/pdf/antonio-preciado-and-the-afro-presence-in-ecuadorian-3cl1c1mm87.pdf

Black Literature and Humanism in Latin America

Antonio Preciado and the Afro Presence in Ecuadorian Literature

Genomic research in Latin America has looked into the African, Amerindian and European ancestry of local populations. This article explores how indigeneity and blackness figure in genomic science in the light of previous and current representations of indigenous and Afro-descendent people. These categories have been cast as ‘other’ in Latin America, but they have occupied different locations in ‘structures of alterity’. I look briefly at these similarities and differences in the colonial and republican periods and in recent multiculturalist reforms. I look at the gendered sexual imagery surrounding each concept, before examining in detail how blackness and indigeneity figure in gendered ways in genomic science research on admixture and ancestry in Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. I conclude that, in the context of multiculturalism, genomics works to re-centre imaginaries of the nation around the mestizo and mixture, while casting blackness and indigeneity, in sexualised and gendered ways, as different kinds of others.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0022216X13000011

Blackness, Indigeneity, Multiculturalism and Genomics in Brazil, Colombia and Mexico

This article examines discourses on Afrocubanismo and mestizaje in the writings of little studied 1930s black Cuban intellectuals. The point of departure of the analysis is historian Alejandro de la Fuente's argument that the 1930s Cuban movement of Afro-Cuban cultural revalorisation known as Afrocubanismo opened up opportunities for blacks to express their own visions of Cuban black culture and denounce racial inequalities. The article's introduction explains De la Fuente's argument in the context of his broader approach to Cuban black mobilisation in the aftermath of the Cuban historical episode known as the 1912 race war. It then highlights the need for a more thorough assessment of black Cuban reformulations of Afrocubanismo and mestizaje based on an analysis of essays and articles written by 1930s black Cuban intellectuals. The ensuing sections examine such writings with an emphasis on their treatment of Jose Marti, black and national identities and mestizaje. The conclusion provides a general assess...

Uniting blacks in a raceless nation: Afro-Cuban reformulations of Afrocubanismo and mestizaje in 1930s Cuba

The literary movement that so many refer to as the Harlem Renaissance remains contested terrain. Even so, the need to periodize and name the movement continues, or for our purposes here there continues to be a need to map the terrain and provide a literary cartography for the New Negro era. As the literary production of the New Negro era came to a close, participants in the literary movement such as Zora Neale Hurston, Sterling Brown, Wallace Thurman, Dorothy West, Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles S. Johnson, and others offered different accounts of its value, its beginnings, and its end. Beginning in 1947, the historical research of John Hope Franklin brought scholarly attention to the New Negro Movement in literature, and Franklin apparently formalized the appellation "Harlem Renaissance" that has come to define it. Continuing research has expanded the now prodigious scholarship on the New Negro and the Harlem Renaissance. However, very little consensus on key questions of periodization has been established either among participants in the New Negro Movement in literature or the literary and historical scholars who came after them.A number of eminent historians have periodized the social and political history of the New Negro: notably John Hope Franklin in From Slavery to Freedom (1947), Nathan Irvin Huggins in Harlem Renaissance (1971), and David Levering Lewis in When Harlem Was in Vogue (1981). The titles of their books clearly indicate that the focus of their valuable scholarship goes well beyond the literary history. Huggins and Lewis centered their work on the larger political and cultural history as it had occurred in a particular place, Harlem, and Franklin's chapter is but a small part of an historical tour de force of African descended peoples. All three locate the beginning of the era in 1919 with the parade of the 369th Infantry Regiment from downtown to uptown Manhattan. In the 1947 edition of From Slavery to Freedom, Franklin engaged the literature very specifically and connected it to the long history of New Negro resistance, making the argument that the literary movement occurred in phases and was ongoing. However, the ninth edition, co-written with Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham and published in 2007, does not reflect this idea of an ongoing literary movement. Huggins in his book ends "the innocent Harlem Renaissance" in 1930 (1971, 303). And Lewis, who has borrowed the title of his book from Langston Hughes, ends the New Negro "vogue" with the 1935 Harlem riot (1981, 306). In subsequent publications, Huggins and Lewis shift their periodization, moving back as far as 1917 and in the case of Huggins shifting forward as far as 1935. Both scholars emphasize the social, political, and cultural history and employ markers that indicate those interests. Clearly, these markers provide worthwhile points of interest for examining New Negro literature. Yet to outline the terrain of the New Negro Movement in literature we must examine what the writers produced and determine when they began to present the varied perspectives, ideas, and world of the New Negro in literature, even while recognizing that close examination of the literature reveals differences, tensions, and anxieties among its writers.Literary scholars similarly find little agreement on the question of periodization. Some follow the divisions set in the well-established social histories; others set their own specifically literary or sometimes even social markers. Speaking to concerns with periodization, Gloria Hull observes in Color Sex and Poetry that "women writers are tyrannized by periodization" (1987, 30). While there is certainly room for Hull's concern for the disparate impact of periodization on women, the position taken here is that sexism, which Hull also addresses, together with genre and thematics are central to decades of women's marginalization in scholarship on New Negro literature. Recognizing the importance of the consideration of genre and thematics along with gender in the construction of periodization, Venetria Patton and Maureen Honey (2001) have revised the New Negro literary movement's beginnings to 1916 and the production of Angelina Weld Grimke's play Rachel that year. …

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Mapping the Terrain of Black Writing during the Early New Negro Era

It has been said that American history looks very different from a cotton patch According to Richard Jackson, Latin American history also looks very different when viewed from below the deck of a slave ship (120) As is well known, both in the United States and Latin America, the accepted version of history is not the one written from the deck of the slave ship Consequently, when one invokes the black presence, one usually seeks to fill in gaps in the official version of history Cuban intellectuals first expressed a desire for inclusiveness in the 1830s While Juan Francisco Manzano's Autobiography (1835) is considered the foundational text, it embodies a more general urge to record previously unspeakable acts For example, in a letter to Domingo del Monte, F6lix Tanco (1796-1871) points to the prevailing tendency to elide socioracial differences: Hasta ahora, parece que se ha tenido y se tiene miedo, o se tiene escrupulo o asco de presentar a los negros en la escena o en la novels junto con los primeros, asi como se presentan en los padrones, y como si no estuviesemos en la realidad, no ya juntos, sino ingertados, amalgamados como cualq(a) confeccion farmaceutica Los jovenes que hoy estan escribiendo novelitas, creo que no lo aciertan en describir amorios o galanteos en los de su clase o color, en describir la propia corrupcion de esta clase, sin acordarse absolutamte de los esclavos que tan poderosa parte tienen en esa corrupcion: (Figarola-Caneda, VII, 113) Tanco's negative judgment bespeaks a realistic desire for documentary accuracy As scholars of the period have shown, censorship imposed content restrictions on Cuban writings of the time (Jensen) However, Tanco's statement also points to self-censorship as a consequence of the official injunction to silence Citing Ramon de Palma's Una pascua en San Marcos (1838) as evidence of contemporary narrative practice, Tanco unmasks its violation of the conventions of verisimilitude: apenas se atreven a escribir la palabra bocabajo, las palabras mal pronunciadas o la algarabia de los negros bozales, con lo cual creen que han pintado el pais La novela de Palma, que es la que tiene mas colorido cubano, adolece sin embargo del defecto que he dicho Un negro viejo, un taita brujo, es todo lo que se ve como de paso en toda la relacion: personage ridiculo, cuando los esclavos no lo son, y personage singular que no parece sino que es el unico que existe en el pals, o en S Marcos, donde gracias- dios hay algunos miles- (Figamla-Caneda, VII, 113) Tanco's critique of the repertoire of stock characters is premised on the notion of shared cultural forms and questions the privileging of the quaint and the fragmentary The very details that writers such as Palma included to authenticate their work are considered by Tanco to be signals of implausibility In Tanco's judgment, registering the black presence was a necessary condition for heightening the believability of a Cuban literary work However, the element of blackness should not be reduced to the category of the strange Tanco counters the normative code with his own portrayal of black characters And in seeking to make other voices heard in his text, he proposes to convey socially conventional behavior Es mi cuento una pintura tan horriblemte verdad(a) de nuestra sociedad y de nras costumbres privadas, que mas no puede ser () En mis Escenas de la vida privada que ahora te remito, veras mucho dialogo, y que el autor habla to indispensable Cada persona usa su lenguage particular nada de bozalismo: mis negros hablan el castellano clarito como lo hablan realmente los criollos: nada de nombres fantasticos buscados en otras novelas, sino los nombres comunes entre nosotros, de Conchita, Petrona, Rosalia, Antonia, Fernando &a (FigarolaCaneda, VII, 113) In calling attention to the rhetorical strategies of his peers and exposing their inauthenticity, Tanco attempts to naturalize his own break with the prevailing literary tradition …

Black Literature and Humanism in Latin America

Citations

Antonio Preciado and the Afro Presence in Ecuadorian Literature

Blackness, Indigeneity, Multiculturalism and Genomics in Brazil, Colombia and Mexico

Uniting blacks in a raceless nation: Afro-Cuban reformulations of Afrocubanismo and mestizaje in 1930s Cuba

Mapping the Terrain of Black Writing during the Early New Negro Era

The Emergence of an Afro-Cuban Aesthetic

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