Uniting Blacks in a Raceless Nation: Blackness, Afro-Cuban Culture, and Mestizaje in the Prose and Poetry of Nicolás Guillén

ISBN-13: 9781611487589 / Angielski / Twarda / 2016 / 274 str.

Arnedo-Gómez, Miguel

Opis

This book is an important landmark in criticism on the Cuban writer Nicolas Guillen, one of Latin America s most famous poets. Guillen has always been considered a poet of mestizaje. Whilst denoting racial mixture, this term also refers to the tendency in Latin American nationalist discourses to proclaim the racially and culturally mixed nature of national identities, as well as their non-conflictive character. Guillen s image as a writer who sought to promote a homogeneous and harmoniously mixed Cuban identity made from the fusion of the Spanish and the African in Cuba is so prevalent in the extant criticism that it has become almost impossible to see the many aspects of his work that actually enhance the distinctiveness of Cuban black and Afro-Cuban identities. This groundbreaking study proposes that this critical blindness partly stems from a tendency to assess Guillen s poetry using prose writings by 1930s white Cuban intellectuals in order to determine its ideological meanings. Against such trend, this book re-assesses Guillen s pre-Cuban Revolution prose and poetry on the basis of the most thorough analysis of 1930s black intellectual discourses to date. Such analysis, which is the book s first chapter, brings to light rhetorical strategies through which 1930s black intellectuals upheld black interests, whilst claiming to also adhere to a dominant nationalist ideology of mestizaje that vetoed any suggestions of black mobilization or ethnic distinctiveness. The rest of the study identifies comparable strategies behind Guillen s poetic and prose representations of Cuban blacks, racial inequality and Afro-Cuban culture, producing a characterization of this poet that is radically innovative, highly original and which will stimulate new avenues of research and critical dialogues, as well as some controversy amongst Cuban, Caribbean and North American scholars."