The Changing Face of Afro-Caribbean Cultural Identity: Negrismo and N gritude looks primarily at Negrismo and N gritude, two literary movements that appeared in the Francophone and Hispanic Caribbean as well as in Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century. It draws on speeches and manifestos, and use cultural studies to contextualize ideas. It poses the bases of both movements in the Caribbean and in Africa, and lays out the literary antecedents that influenced or shaped both movements. This book examines the search for cultural identity through the poetry of Nicolas Guill n, Manuel del Cabral, and Pal s Matos. This search is extended to the N gritude movement through the poems of L opold Senghor, L on-Gontran Damas, and Aim C saire. Mamadou Badiane further discusses the under-represented N gritude women writers who were silenced by their male counterparts during the first half of the twentieth century. Ultimately, this is a book on Caribbean cultural identity that shows it in a slippery and fluctuating zone. By demonstrating that while the founders of the N gritude movement both identified themselves as descendants of Africans and were proud to proclaim their African heritage, the members of the Antillanit and Cr olit movements see themselves as a product of miscegenation between different cultures.

The geopolitical influence of the United States informs the processes of racialization in Puerto Rico, including the construction of black places. In Scripts of Blackness, Isar P. Godreau explores how Puerto Rican national discourses about race--created to overcome U.S. colonial power--simultaneously privilege whiteness, typecast blackness, and silence charges of racism. Based on an ethnographic study of the barrio of San Antón in the city of Ponce, Scripts of Blackness examines institutional and local representations of blackness as developing from a power-laden process that is inherently selective and political, not neutral or natural. Godreau traces the presumed benevolence or triviality of slavery in Puerto Rico, the favoring of a Spanish colonial whiteness (under a hispanophile discourse), and the insistence on a harmonious race mixture as discourses that thrive on a presumed contrast with the United States that also characterize Puerto Rico as morally superior. In so doing, she outlines the debates, social hierarchies, and colonial discourses that inform the racialization of San Antón and its residents as black. Mining ethnographic materials and anthropological and historical research, Scripts of Blackness provides powerful insights into the critical political, economic, and historical context behind the strategic deployment of blackness, whiteness, and racial mixture.

The Cuban writer Nicolás Guillén has traditionally been considered a poet of mestizaje, a term that, whilst denoting racial mixture, also refers to a homogenizing nationalist discourse that proclaims the harmonious nature of Cuban identity. Yet, many aspects of Guillén’s work enhance black Cuban and Afro-Cuban identities. Miguel Arnedo-Gómez explores this paradox in Guillén’s pre-Cuban Revolution writings placing them alongside contemporaneous intellectual discourses that feigned adherence to the homogenizing ideology whilst upholding black interests. On the basis of links with these and other 1930s Cuban discourses, Arnedo-Gómez shows Guillén’s work to contain a message of black unity aimed at the black middle classes. Furthermore, against a tendency to seek a single authorial consciousness—be it mulatto or based on a North American construction of blackness—Guillén’s prose and poetry are also characterized as a struggle for a viable identity in a socio-culturally heterogeneous society.

James confronts the exploitive wealthy; it also opposes Pauline hybridity. K. Jason Coker argues that postcolonial perspectives allow us to understand how these themes converge in the letter. James opposes the exploitation of the Roman Empire and a peculiar Pauline form of hybridity that compromises with it; refutes Roman cultural practices, such as the patronage system and economic practices, that threaten the identity of the letter’s recipients; and condemns those who would transgress the boundaries between purity and impurity, God and “world.”

Discusses the life and boxing career of Jack Johnson.

From his arrival in Britain in the 1950s and involvement in the New Left, to founding the field of cultural studies and examining race and identity in the 1990s and early 2000s, Stuart Hall has been central to shaping many of the cultural and political debates of our time. Essential Essays—a landmark two-volume set—brings together Stuart Hall's most influential and foundational works. Spanning the whole of his career, these volumes reflect the breadth and depth of his intellectual and political projects while demonstrating their continued vitality and importance. Volume 2: Identity and Diaspora draws from Hall's later essays, in which he investigated questions of colonialism, empire, and race. It opens with “Gramsci's Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” which frames the volume and finds Hall rethinking received notions of racial essentialism. In addition to essays on multiculturalism and globalization, black popular culture, and Western modernity's racial underpinnings, Volume 2 contains three interviews with Hall, in which he reflects on his life to theorize his identity as a colonial and diasporic subject.

How can a people overthrow 500 years of colonial oppression? What can be done to decolonize mentalities, economic structures, and political institutions? In this book, which includes the first translation of the text ‘Analysis of a Few Types of Resistance’ as well as ‘The Role of Culture in the Struggle for Independence,’ the African revolutionary Amílcar Cabral explores these and other questions. These texts demonstrate his frank and insightful directives to his comrades in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde’s party for independence, as well as reflections on culture and combat written the year prior to his assassination by the Portuguese secret police. As one of the most important and profound African revolutionary leaders in the 20th century, and justly compared in importance to Frantz Fanon, Cabral’s thoughts and instructions as articulated here help us to rethink important issues concerning nationalism, culture, vanguardism, revolution, liberation, colonialism, race, and history. The volume also includes two introductory essays: the first introduces Cabral’s work within the context of Africana critical theory, and the second situates these texts in the context their historical-political context and analyzes their relevance for contemporary anti-imperialism.

The Future is Now: A New Look at African Diaspora Studies is an exciting collection of essays representative of new voices in this ever-expanding field. Writing in English, Spanish, French, and Haitian Creole, the volume’s contributors look at the fields of art, literature, film, and music. From the Hispanophone, Francophone, and Anglophone Caribbean to the United States and Europe, the scholars here interrogate themes of memory, power, gender, identity, race, and religion. In so doing, they uncover forgotten episodes of history previously lost to hegemonic tellings of the past. Here, readers will find studies on Haitian documentary, Puerto Rican art, Trinidadian calypso, Colombian poetry, the African-American novel, and African photography and collage. The Future Is Now serves as a celebration of the contributions made by peoples of African descent, providing a glimpse at the breadth of cultural offerings to be found throughout the African Diaspora in the Americas and Europe.

Joseph Zobel is one of the best-known Francophone Caribbean authors, and is internationally recognised for his novel La Rue Cases-Nègres (1950). Through a series of close readings, with supporting references drawn from his published short stories, poetry and diaries, Joseph Zobel: Négritude and the Novel generates new insights into Zobel’s highly original decision to develop Négritude’s project of affirming pride in black identity by turning to the novel.

Expressivity in Modern Poetry explores three interrelated subjects. The first is a general exposition of the radical or deeply realistic aspects of the poetry and visual arts of the modem period. The focus is on the works of Ezra Pound as understood through a prism of postmodern thought. The second subject is the poetry and poetics of Charles Olson, a pivotal figure during the transition from modernism to postmodemism. The third subject is contemporary innovative poetry with special attention to transcultural, neobarroco, and language-centered aspects of composition. The grounding for this section is found in the works of William Carlos Williams, Aime Cesaire, and Jose Lezama Lima. A reversal of the relation between the center and periphery-decentering the New York-to-Paris vector-is crucial for understanding the Caribbean as a seedbed for both innovative and identity-based poetics. Wellman's purpose is to amplify the cultural importance of expressivity in a field where critical discussion is often dominated by constructivism and conceptualism. Expressivity in Modern Poetry offers a new reading of the relation between twentieth-century modernism and contemporary poetic practice.