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.

Illuminating the activism of Black women during Cuba’s prerevolutionary period Association of Black Women Historians Letitia Woods Brown Book Prize In Black Women, Citizenship, and the Making of Modern Cuba, Takkara Brunson traces how women of African descent battled exclusion on multiple fronts and played an important role in forging a modern democracy. Brunson takes a much-needed intersectional approach to the political history of the era, examining how Black women’s engagement with questions of Cuban citizenship intersected with racial prejudice, gender norms, and sexual politics, incorporating Afro-diasporic and Latin American feminist perspectives. Brunson demonstrates that between the 1886 abolition of slavery in Cuba and the 1959 Revolution, Black women—without formal political power—navigated political movements in their efforts to create a more just society. She examines how women helped build a Black public sphere as they claimed moral respectability and sought racial integration. She reveals how Black women entered into national women’s organizations, labor unions, and political parties to bring about legal reforms. Brunson shows how women of African descent achieved individual victories as part of a collective struggle for social justice; in doing so, she highlights how racism and sexism persisted even as legal definitions of Cuban citizenship evolved.

Handmade in Cuba is an in-depth examination of Ediciones Vigía, an artisanal press that published exquisite books crafted from simple supplies during some of Cuba’s most dire economic periods. Vividly illustrated, this volume shows how the publishing collective responded to the nation’s changing historical and political situation from the margins of society, representing Cuban culture across the boundaries of race, age, gender, and genre. In this volume, poets and scholars reflect on the unique artistic direction of Rolando Estévez, who oversaw the creation of over 500 handmade books and magazines between 1985 and 2014. They highlight the beautiful designs and unusual materials selected, including fabric, metals, wood, feathers, and discarded items. Through diverse perspectives, including an interview with Estévez himself, the essays showcase the unlimited inventive possibilities of books as objects, as sculptural pieces, and as installations. Even in the age of technology, Estévez generated enormous excitement and admiration for these hand-crafted books, and this volume offers the first inside view of this important alternative publishing space. Contributors: Ruth Behar | Juanamaría Cordones-Cook | Gwendolyn Díaz | Erin Finzer | William Luis | Nancy Morejón | Kim Nochi | Carina Pino Santos | Kristin Schwain | Elzbieta Sklodowska

This book examines the conundrum that has haunted the Black and White ancestry for ages on what supremacy actually means. Is it Black or White supremacy? Granted, the term White supremacy has occupied the sociopolitical, cultural and economic discourse for ages, but what does that really imply? All other ancestries on planet earth have been coerced to believe that conformity to Euro-American lifestyle is the way to become ‘civilized’ on planet earth. But the term civilization owes its genesis to the African cultural and educational achievements in Egypt. Consequently, Black ancestry, the first human species on planet earth, should lead mankind to cultural and epistemological supremacy but that has always been met with skepticism.This book examines this debate, especially between the Black and White ancestry.

Salsa is both an American and transnational phenomenon, however women in salsa have been neglected. To explore how female singers negotiate issues of gender, race, and nation through their performances, Poey engages with the ways they problematize the idea of the nation and facilitate their musical performances' movement across multiple borders.

Within the Euro-American literary tradition, Gothic stories of childhood and adolescence have often served as a tool for cultural propaganda, advancing colonialist, white supremacist and patriarchal ideologies. This book turns our attention to modern and contemporary Gothic texts by hemispheric American writers who have refigured uncanny youth in ways that invert these cultural scripts. In the hands of authors ranging from Octavio Paz and Maryse Condé to N. Scott Momaday and Carmen Maria Machado, Gothic conventions become a means of critiquing pathological structures of power in the space of the Americas. As fictional children and adolescents confront persisting colonial and neo-imperialist architectures, grapple with the everyday ramifications of white supremacist thinking, navigate rigged systems of socioeconomic power, and attempt to frustrate patterns of gendered, anti-queer violence, the uncanny and the nightmarish in their lives force readers to reckon affectively as well as intellectually with these intersecting forms of injustice.

Latin American Literature in Transition 1930-1980 explores the literary landscape of the mid-twentieth-century and the texts that were produced during that period. It takes four core areas of thematic and conceptual focus – solidarity, aesthetics and innovation, war, revolution and dictatorship, metropolis and ruins – and employs them to explore the complexity, heterogeneity and hybridity of form, genre, subject matter and discipline that characterised literature from the period. In doing so, it uncovers the points of transition, connection, contradiction, and tension that shaped the work of many canonical and non-canonical authors. It illuminates the conversations between genres, literary movements, disciplines and modes of representation that underpin writing form this period. Lastly, by focusing on canon and beyond, the volume visibilizes the aesthetics, poetics, politics, and social projects of writing, incorporating established writers, but also writers whose work is yet to be examined in all its complexity.

This book analyzes racism in Communist and post-Communist contexts, examining the 'Red' promise of an end to racism and the racial logics at work in the Soviet Union, Central and Eastern Europe, Cuba and China, placing these in the context of global racialization.

A fourth edition of this book is now available. Now in its third edition, this leading reader has been updated to make it even more relevant to the study of contemporary Latin America. This edition includes an entirely new chapter, "The New Left Turn," and the globalization chapter has been thoroughly revised to reflect the rapid pace of change over the past five years. The book continues to offer a rich variety of materials that can be tailored to the needs of individual instructors. By focusing each chapter on a single interpretive "problem," the book painlessly engages students in document analysis and introduces them to historiography. With its innovative combination of primary and secondary sources and editorial analysis, this text is designed specifically to stimulate critical thinking in a wide range of courses on Latin American history since independence.

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.