Reviews several books. A Place in the Sun? Women Writers in Twentieth-Century Cuba, by Catherine Davis; Afro-Cuban Literature: Critical Junctures,'by Edward J. Mullen; My Own Private Cuba: Essays on Cuban Literature and Culture, by Gustavo Pérez Firmat.;
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
399 p, Focusing on developments in Afro-Cuban religious culture, demonstrates that traditional Caribbean cultural practices are part and parcel of the same history that produced modernity and that both represent complexly interrelated hybrid formations. Palmié argues that the standard narrative trajectory from tradition to modernity, and from passion to reason, is a violation of the synergistic processes through which historically specific, moral communities develop the cultural forms that integrate them.
