Part I. Early writings -- The future of Cuban witchcraft -- Afro-Cuban cabildos -- Part II. Instrument essays -- Makuta -- Ararâa drums -- The Chekerâe, âAgbe, or Aggèuâe -- The conga -- Part III. Ethnographic essays -- Kongo traditions -- The religious music of black Cuban Yorubas -- The "tragedy" of the äNâaänigos -- Satirical and commercial song
While Fernando Ortiz's contribution to our understanding of Cuba and Latin America more generally has been widely recognized since the 1940s, recently there has been renewed interest in this scholar and activist who made lasting contributions to a staggering array of fields. This book is the first work in English to reassess Ortiz's vast intellectual universe. Essays in this volume analyze and celebrate his contribution to scholarship in Cuban history, the social sciences--notably anthropology--and law, religion and national identity, literature, and music. Presenting Ortiz's seminal thinking, including his profoundly influential concept of 'transculturation', Cuban Counterpoints explores the bold new perspectives that he brought to bear on Cuban society. Much of his most challenging and provocative thinking--which embraced simultaneity, conflict, inherent contradiction and hybridity--has remarkable relevance for current debates about Latin America's complex and evolving societies.
Origins of Cuban Music and Dance: Changüí is the first in-depth study of changüí, a style of music and dance in Guantánamo, Cuba. Changüí is analogous to blues in the United States and is a crucible of Cuban Creole culture. Benjamin Lapidus describes changüí and its relationship to the roots of son, Cuba's national genre and the style of music that contributed to the development of salsa, in Eastern Cuba. He also highlights the connections between Afro-Haitian music and Cuban popular music through changüí, connections with the Caribbean that have been largely overlooked in the past. After an initial historical discussion about the region of Guantánamo and the inter-connectedness of its various musical styles with a focus on changüí, Lapidus discusses the technical aspects of the genre as practiced within the region and beyond. He considers the socio-historical importance of its lyrics, presenting numerous musical transcriptions that explain how the music is structured, as well as providing background stories to songs. In a chapter unique to this book and a first in Cuban musicology and ethnography, Lapidus describes years of festivals and musical competitions to show how local musical identity takes shape, particularly when encountering national narratives of music history. The volume concludes with a comparison between changüí and son, as well as a bibliography, discography, and videography.
This work describes how, in Brazil, Catholic priests and the colonial government as early as 1573 allowed and encouraged the African slaves to celebrate Epiphany and the Festival of the Three Kings.
Lydia Cabrera (1900-1991), an upper-class white Cuban intellectual, spent many years traveling through Cuba collecting oral histories, stories, and music from Cubans of African descent. Her work is commonly viewed as an extension of the work of her famous brother-in-law, Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, who initiated the study of Afro-Cubans and the concept of transculturation. Here, Edna Rodriguez-Mangual challenges this perspective, proposing that Cabrera's work offers an alternative to the hegemonizing national myth of Cuba articulated by Ortiz and others. Rodriguez-Mangual examines Cabrera's ethnographic essays and short stories in context. By blurring fact and fiction, anthropology and literature, Cabrera defied the scientific discourse used by other anthropologists. She wrote of Afro-Cubans not as objects but as subjects, and in her writings, whiteness, instead of blackness, is gazed upon as the "other." As Rodriguez-Mangual demonstrates, Cabrera rewrote the history of Cuba and its culture through imaginative means, calling into question the empirical basis of anthropology and placing Afro-Cuban contributions at the center of the literature that describes the Cuban nation and its national identity.
This volume approaches literary representations of post and neocolonialism by combining their readings with respective theoretical configurations. The aim is to cast light upon common characteristics of contemporary texts from around the world that deal with processes of colonization. Based on the epistemic discourses of postimperialism/postcolonialism, globalization, and world literature, the volume’s chapters bring together international scholars from various disciplines in the Humanities, including Comparative Cultural Studies, Slavic, Romance, German, and African Studies. The main concern of the contributions is to conceptualize an autonomous category of a world literature of the colonial, going well beyond established classifications according to single languages or center-periphery dichotomies.
Tracking Cuban history from 1492 to the present, The Cuba Reader includes more than one hundred selections that present myriad perspectives on Cuba's history, culture, and politics. The volume foregrounds the experience of Cubans from all walks of life, including slaves, prostitutes, doctors, activists, and historians. Combining songs, poetry, fiction, journalism, political speeches, and many other types of documents, this revised and updated second edition of The Cuba Reader contains over twenty new selections that explore the changes and continuities in Cuba since Fidel Castro stepped down from power in 2006. For students, travelers, and all those who want to know more about the island nation just ninety miles south of Florida, The Cuba Reader is an invaluable introduction.
Ángel Rama was one of twentieth-century Latin America's most distinguished men of letters. Writing across Cultures is his comprehensive analysis of the varied sources of Latin American literature. Originally published in 1982, the book links Rama's work on Spanish American modernism with his arguments about the innovative nature of regionalist literature, and it foregrounds his thinking about the close relationship between literary movements, such as modernism or regionalism, and global trends in social and economic development. In Writing across Cultures, Rama extends the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz's theory of transculturation far beyond Cuba, bringing it to bear on regional cultures across Latin America, where new cultural arrangements have been forming among indigenous, African, and European societies for the better part of five centuries. Rama applies this concept to the work of the Peruvian novelist, poet, and anthropologist José María Arguedas, whose writing drew on both Spanish and Quechua, Peru's two major languages and, by extension, cultures. Rama considered Arguedas's novel Los ríos profundos (Deep Rivers) to be the most accomplished example of narrative transculturation in Latin America. Writing across Cultures is the second of Rama's books to be translated into English.
This entertaining history of Cuba and its music begins with the collision of Spain and Africa and continues through the era of Miguelito Valdes, Arsenio Rodriguez, Benny More, and Perez Prado. It offers a behind-the-scenes examination of music from a Cuban point of view, unearthing surprising, provocative connections and making the case that Cuba was fundamental to the evolution of music in the New World. The ways in which the music of black slaves transformed 16th-century Europe, how the "claves" appeared, and how Cuban music influenced ragtime, jazz, and rhythm and blues are revealed. Music lovers will follow this journey from Andalucia, the Congo, the Calabar, Dahomey, and Yorubaland via Cuba to Mexico, Puerto Rico, Saint-Domingue, New Orleans, New York, and Miami. The music is placed in a historical context that considers the complexities of the slave trade; Cuba's relationship to the United States; its revolutionary political traditions; the music of Santeria, Palo, Abakua, and Vodu; and much more.
