Blackface Cuba, 1840-1895

Blackface Cuba, 1840-1895

Author: Jill Lane

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2005-06-22

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13:

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This is a critical history of the relation between racial impersonation, national sentiment, and the emergence of an anticolonial public sphere in 19th century Cuba.


Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection

Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection

Author: Matthew Pettway

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2019-12-30

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 1496825004

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Juan Francisco Manzano and Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés (Plácido) were perhaps the most important and innovative Cuban writers of African descent during the Spanish colonial era. Both nineteenth-century authors used Catholicism as a symbolic language for African-inspired spirituality. Likewise, Plácido and Manzano subverted the popular imagery of neoclassicism and Romanticism in order to envision black freedom in the tradition of the Haitian Revolution. Plácido and Manzano envisioned emancipation through the lens of African spirituality, a transformative moment in the history of Cuban letters. Matthew Pettway examines how the portrayal of African ideas of spirit and cosmos in otherwise conventional texts recur throughout early Cuban literature and became the basis for Manzano and Plácido’s antislavery philosophy. The portrayal of African-Atlantic religious ideas spurned the elite rationale that literature ought to be a barometer of highbrow cultural progress. Cuban debates about freedom and selfhood were never the exclusive domain of the white Creole elite. Pettway’s emphasis on African-inspired spirituality as a source of knowledge and a means to sacred authority for black Cuban writers deepens our understanding of Manzano and Plácido not as mere imitators but as aesthetic and political pioneers. As Pettway suggests, black Latin American authors did not abandon their African religious heritage to assimilate wholesale to the Catholic Church. By recognizing the wisdom of African ancestors, they procured power in the struggle for black liberation.


Searching for Madre Matiana

Searching for Madre Matiana

Author: Edward Wright-Rios

Publisher: UNM Press

Published: 2014-12-01

Total Pages: 407

ISBN-13: 082634660X

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In the mid-nineteenth century prophetic visions attributed to a woman named Madre Matiana roiled Mexican society. Pamphlets of the time proclaimed that decades earlier a humble laywoman foresaw the nation’s calamitous destiny—foreign invasion, widespread misery, and chronic civil strife. The revelations, however, pinpointed the cause of Mexico’s struggles: God was punishing the nation for embracing blasphemous secularism. Responses ranged from pious alarm to incredulous scorn. Although most likely a fiction cooked up amid the era’s culture wars, Madre Matiana’s persona nevertheless endured. In fact, her predictions remained influential well into the twentieth century as society debated the nature of popular culture, the crux of modern nationhood, and the role of women, especially religious women. Here Edward Wright-Rios examines this much-maligned—and sometimes celebrated—character and her position in the development of a nation.


Riot and Rebellion in Mexico

Riot and Rebellion in Mexico

Author: Ana Sabau

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2022-02-08

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 1477324224

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Many scholars assert that Mexico’s complex racial hierarchy, inherited from Spanish colonialism, became obsolete by the turn of the nineteenth century as class-based distinctions became more prominent and a largely mestizo population emerged. But the residues of the colonial caste system did not simply dissolve after Mexico gained independence. Rather, Ana Sabau argues, ever-present fears of racial uprising among elites and authorities led to persistent governmental techniques and ideologies designed to separate and control people based on their perceived racial status, as well as to the implementation of projects for development in fringe areas of the country. Riot and Rebellion in Mexico traces this race-based narrative through three historical flashpoints: the Bajío riots, the Haitian Revolution, and the Yucatan’s caste war. Sabau shows how rebellions were treated as racially motivated events rather than political acts and how the racialization of popular and indigenous sectors coincided with the construction of “whiteness” in Mexico. Drawing on diverse primary sources, Sabau demonstrates how the race war paradigm was mobilized in foreign and domestic affairs and reveals the foundations of a racial state and racially stratified society that persist today.


Performance in the Borderlands

Performance in the Borderlands

Author: R. Rivera-Servera

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2010-11-17

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 0230294553

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A border is a force of containment that inspires dreams of being overcome and crossed; motivates bodies to climb over; and threatens physical harm. This book critically examines a range of cultural performances produced in relation to the tensions and movements of/about the borders dividing North America, including the Caribbean.


Racial Migrations

Racial Migrations

Author: Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2021-05-04

Total Pages: 403

ISBN-13: 0691218374

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In the late nineteenth century, a small group of Cubans and Puerto Ricans of African descent settled in the segregated tenements of New York City. At an immigrant educational society in Greenwich Village, these early Afro-Latino New Yorkers taught themselves to be poets, journalists, and revolutionaries. At the same time, these individuals--including Rafael Serra, a cigar maker, writer, and politician; Sotero Figueroa, a typesetter, editor, and publisher; and Gertrudis Heredia, one of the first women of African descent to study midwifery at the University of Havana--built a political network and articulated an ideal of revolutionary nationalism centered on the projects of racial and social justice. These efforts were critical to the poet and diplomat José Martí’s writings about race and his bid for leadership among Cuban exiles, and to the later struggle to create space for black political participation in the Cuban Republic.


The Future is Now

The Future is Now

Author: Vanessa K. Valdés

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2012-01-17

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 144383677X

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The Future is Now: A New Look at African Diaspora Studies is an exciting collection of essays representative of new voices in this ever-expanding field. Writing in English, Spanish, French, and Haitian Creole, the volume’s contributors look at the fields of art, literature, film, and music. From the Hispanophone, Francophone, and Anglophone Caribbean to the United States and Europe, the scholars here interrogate themes of memory, power, gender, identity, race, and religion. In so doing, they uncover forgotten episodes of history previously lost to hegemonic tellings of the past. Here, readers will find studies on Haitian documentary, Puerto Rican art, Trinidadian calypso, Colombian poetry, the African-American novel, and African photography and collage. The Future Is Now serves as a celebration of the contributions made by peoples of African descent, providing a glimpse at the breadth of cultural offerings to be found throughout the African Diaspora in the Americas and Europe.


Afro-Latin@s in Movement

Afro-Latin@s in Movement

Author: Petra R. Rivera-Rideau

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-06-29

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 1137598743

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Through a collection of theoretically engaging and empirically grounded texts, this book examines African-descended populations in Latin America and Afro-Latin@s in the United States in order to explore questions of black identity and representation, transnationalism, and diaspora in the Americas.


Revolutionary Masculinity and Racial Inequality

Revolutionary Masculinity and Racial Inequality

Author: Bonnie A. Lucero

Publisher: University of New Mexico Press

Published: 2021-12-01

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 0826360106

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One of the most paradoxical aspects of Cuban history is the coexistence of national myths of racial harmony with lived experiences of racial inequality. Here a historian addresses this issue by examining the ways soldiers and politicians coded their discussions of race in ideas of masculinity during Cuba’s transition from colony to republic. Cuban insurgents, the author shows, rarely mentioned race outright. Instead, they often expressed their attitudes toward racial hierarchy through distinctly gendered language—revolutionary masculinity. By examining the relationship between historical experiences of race and discourses of masculinity, Lucero advances understandings about how racial exclusion functioned in a supposedly raceless society. Revolutionary masculinity, she shows, outwardly reinforced the centrality of color blindness to Cuban ideals of manhood at the same time as it perpetuated exclusion of Cubans of African descent from positions of authority.