Daughters of the Stone
Daughters of the Stone

Author: Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2009-09-01

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 1429918527

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Finalist for the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers It is the mid-1800s. Fela, taken from Africa, is working at her second sugar plantation in colonial Puerto Rico, where her mistress is only too happy to benefit from her impressive embroidery skills. But Fela has a secret. Before she and her husband were separated and sold into slavery, they performed a tribal ceremony in which they poured the essence of their unborn child into a very special stone. Fela keeps the stone with her, waiting for the chance to finish what she started. When the plantation owner approaches her, Fela sees a better opportunity for her child, and allows the man to act out his desire. Such is the beginning of a line of daughters connected by their intense love for one another, and the stories of a lost land. Mati, a powerful healer and noted craftswoman, is grounded in a life that is disappearing in a quickly changing world. Concha, unsure of her place, doesn't realize the price she will pay for rejecting her past. Elena, modern and educated, tries to navigate between two cultures, moving to the United States, where she will struggle to keep her family together. Carisa turns to the past for wisdom and strength when her life in New York falls apart. The stone becomes meaningful to each of the women, pulling them through times of crisis and ultimately connecting them to one another. Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa shows great skill and warmth in the telling of this heartbreaking, inspirational story about mothers and daughters, and the ways in which they hurt and save one another.

Black Writing, Culture, and the State in Latin America
Black Writing, Culture, and the State in Latin America

Author: Jerome C. Branche

Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press

Published: 2021-04-30

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 0826503721

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Imagine the tension that existed between the emerging nations and governments throughout the Latin American world and the cultural life of former enslaved Africans and their descendants. A world of cultural production, in the form of literature, poetry, art, music, and eventually film, would often simultaneously contravene or cooperate with the newly established order of Latin American nations negotiating independence and a new political and cultural balance. In Black Writing, Culture, and the State in Latin America, Jerome Branche presents the reader with the complex landscape of art and literature among Afro-Hispanic and Latin artists. Branche and his contributors describe individuals such as Juan Francisco Manzano, who wrote an autobiography on the slave experience in Cuba during the nineteenth century. The reader finds a thriving Afro-Hispanic theatrical presence throughout Latin America and even across the Atlantic. The role of black women in poetry and literature comes to the forefront in the Caribbean, presenting a powerful reminder of the diversity that defines the region. All too often, the disciplines of film studies, literary criticism, and art history ignore the opportunity to collaborate in a dialogue. Branche and his contributors present a unified approach, however, suggesting that cultural production should not be viewed narrowly, especially when studying the achievements of the Afro-Latin world.

Women Warriors of the Afro-Latina Diaspora
Women Warriors of the Afro-Latina Diaspora

Author: Marta Moreno Vega

Publisher: Arte Publico Press

Published: 2012-04-30

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 155885746X

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Hers is one of eleven essays and four poems included in this volume in which Latina women of African descent share their stories. The authors included are from all over Latin America-Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Panama, Puerto Rico, Venezuela-and the United States. They write about the African diaspora and issues such as colonialism, oppression and disenfranchisement. Diva Moreira, a Brazilian, writes that she experienced racism and humiliation at a very young age. The worst experience, she remembers, was her mother's bosses' conviction that Diva didn't need to go to school after the fourth grade, "because blacks don't need to study more than that."

Writing the Afro-Hispanic
Writing the Afro-Hispanic

Author: Conrad James

Publisher: Adonis & Abbey Publishers Ltd

Published: 2012-02-15

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 1912234203

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The impact of the African Diaspora in Spanish America is far greater than is understood or acknowledged in the English speaking world. Connected initially to the Spanish-Caribbean through trans-Atlantic slavery, Africa is so deeply ingrained in the biology and culture of these countries that, in the words of the Cuban poet Nicolas Guillen, it would require the work of a 'miniaturist to disentangle that hieroglyph.' Through complex explorations of narratives of Spanish Blacks in the Caribbean this collection of essays builds critically on mid and late twentieth century Afro-Hispanist scholarship and thereby amplifies the terms in which Africans in the Americas are generally discussed. Each of these essays deals with a pivotal aspect of the African experience in the Spanish speaking Caribbean from the period of slavery to the present day. The essays focus on Black African cultures in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic as well as in the circum Caribbean areas of Mexico and Colombia. In the process they cover a vast and highly involved range of issues including abolition and the politics of anti-slavery rhetoric, African women's political activism, performance poetry and female embodiment of the Black Diaspora, the Cuban Revolution and its investment in African liberation struggles, race and intra-Caribbean migration, ritualised spirituality and African healing practices among others. Through their investigation of both official and popular cultures in the Caribbean not only do the essays in this volume show the indispensable functions of African cultural capital in the Spanish speaking Caribbean but they also underline the multiple demographic, socio-political and institutional imperatives that are at stake in considering contemporary understandings of the African Diaspora.

Afro-Latin American Studies
Afro-Latin American Studies

Author: Alejandro de la Fuente

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-04-26

Total Pages: 663

ISBN-13: 1316832325

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Alejandro de la Fuente and George Reid Andrews offer the first systematic, book-length survey of humanities and social science scholarship on the exciting field of Afro-Latin American studies. Organized by topic, these essays synthesize and present the current state of knowledge on a broad variety of topics, including Afro-Latin American music, religions, literature, art history, political thought, social movements, legal history, environmental history, and ideologies of racial inclusion. This volume connects the region's long history of slavery to the major political, social, cultural, and economic developments of the last two centuries. Written by leading scholars in each of those topics, the volume provides an introduction to the field of Afro-Latin American studies that is not available from any other source and reflects the disciplinary and thematic richness of this emerging field.

¡Manteca!
¡Manteca!

Author: Melissa Castillo-Garsow

Publisher: Arte Publico Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781558858428

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"We defy translation," Sandra María Esteves writes. "Nameless/we are a whole culture/once removed." She is half Dominican, half Puerto Rican, with indigenous and African blood, born in the Bronx. Like so many of the contributors, she is a blend of cultures, histories and languages. Containing the work of more than 40 poets--equally divided between men and women--who self-identify as Afro-Latino, ¡Manteca! is the first poetry anthology to highlight writings by Latinos of African descent. The themes covered are as diverse as the authors themselves. Many pieces rail against a system that institutionalizes poverty and racism. Others remember parents and grandparents who immigrated to the United States in search of a better life, only to learn that the American Dream is a nightmare for someone with dark skin and nappy hair. But in spite of the darkness, faith remains. Anthony Morales' grandmother, like so many others, was "hardwired to hold on to hope." There are love poems to family and lovers. And music--salsa, merengue, jazz--permeates this collection.Editor and scholar Melissa Castillo-Garsow writes in her introduction that "the experiences and poetic expression of Afro-Latinidad were so diverse" that she could not begin to categorize it. Some write in English, others in Spanish. They are Puerto Rican, Dominican and almost every combination conceivable, including Afro-Mexican. Containing the work of well-known writers such as Pedro Pietri, Miguel Piñero and E. Ethelbert Miller, less well-known ones are ready to be discovered in these pages.

Afro-Latino Voices
Afro-Latino Voices

Author: Kathryn Joy McKnight

Publisher: Hackett Publishing

Published: 2009-11-15

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 1603842942

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A landmark scholarly achievement . . . With judicious commentary by several of the leading experts in the field, this book dramatically expands the canon of texts used to study the black Atlantic and the African diaspora, and captures the tenor of the 'black voice' as it collectively engaged the power of colonial institutions. In no uncertain terms, Afro-Latino Voices will prove to be a remarkable pedagogical tool and an influential resource, inspiring deeper comparative work on the African diaspora. --Ben Vinson III, Center for Africana Studies, Johns Hopkins University

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: 330

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.

Black Writers and Latin America
Black Writers and Latin America

Author: Richard L. Jackson

Publisher: Washington, DC : Howard University Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13:

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In this study, the author begins by examining the influence of Africa and Spain upon the literatures of African Americans and Latin Americans. He explores the reciprocal exchange of influences among artists of African descent in the United States and in Latin America--from established writers to a new generation of writers, including women.

Afro-Latin America, 1800-2000
Afro-Latin America, 1800-2000

Author: George Reid Andrews

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2004-07-15

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 0195152328

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Covering the last two hundred years, and including Spanish America, Brazil, and the Caribbean, this book examines how African-descended people made their way out of slavery and into freedom, and how, once free, they helped build social and political democracy in the region.