Uniting Blacks in a Raceless Nation (eBook)

Blackness, Afro-Cuban Culture, and Mestizaje in the Prose and Poetry of Nicolas Guillen

Miguel Arnedo-Gomez (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2016
324 Seiten
Bucknell University Press (Verlag)
978-1-61148-759-6 (ISBN)

Infos

Uniting Blacks in a Raceless Nation highlights the black qualities of the prose and poetry written by the Cuban mulatto writer Nicolás Guillén, and the ways in which they reflect the conflictive racial and sociocultural heterogeneity of Cuban society.

---

The Cuban writer Nicolas Guillen 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 Guillen's work enhance black Cuban and Afro-Cuban identities. Miguel Arnedo-Gomez explores this paradox in Guillen'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-Gomez shows Guillen'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-Guillen's prose and poetry are also characterized as a struggle for a viable identity in a socio-culturally heterogeneous society.

Autor

Miguel Arnedo-Gómez is a senior lecturer in the Spanish and Latin American Studies Program at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and the author of Writing Rumba: The Afrocubanista Movement in Poetry (2006).

Inhalt

A Note on TranslationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction:Chapter One: Afro-Cuban Reformulations of Afrocubanismo and Mestizaje in 1930s Cuba Chapter Two: Racism and the Myth of Racial Equality in Nicolás Guillén’s 1930s Essays on Racial Inequality Chapter Three: Guillén’s Afro-Cuban Other and Black Intraracial Discrimination in Motivos de son Chapter Four: The Search for a Mulatto Identity in Motivos de son, “Balada de los dos abuelos,” “El apellido,” and “Son número 6”Chapter Five: Renegrifying Sóngoro Cosongo and “La canción del bongó”Chapter Six: Guillén’s Black Masculinist Visions of the Mulata’s Cross-Racial Proclivities Conclusion: Reaffirming the Afro-Cuban Subject, from Mestizaje to Heterogeneity Bibliography Index About the Author

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 12.5.2016
• Reihe/Serie: Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and Theory
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
• Schlagworte: Afro-Cuban Identity • Afro-Cuban Studies • Latin American Studies • Poetry
• ISBN-10: 1-61148-759-5 / 1611487595
• ISBN-13: 978-1-61148-759-6 / 9781611487596