilian politics through sponsored performances across transnational borders.

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

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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.

Writing the Caribbean in Magazine Time

Writing the Caribbean in Magazine Time PDF Author: Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1978822421
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
This book demonstrates the material, political, and aesthetic dimensions of Pan-Caribbean literary discourse in magazine texts by Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, Nicolás Guillén, José Lezama Lima, Alejo Carpentier, George Lamming, Derek Walcott and their contemporaries. Thus far, the canonical centrality of literary magazines to Caribbean literature, politics, and social theory has been obscured. Up against the global book industry, Caribbean literary magazines have waged a guerrilla pursuit for the terms of Caribbean representation.

Afro-Latin American Studies

Afro-Latin American Studies PDF Author: Alejandro de la Fuente
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107177626
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 663

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Book Description
Examines the full range of humanities and social science scholarship on people of African descent in Latin America.

Nature, Culture, and Race in Colonial Cuba

Nature, Culture, and Race in Colonial Cuba PDF Author: Lee Sessions
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300277687
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
A new and necessary examination of how nineteenth-century Cuban white elites viewed the natural world, material culture, and political power as intertwined In the decades before the Cuban wars of independence, white elites exploited the island’s natural history and culture to redefine racial identity and reassert authority. These practices occurred in the face of challenges to their political power from Cubans of mixed race and as Cuba’s dependence on sugar led to ecological and economic precarity. Lee Sessions uses close visual analysis to investigate how white elites wielded power by manipulating material culture, placing in conversation for the first time the natural history museums, botanical gardens, and thousands of paintings, drawings, and prints produced in and about Cuba from 1820 to 1860. This important and novel book explores how groups used material culture to imagine their own future at a moment when racial and political dynamics were changing rapidly, while facing an ecological disaster of unimaginable scale.

Crossing Waters

Crossing Waters PDF Author: Marisel C. Moreno
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 147732562X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 421

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Book Description
2023 Honorable Mention, Isis Duarte Book Prize, Haiti/ Dominican Republic section (LASA) 2023 Winner, Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Book Award, Caribbean Studies Association An innovative study of the artistic representations of undocumented migration within the Hispanophone Caribbean Debates over the undocumented migration of Latin Americans invariably focus on the southern US border, but most migrants never cross that arbitrary line. Instead, many travel, via water, among the Caribbean islands. The first study to examine literary and artistic representations of undocumented migration within the Hispanophone Caribbean, Crossing Waters relates a journey that remains silenced and largely unknown. Analyzing works by novelists, short-story writers, poets, and visual artists replete with references to drowning and echoes of the Middle Passage, Marisel Moreno shines a spotlight on the plight that these migrants face. In some cases, Puerto Rico takes on a new role as a stepping-stone to the continental United States and the society migrants will join there. Meanwhile the land border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the only terrestrial border in the Hispanophone Caribbean, emerges as a complex space within this cartography of borders. And while the Border Patrol occupies US headlines, the Coast Guard occupies the nightmares of refugees. An untold story filled with beauty, possibility, and sorrow, Crossing Waters encourages us to rethink the geography and experience of undocumented migration and the role that the Caribbean archipelago plays as a border zone.

Nationalizing Blackness

Nationalizing Blackness PDF Author: Robin Dale Moore
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 9780822971856
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
The 1920s saw the birth of the tango, the "jazz craze," bohemian Paris, the Harlem Renaissance, and the primitivists. It was a time of fundamental change in the music of nearly all Western countries, including Cuba. Significant concessions to blue-collar and non-Western aesthetics began on a massive scale, making artistic expression more democratic.In Cuba, from about 1927 through the late thirties, an Afrocubanophile frenzy seized the public. Strong nationalist sentiments arose at this time, and the country embraced afrocubanismo as a means of expressing such feelings. Black street culture became associated with cubanidad (Cubanness) and a movement to merge once distinct systems of language, religion, and artistic expression into a collective of national identity.Nationalizing Blackness uses the music of the 1920s and 1930s to examine Cuban society as it begins to embrace Afrocuban culture. Moore examines the public debate over "degenerate Africanisms" associated with comparas or carnival bands; similar controversies associated with son music; the history of blackface theater shows; the rise of afrocubanismo in the context of anti-imperialist nationalism and revolution against Gerardo Machado; the history of cabaret rumba; an overview of poetry, painting, and music inspired by Afrocuban street culture; and reactions of the black Cuban middle classes to afrocubanismo. He has collected numerous illustrations of early twentieth-century performers in Havana, many included in this book.Nationalizing Blackness represents one of the first politicized studies of twentieth-century culture in Cuba. It demonstrates how music can function as the center of racial and cultural conflict during the formation of a national identity.