221 p., Carmen (Mérimée 1845, Bizet 1875), the story about the (in)famous Gypsy dancer from Spain, is the second most adapted narrative in the history of world cinema, with over eighty global versions officially recognized to date. Despite the global reach of the Carmen phenomenon, many scholars claim that this tale has hardly been reworked in Spanish America and never in the Caribbean. Following Carmen from Spain to Spanish America, the author shows how the template of Carmen (a love story that reveals the racio-ethnic and gender stratification in Spain) has been artfully but unsuspectingly reappropriated and "creolized" in postcolonial Cuba in the controversial film María Antonia (1991) by Afro-Cuban filmmaker Sergio Giral, based on the landmark play María Antonia (1964) by Afro-Cuban playwright Eugenio Hernández Espinosa.
429 p., Founded in 1969 in Lima, Perú Negro is now the most widely recognized Afro-Peruvian dance and music company. In order to emphasize the black presence in a nation that has dominantly narrated itself as mestizo, Perú Negro has produced representations of blackness that are grounded both on the history of slavery and on Diasporic idealizations of Africanness. While meant to value blackness through its music and dance performance, Perú Negro’s representations have contributed to romanticize the slave past and essentialize the African roots. This is made clear in the group’s concept of “family” upon which Perú Negro has relied to define who can and cannot belong to the group as well as who is capable of performing blackness.