African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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710 p, Examines the economic history of the Caribbean in the two hundred years since the Napoleonic Wars and is the first analysis to span the whole region. Its findings challenge many long-standing assumptions about the region, and its in-depth case studies shed new light on the history of three countries in particular, namely Belize, Cuba, and Haiti"
For women writers of the Caribbean as well as for larger marginalized communities, the relationship between oral traditions and written texts is a part of the defining thread of Caribbean historiography. This article draws on Waugh and Hutcheon to examine the use of such texts by women writers of the Hispanophone Caribbean in order to highlight narrative strategies of historically marginalized groups to contest hegemonic constructions of the nation.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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306 p., Weather-induced environmental crises and slow responses from imperial authorities, Johnson argues, played an inextricable and, until now, largely unacknowledged role in the rise of revolutionary sentiments in the 18th century Caribbean.
Discusses the poetry of Afro-Cuban writer Nancy Morejón, focusing on her poetry collection, Paisaje célebre (Fundarte, 1993). Compares the book to her previous work, and discusses the political and social influences that shaped it. Notes that this book marks an important stage in Morejón's poetry, in that it celebrates a new and different country and voice - one of indepedence and freedom.;
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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221 p, In the 19th and 20th centuries, the Hispanic Caribbean was fundamentally a plantation economy dominated mainly by the world sugar market. The politics were shaped by revolutions, political coups, wars, and elections, resulting in an end of Spanish power, independent states, and the domination of the region by the United States. These developments led to changes in social values. The author follows these developments throughout the main Hispanic islands and provides a fascinating picture of a region in turmoil.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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449 p, During the presidencies of Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson, the Caribbean was in crisis. The men responsible included, from Cuba, Fidel Castro, and his brother Raúl; from Argentina, Che Guevara; from the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo; and from Haiti, François "Papa Doc" Duvalier. The superpowers thought they could use Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic as puppets, but what neither bargained on was that their puppets would come to life.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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505 p., During the presidencies of Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson, the Caribbean was in crisis. The men responsible included, from Cuba, Fidel Castro, and his brother Raúl; from Argentina, Che Guevara; from the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo; and from Haiti, François "Papa Doc" Duvalier. The superpowers thought they could use Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic as puppets, but what neither bargained on was that their puppets would come to life.
Reviews several books on Cuban history before 1959. American Sugar Kingdom: The Plantation Economy of the Spanish Caribbean 1898-1934, by César Ayala; Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898, by Ada Ferrer; Pleasure Island: Tourism and Temptation in Cuba, by Rosalie Schwartz.;
Discusses the emergence of an Afro-Cuban aesthetic. Notes the major contributions of Cuban writers Félix Tanco, Antonio Zambrana, Nicolás Guillén, Miguel Barnet, and others to the literary movement. Remarks that these authors give us a view of Latin American history from "below the deck of a slave ship" - a view that is very different from the traditional one.;
This study examines the identity categories of gender and race in the Cuban context of the first thirty years of the Revolution and focuses on black and mulata women, in which both categories converge. In this work I analyze the literary discourse of the Afro-Cuban female poets between the 1960s and 1980s and discern the role of self-representation that each of these poets constructs within the framework of "being black" or "mulata" woman. Also, since gender and race are redefined by the dominant power, this project analyzes the political hegemonic discourse of the period in relation to race and gender, and illuminates its role in preserving racial stereotypes as well as the patriarchal normatives of gender.
344 p., Explores continuities and transformations in the construction of Afro-Cuban womanhood in Cuba between 1902 and 1958. A dynamic and evolving process, the construction of Afro-Cuban womanhood encompassed the formal and informal practices that multiple individuals--from lawmakers and professionals to intellectuals and activists to workers and their families--established and challenged through public debates and personal interactions in order to negotiate evolving systems of power. The dissertation argues that Afro-Cuban women were integral to the formation of a modern Cuban identity. Studies of pre-revolutionary Cuba dichotomize race and gender in their analyses of citizenship and national identity formation. As such, they devote insufficient attention to the role of Afro-Cuban women in engendering social transformations.
275 p., Racial ideology in Cuba, which negates the importance and effects of race and a racial hierarchy, gained significant legitimacy at the start of the Cuban Revolution due to increased levels of equality and the initial commitment by the Revolution to eradicate racism and racial discrimination. Racism was declared to be solved and race was subsequently erased from the public script two years after its triumph in 1959. This project determines (1) how the ideology of racial harmony and Cuban socialism join to create a racial ideology that often succeeds in reducing the salience of race for Cubans, particularly among the revolution's supporters (2) how this racial ideology affects identity formation, racial consciousness and racial attitudes among blacks as it interacts with visible racial disparities and (3) the trajectory that black politics has taken in Cuba.
327 p., "This research is in response to the general academic need to examine how black histories have been conceived and written. Instead of folklore, I look to the Osainistas (healers and herbalists initiated into the secrets of Osain) in Cuba as possible partners in a conversation in collaborative conservation. My study of Lucumí (Yorùbá-derived) religion and Osain (deity of the sacred forests, herbs and healings) reveals an embodied understanding of nature through which the boundaries of subject as well as material and spiritual become collapsed and traversed through specialized communication techniques. Ways of knowing through invocations, praise poetry, music and dance are essential to nearly all Yorùbá ritual in which spiritual forces are actualized-evoking and thus invoking spirit into physical form. Yorùbá employ these embodied techniques to transcend boundaries and open communication among spirit, material, temporal and spatial worlds, particularly to understand and work with natural resources. This embodied knowledge is, as Yvonne Daniel argues in her book Dancing Wisdom , "rich and viable and should be referenced among other kinds of knowledge" (2005:4). This intermittently conducted 2003-06 ethnographic study, relies on what I am calling evocative ethnography, which is organized around ethnography using visual and cognitive techniques along with archival research to explore how Lucumí conceptualize nature and how I can translate these embodied perceptions." --The Author.
207 p., Explores the expression of Afro-Cuban identity and its illustration by Afro-Cuban writers and filmmakers within the context of the Cuban Revolution. It answers two questions. First, how does Afro-Cuban artistic expression of Afro-Cuban reality change from the 1970s to the 1990s? and second, how can we reread works from Afro-Cuban writers and filmmakers within the context of the Cuban Revolution in light of the ideological disconnects between Revolution, racial discourse, and artistic expression? To answer these questions the author looks to a diverse group of Afro-Cuban artists who produced groundbreaking works during the 1970s and 1990s. Beginning with Nancy Morejón as an example of a well-known literary figure in Afro-Cuban arts, the dissertation delves deeper into the evolution of Afro-Cuban aesthetics with the cinematic works of Nicolas Guillen Landrian in the 1960s, Sara Gómez and Sergio Giral in the 1970s and finally Gloria Rolando in the 1990s. These are all artists whose work has previously never been considered in concert, but together, their works engage in an interesting dialogue and provide a collective answer to the research questions on which this project is based.
453 p., Offers an anthropological interpretation of cultural discourses about the body found in literature, visual narratives and archival sources throughout 19th century in Spanish colonial Havana. These discourses show a pressing concern with the "manners" of bodies, the ways they moved, how they occupied space, and how they managed sensations and emotions to negotiate power and prestige in the highly stratified Havana's society. Concerns for the manners of the body became the discursive domain of the rising planter and intellectual elite of Cuban creoles. They often expressed these concerns in normalizing terms such as "good manners," "good taste," and "tone." Argues that these and other highly embodied, interlocking moral, sensory, affective and aesthetic categories such as nobility, respect or " sabor " became focal indexes of the social status of individuals in colonial society.
282 p., Challenges how critical scholarship on race and racism in Latin America has traditionally understood racial subalterns in Cuba and Puerto Rico as people who are prevented from acting as black political subjects because of the hegemonic power of discourses of nationhood premised on ideas of mestizaje and racial fraternity. By providing an intellectual history of several important yet largely ignored Cuban and Puerto Rican activists intellectuals of color who lived and worked between the Caribbean and the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century, the author shows that instead of being tricked by creole elite national narratives, they attempted to redefine ideas of nationhood to challenge racism, colonialism, and imperialism at local, national, and transnational levels.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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311 p., Focuses on conflict and convergence among African Americans, Cuban exiles, and Afro-Cubans in the United States. Argues that the racializing discourses found in the Miami Times, which painted Cuban immigrants as an economic threat, and discourses in the Herald, which affirmed the presumed inferiority of blackness and superiority of whiteness, reproduce the centrality of ideologies of exclusivity and white supremacy in the construction of the U.S. nation.
237 p., Free people of color held an ambiguous place in Caribbean slave societies. On the one hand they were nominally free, but the reality of their daily lives was often something less than free. This work examines how free people of color, or libres de color , in nineteenth-century Cuba attempted to carve out lives for themselves in the face of social, economic, and political constraints imposed on them by white Cubans and Spaniards living in the island. It focuses on how through different Afro-Cuban associations some libres de color used public music and dance performances to self-fashion identities on their own terms.
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251 p., Chapters: African and Afro-Cuban factors in the structure of Lydia Cabrera's black short stories -- The characters : gods, animals, humans, supernatural beings and objects -- The theme of the waters.
321 p., Locates contemporary articulations of afrofeminismo in manifold modes of cultural production including literature, music, visual displays of the body, and digital media. Examines the development of afrofeminismo in relation to colonial sexual violence in sugar-based economies to explain how colonial dynamics inflect ideologies of blanqueamiento/embranquecimento (racial whitening) and pseudo-scientific racial determinism. In this context, the author addresses representations of the mujer negra (black woman) and the mulata (mulatto woman) in Caribbean and Brazilian cultural discourse.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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247 p., Describes how black Cubans experience racism on two levels. Cuban racism might result in less access for black Cubans to their group's resources, including protection within Cuban enclaves from society-wide discrimination. In society at large, black Cubans are below white Cubans on every socioeconomic indicator. Rejected by their white co-ethnics, black Cubans are welcomed by other groups of African descent. Many hold similar political views as African Americans. Identifying with African Americans neither negatively affects social mobility nor leads to a rejection of mainstream values and norms.
667 p., The author locates New Orleans as a cultural and cartographic heart linking the Caribbean, the United States, and Latin America into what she calls Américas du Golfe. The author traces flows of cultures and citizens(hips) through New Orleans and across national borders: physically, culturally, economically, visually, linguistically, and musically, challenging traditional nation-based scholarly frameworks, and reorienting New Orleans as a Gulf, rather than American, city.
380 p., This work brings an anti-colonial reading to the production and maintenance of racial logic in Cuban schooling, through conversations with, and surveys of Cuban teachers, as well as through analyses of secondary and primary documents. The study undertaken seeks to contribute to the limited existent research on race relations in Cuba, with a research focus on the Cuban educational context. Teasing and staking out a middle ground between the blinding and often hollow pro-Cuba fanaticism and the deafening anti-Cuban rhetoric from the left and right respectively, this project seeks a more nuanced, complete and dialogical understanding of race and race relations in Cuba, with a specific focus on the educational context. This work investigates and explicates an apparent contradiction inherent in teachers' work and discourse on the island, revealing a flawed and complex form of Cuban anti-racism.
500 p., Explains the rise of a culture of racial silence in a time of heightening racial exclusion in Cuba at the turn of the twentieth century. Employing a case study of Cienfuegos, a port city on the south-central coast of the island, the author examines gendered articulations of inequality among Cuban separatists between the outbreak of the war of independence in 1895 and the inauguration of the Cuban republic in 1902. It is argued that Cuban struggles for political power in the wake of the American military intervention (1898) and military occupation (1899-1902) fundamentally transformed separatist visions of citizenship, increasingly restricting its boundaries along racial lines.
Discusses how ephemeral artifacts of daily material culture, such as marquillas -- the colorful lithographed papers that were used to wrap bundles of cigarettes during the second half of the nineteenth century in Cuba -- partook of the symbolization of emergent forms of racialized governability towards the end of slavery on the island.
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203 p., Argues for grounding the concept of global subaltern resistance in the legacy of the 1966 Tricontinental in which delegates from the liberation movements of 82 nations came together in Havana, Cuba to form an alliance against imperialism. This alliance, called the Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America (OSPAAAL) quickly became the driving force of international political radicalism and the primary engine of its cultural production. Because the Tricontinental represents the extension into the Americas of the anti-imperialist union of Afro-Asian nations begun at the 1955 Bandung Conference, it points to a moment in which a diverse range of radicalist writers and artists in the Americas began interacting with its discourse. By tracing the circulation of the Tricontinental's ideology in its cultural production and in related texts from Third Cinema, Cuban Revolutionary film, the Nuyorican Movement, and writings by Young Lords and Black Power activists, Beyond the Color Curtain outlines how tricontinentalists laid the groundwork for a theory of power and resistance that is resurfacing in the contemporary notion of the Global South.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, Projected Date: 0812
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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364 p., Miller's extensive fieldwork in Cuba and West Africa documents ritual languages and practices that survived the Middle Passage and evolved into a unifying charter for transplanted slaves and their successors. To gain deeper understanding of the material, Miller underwent Ékpè initiation rites in Nigeria after ten years' collaboration with Abakuá initiates in Cuba and the United States. He argues that Cuban music, art, and even politics rely on complexities of these African-inspired codes of conduct and leadership.
211 p., Explores the similarities and differences which characterize the depiction of people of color in certain representative 19th century Cuban and Brazilian slavery novels as a function of the authorial approach of each territory's literary tradition toward the issues of slavery, racial prejudice, and people of color. The selected texts, derived from the peak periods in slavery literature of each territory, include Francisco , by Anselmo Snárez y Romero; Sab , by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda; Cecilia Valdés , by Cirilo Villaverde; A escrava Isaura , by Bernardo Guimarães; O mulato , by Aluísio Azevedo; and Bom-Crioulo , by Adolfo Caminha. While the present study explores the enslavement, abuse, and discrimination of people of color as a consequence of a deep-seated discourse of power, privilege and racial superiority, it focuses more extensively on the representation of people of color, particularly in their capacity to constructively appropriate the cultural values of the white dominant group and recognize their identity as ambiguous.
280 p., Examines how Cubans mobilized the memory of their wars of independence as the symbolic and narrative foundations of their nationhood. Argues that the creation of a set of heroes, icons, and parables was crucial to consolidation of the Cuban republic and to the establishment of political and racial norms that sustained it. Cuban independence was threatened from its outset by the prospect of U.S. intervention. In this context, securing political stability and social unity became matters of national survival. The sanctification of national heroes enabled Cubans to demonstrate the historical legitimacy of their fragile republic, and Cubans circulated narratives emphasizing the cooperation of black and white Cubans in the anti-colonial struggle to deny and forestall conflicts over racial inequality.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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251 p., Explores how Juan Francisco Manzano and Gabriel de la Concepcion Valdés (also known as Plácido) appropriated Hispanic literature to inscribe an African descendant subjectivity in 19th century proto-nationalist Cuban discourse. Revises Mary Louise Pratt's notion of "intercultural texts" and Angel Rama's "literary transculturation", proposing "transculturated colonial literature" to trace the contradictions, re-significations, silences and shifts in the aesthetic and ideological function of Manzano and Plácido's texts. As such, 19th century Afro-Cuban literature is analyzed as an active space of negotiation and exchange disputing racial and religious hierarchies to inscribe an Afro-Cuban religio-cultural subject. The author concludes that both Manzano and Plácido disrupted the aesthetic and ideological norms of the colonial status quo by producing the first instance of literary transculturation in Cuba.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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273 p., Explores the iconography of Cuban rumba--a unique AfroCuban dance and music complex that represents the foundation of contemporary Cuban popular culture--and argues that rumba constitutes an essential part of a greater African-based ontology. Rumba dance performance is conceptualized as knowledge embodied, an avatar of nonverbal cultural communication and consciousness, which plays a central role in the organization of daily life and formation of identity. This dissertation demonstrates that concrete continuities exist between the diaspora and mainland Africa through close scrutiny of rumba and parallel performance art traditions in north, west and central Africa. Also attempts to identify specific African-based stylistic conventions as exemplified by Sahara's Imazighen (also known as Berber) peoples, Mali's Mande (known as Gangá in Cuba) and related groups, and the Kongo civilization establishing that although ethno-cultural boundaries exist, they tend to be permeable.
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.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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477 p., This study is a "deep history" of the British invasion and occupation of Havana and western Cuba (1762-3) at the end of the Seven Years' War. By contextualizing this event within the broader story of intercolonial relations of war, trade, and slavery from 1713 to 1790, it demonstrates that the British occupation was a continuation and expansion of relations that preceded and postdated the invading warships' arrival. These Anglo-Cuban relations were forged through contraband commerce, the British slave trade to Cuba, and the practices of interimperial warfare, all of which undermined Spanish sovereignty in Cuba and linked its populations of both European and African descent to its British colonial neighbors.
Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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365 p., As Louisiana and Cuba emerged from slavery in the late 19th Century, each faced the question of what rights former slaves could claim. Observes the people, places, legislation and leadership that shaped how these societies adjusted to the abolition of slavery. The two distinctive worlds also come together, as Cuban exiles take refuge in New Orleans in the 1880s, and black soldiers from Louisiana garrison small towns in eastern Cuba during the 1899 U.S. military occupation.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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292 p., Definitive information on the identity and status of the emancipados who were a special group of Africans in Brazil, Cuba and Latin America. The author establishes that the peculiar nature of the introduction of the emacipados into Brazil and America made them free Africans, both de jure and de facto, thereby setting them apart from freed Africans or slaves in Brazilian and Cuban societies. Emancipados held a much better status within these societies.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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342 p, Examines how the low socioeconomic status of the black population in Cuba informs the representation of black characters in Cuban narrative fiction. From its very first example (Espejo de paciencia, 1608) until the most recent short fiction written after the 1959 Revolution, Cuban narrative fiction has played (and still plays) an important role in creating and maintaining the subaltern position of the black population in Cuba.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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255 p., The collapse and disappearance of the Soviet Union implied many transformations in the Cuban society, which altered the traditional construction of identity within the frame of the nation-state. It is in that context where alternative new discourses on "race", racism and negritude emerged. The representation of the afro-descendent in the novels of the 1990's and 2000's poses enormous interest since the literary text has been one of the spaces where identity markers have been renegotiated. This dissertation explores how social discourses on cubanidad and negritude have an effect on the writers Eliseo Altunaga and Marta Rojas and their literary production.
301 p., Throughout the 20th century, various Cuban regimes have tried to eliminate the practice of religions of African origin by combining repressive legislation and coercive social practices that stigmatized practitioners as culturally backward, socially deviant, and mentally deficient. Religious practitioners, however, used the state apparatus to continue worshipping their African deities, sometimes challenging government officials' excessive application of the law or devising ways to evade their scrutiny. Through an analysis of archival documents, newspapers, works produced by practitioners, oral history interviews and published ethnographies, this dissertation examines the strategies practitioners of Ocha-Ifá - also known as Santería - employed as they continued practicing the religion of their ancestors and participating in the national projects of the twentieth century. Focusing on the period after the 1959 revolution, this dissertation argues that revolutionary policies that were designed to discourage the practice of religions of African origin actually facilitated its continued practice and development in unintended ways.
Thanks to the federal Freedom of Information Act, citizens were made aware of a program the FBI - under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover - enacted to "neutralize" Black leadership in America.
Members of the Congressional Black Caucus, including Ohio Congresswoman Marcia Fudge, have been taking it on the chin in some quarters for a fact-finding trip to Havana, Cuba, to meet with that nation's president. Since the Kennedy administration in the 1960s in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the tiny island 90 miles off the coast of the U.S. has been embargoed and isolated.
