Afro-Cuban Costumbrismo

Afro-Cuban Costumbrismo PDF Author: Rafael Ocasio
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813043670
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Costumbrismo, which refers to depictions of life in Latin America during the nineteenth century, introduced some of the earliest black themes in Cuban literature. Rafael Ocasio delves into this literature to offer up a new perspective on the development of Cuban identity, as influenced by black culture and religion, during the sugar cane boom. Comments about the slave trade and the treatment of slaves were often censored in Cuban publications; nevertheless white Costumbrista writers reported on a vast catalogue of stereotypes, religious beliefs, and musical folklore, and on rich African traditions in major Cuban cities. Exploring rare and seldom discussed nineteenth-century texts, Ocasio offers insight into the nuances of black representation in Costumbrismo while analyzing authors such as Suárez y Romero, an abolitionist who wrote from the perspective of a plantation owner. Afro-Cuban Costumbrismo expands the idea of what texts constitute Costumbrismo and debunks the traditional notion that this writing reveals little about the Afro-Cuban experience. The result is a novel examination of how white writers' representations of black culture heavily inform our current understanding of nineteenth-century Afro-Cuban culture and national identity.

Afro-Cuban Costumbrismo

Afro-Cuban Costumbrismo PDF Author: Rafael Ocasio
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813043670
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Costumbrismo, which refers to depictions of life in Latin America during the nineteenth century, introduced some of the earliest black themes in Cuban literature. Rafael Ocasio delves into this literature to offer up a new perspective on the development of Cuban identity, as influenced by black culture and religion, during the sugar cane boom. Comments about the slave trade and the treatment of slaves were often censored in Cuban publications; nevertheless white Costumbrista writers reported on a vast catalogue of stereotypes, religious beliefs, and musical folklore, and on rich African traditions in major Cuban cities. Exploring rare and seldom discussed nineteenth-century texts, Ocasio offers insight into the nuances of black representation in Costumbrismo while analyzing authors such as Suárez y Romero, an abolitionist who wrote from the perspective of a plantation owner. Afro-Cuban Costumbrismo expands the idea of what texts constitute Costumbrismo and debunks the traditional notion that this writing reveals little about the Afro-Cuban experience. The result is a novel examination of how white writers' representations of black culture heavily inform our current understanding of nineteenth-century Afro-Cuban culture and national identity.

Afro-Cuban Costumbrismo

Afro-Cuban Costumbrismo PDF Author: Rafael Ocasio
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813041643
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
A broad examination of representations of Afro-Cuban religious themes in literature and popular arts, focusing on white authors of Costumbrismo literature represented black culture.

Performing Afro-Cuba

Performing Afro-Cuba PDF Author: Kristina Wirtz
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022611919X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Visitors to Cuba will notice that Afro-Cuban figures and references are everywhere: in popular music and folklore shows, paintings and dolls of Santería saints in airport shops, and even restaurants with plantation themes. In Performing Afro-Cuba, Kristina Wirtz examines how the animation of Cuba’s colonial past and African heritage through such figures and performances not only reflects but also shapes the Cuban experience of Blackness. She also investigates how this process operates at different spatial and temporal scales—from the immediate present to the imagined past, from the barrio to the socialist state. Wirtz analyzes a variety of performances and the ways they construct Cuban racial and historical imaginations. She offers a sophisticated view of performance as enacting diverse revolutionary ideals, religious notions, and racial identity politics, and she outlines how these concepts play out in the ongoing institutionalization of folklore as an official, even state-sponsored, category. Employing Bakhtin’s concept of “chronotopes”—the semiotic construction of space-time—she examines the roles of voice, temporality, embodiment, imagery, and memory in the racializing process. The result is a deftly balanced study that marries racial studies, performance studies, anthropology, and semiotics to explore the nature of race as a cultural sign, one that is always in process, always shifting.

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.

Cuba

Cuba PDF Author: Louis A. Pérez
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199301441
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
Spanning the history of the island from pre-Columbian times to the present, this highly acclaimed survey examines Cuba's political and economic development within the context of its international relations and continuing struggle for self-determination. The dualism that emerged in Cuban ideology--between liberal constructs of patria and radical formulations of nationality--is fully investigated as a source of both national tension and competing notions of liberty, equality, and justice. Author Louis A. Pérez, Jr., integrates local and provincial developments with issues of class, race, and gender to give students a full and fascinating account of Cuba's history, focusing on its struggle for nationality.

Afro-Asian Connections in Latin America and the Caribbean

Afro-Asian Connections in Latin America and the Caribbean PDF Author: Luisa Marcela Ossa
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498587097
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Afro-Asian Connections in Latin America and the Caribbean explores the connections between people of Asian and African descent in Latin America and the Caribbean. Although their journeys started from different points of origin, spanning two separate oceans, their point of contact in this hemisphere brought them together under a hegemonic system that would treat these seemingly disparate continental ancestries as one. Historically, an overwhelming majority of people of African and Asian descent were brought to the Americas as sources of labor to uphold the plantation, agrarian economies leading to complex relationships and interactions. The contributions to this collection examine various aspects of these connections. The authors bring to the forefront perspectives regarding history, literature, art, and religion and engage how they are manifested in these Afro-Asian relationships and interactions. They investigate what has received little academic engagement outside the acknowledgement that there are groups who are of African and Asian descent. In regard to their relationships with the dominant Europeanized center, references to both groups typically only view them as singular entities. What this interdisciplinary collection presents is a more cohesive approach that strives to place them at the center together and view their relationships in their historical contexts.

Tampa

Tampa PDF Author: Wenceslao Gálvez y Delmonte
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813057647
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
In 1896, Wenceslao Gálvez y Delmonte fled the violence of Cuba’s war for independence and settled in Tampa. He soon made his new home the focus of a work of costumbrismo, the Spanish-language genre built on closely observing the everyday manners and customs of a place. Translated here into English, Gálvez’s narrative mixes evocative descriptions with charming commentary to bring to life the early Cuban exile communities in Ybor City and West Tampa. The writer’s sharp eye finds the local characters, the barber shops and electric streetcars, the city landmarks and new Cuban enclaves. One day, Gálvez offers his thoughts on the pro-independence activities of community leaders like Martín Herrera and Fernando Figuerdo. On another, our exiled bourgeois intellectual author wryly recounts his new life as a door-to-door salesman and lector reading aloud to workers in a cigar factory. This scholarly edition includes photographs and newspaper clippings, a foreword on Gálvez’s extraordinary pre-exile years, extensive notes to the translation, and a wealth of other supplementary material putting the author’s life and work in context. A volume in the series New World Diasporas, edited by Kevin A. Yelvington

What Postcolonial Theory Doesn't Say

What Postcolonial Theory Doesn't Say PDF Author: Anna Bernard
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113509618X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
This book reclaims postcolonial theory, addressing persistent limitations in the geographical, disciplinary, and methodological assumptions of its dominant formations. It emerges, however, from an investment in the future of postcolonial studies and a commitment to its basic premise: namely, that literature and culture are fundamental to the response to structures of colonial and imperial domination. To a certain extent, postcolonial theory is a victim of its own success, not least because of the institutionalization of the insights that it has enabled. Now that these insights no longer seem new, it is hard to know what the field should address beyond its general commitments. Yet the renewal of popular anti-imperial energies across the globe provides an important opportunity to reassert the political and theoretical value of the postcolonial as a comparative, interdisciplinary, and oppositional paradigm. This collection makes a claim for what postcolonial theory can say through the work of scholars articulating what it still cannot or will not say. It explores ideas that a more aesthetically sophisticated postcolonial theory might be able to address, focusing on questions of visibility, performance, and literariness. Contributors highlight some of the shortcomings of current postcolonial theory in relation to contemporary political developments such as Zimbabwean land reform, postcommunism, and the economic rise of Asia. Finally, they address the disciplinary, geographical, and methodological exclusions from postcolonial studies through a detailed focus on new disciplinary directions (management studies, international relations, disaster studies), overlooked locations and perspectives (Palestine, Weimar Germany, the commons), and the necessity of materialist analysis for understanding both the contemporary world and world literary systems.

The Sun of Jesús del Monte

The Sun of Jesús del Monte PDF Author: Andrés Avelino de Orihuela
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813946220
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 426

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Book Description
Translated into English for the first time, Andrés Avelino de Orihuela’s El Sol de Jesús del Monte is a landmark Cuban antislavery novel. Published originally in 1852, the same year as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (which Orihuela had translated into Spanish), it provides an uncompromising critique of discourses of white superiority and an endorsement of equality for free people of color. Despite its historical and literary value, The Sun of Jesús del Monte is a long-neglected text, languishing for 150 years until its republication in 2008 in the original Spanish. The Sun of Jesús del Monte is the only Cuban novel of its time to focus on La Escalera, or the Ladder Rebellion, a major anticolonial and slave insurrection of nineteenth-century Cuba that shook the world’s wealthiest colony in 1843–44. It is also the only Cuban novel of its time to take direct aim at white privilege and unsparingly denounce the oppression of free people of color that intensified after the insurrection. This new critical edition—featuring an invaluable, contextualizing introduction and afterword in addition to the new English translation—offers readers the most detailed portrait of the everyday lives and plight of free people of color in Cuba in any novel up to the 1850s. Writing the Early Americas

El Monte

El Monte PDF Author: Lydia Cabrera
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478023341
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 606

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Book Description
First published in Cuba in 1954 and appearing here in English for the first time, Lydia Cabrera’s El Monte is a foundational and iconic study of Afro-Cuban religious and cultural traditions. Drawing on conversations with elderly Afro-Cuban priests who were one or two generations away from the transatlantic slave trade, Cabrera combines ethnography, history, folklore, literature, and botany to provide a panoramic account of the multifaceted influence of Afro-Atlantic cultures in Cuba. Cabrera details the natural and spiritual landscape of the Cuban monte (forest, wilderness) and discusses hundreds of herbs and the constellations of deities, sacred rites, and knowledge that envelop them. The result is a complex spiritual and medicinal architecture of Afro-Cuban cultures. This new edition of what is often referred to as “the Santería bible” includes a new foreword, introduction, and translator notes. As a seminal work in the study of the African diaspora that has profoundly impacted numerous fields, Cabrera’s magnum opus is essential for scholars, activists, and religious devotees of Afro-Cuban traditions alike.