Related Papers
2019 •
Cheyenne Jennings
Race and Ethnicity in Education
Race Ethnicity and Education Colour-blind praxis in Havana: interrogating Cuban teacher discourses of race and racelessness
2013 •
Arlo Kempf
Despite massive gains in racial equality over the past 50 years, racism persists in twenty-first century Cuba. One of the key tools for the preservation and maintenance of racism is the discourse of racelessness through which the relevance of race is denied and silenced. Paradoxically, the racelessness frame has also been a guiding anti-racist force for over a century; an effective tool for challenging racism on the island since the late eighteenth century. Based on interviews with 41 Cuban teachers conducted in the Havana area, this article investigates teacher understandings of race and racelessness in Cuban society generally, and with regard to the schooling context in particular. Conversations with teachers reveal a paradoxical formation in which teachers using the racelessness approach, are indeed doing race work in their classrooms following an anti-racism derived from the larger Cuban race narrative as well as from their own experiences with race and racism.
Black Diaspora Review
" Salvándose " in Contemporary Havana: Rumba's Paradox for Black Identity Politics
2016 •
Maya J Berry
In the scholarship of anti-racist struggle in Cuba, rumberos (rumba practitioners) are typically ignored for operating within racist folkloric stereotypes that further the commodification and appropriation of Black expressive culture by the state. This ethnographic case study explores how the Afro-religious urban poor in Havana deploy rumba within the sacred sphere to perform an affirming Black cultural difference and create an alternative market in which to secure autonomous economic and socio-spiritual sustenance: salvándose (saving themselves). This particular form of political agency finds itself in a paradoxical relationship with the dominant ideological thrust of the " New Afro-Cuban movement " against racism. Using performance theory, Black feminism(s), and political economy, this study found that performances by and for this overlooked sector in the sacred sphere cannot be dismissed as insignificant vis-à-vis antiracist objections to the narrow social definition of Blackness as folklore and the increasingly narrow opportunities for Afro-Cubans in the emerging private market. A performance-oriented lens can offer key insights into how alternative Black political consciousness is developed and transmitted across generations.
Latin American Music Review 26, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2005): 164-194
¿De qué color es el oro?: Race, Environment, and the History of Cuban National Music
2005 •
Gregory Cushman
Migration, Diasporas, and the Importance of Local Knowledge
amanda concha-holmes
Culture Mandala: Th e Bulletin of the Centre for East-West Cultural and Economic Studies
2001 •
James Ferguson
Extract: Recent rapid advances in communication technology have changed global structural patterns and produced new concepts and poles of dynamism in international relations. One such technology, which is increasingly causing a mixed reaction across international boundaries, is that of the Internet. For the first time in history the emergence of the Internet has produced an anarchic power that is capable of influencing individuals, societies and governments on a scale previously unimaginable.
Latin American Literature in Transition
Abolitionism
2022 •
Victor Goldgel-Carballo
With a focus on Brazil, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, this chapter examines the sense of belatedness in abolitionist and post-abolitionist literature published between the 1860s and the 1930s. Belatedness implied an affective relationship to the global temporality of abolition—a way of feeling time as shame that shaped literature in long-lasting ways. Writers like José Martí and Machado de Assis reflected on the apparently anomalous status of their nations, where slavery was not abolished until 1886 and 1888, respectively. By analyzing canonical literature in light of the black public spheres that emerged in the last decades of the nineteenth-century, this chapter explores questions such as the rejection of African cultures, whitening ideologies, the fantasy of the submissive slave, the myths and realities of racial democracy, maroonage, and other forms of slave resistance. Other writers analyzed include Maria Firmina dos Reis, Antônio de Castro Alves, Alfonso Henriques de Lima Barreto, Martín Morúa Delgado, and Francisco Calcagno.
Racial Experiments in Cuban Literature and Ethnography
2011 •
Emily Maguire
In the wake of independence from Spain in 1898, Cuba's intellectual avant-garde struggled to cast their country as a modern nation. They grappled with the challenges presented by the postcolonial situation in general and with the location of blackness within a narrative of Cuban-ness in particular. This study examines how a cadre of writers reimagined the nation and re-valorized Afro-Cuban culture through a textual production that incorporated elements of the ethnographic with the literary. To explore the potential of this encounter between established literary forms, developing ethnographic methodologies, and popular culture, the book analyzes the work of four Cuban writers: Fernando Ortiz, Alejo Carpentier, Nicolás Guillén, and Lydia Cabrera. Singling out the work of Lydia Cabrera as emblematic of the experimentation with genre that characterized the age, the text constructs a series of counterpoints which place Cabrera's work in dialogue with that of her Cuban contemporaries. As it diagnoses an “ethnographic spirit” in the work of these writers, the study explores the experimental sensibility of the moment through a comparative analysis of the structural mechanics of their texts, the constructions of blackness in which illuminate the dynamic, sometimes contradictory dialogue around race in republican Cuba. A final chapter on Cabrera and African American writer Zora Neale Hurston widens the scope to locate Cuban texts within a hemispheric movement to represent black culture. Keywords: Cuban literature, blackness, Cuban ethnography, race, Afro-Cubanism, Lydia Cabrera, Fernando Ortiz, Nicolás Guillén, Alejo Carpentier, Zora Neale Hurston
Reviews in American History
Revolutionary Ideology and the Special Period in Cuban History
2018 •
mauricio castro
On Writing in Exile
2015 •
Cristina Mislan
Using James Carey’s notion of “historical consciousness,” this article conducted a historical analysis on how Robert F. Williams, a US-born civil rights activist and journalist, negotiated debates about race, racism, and class conflict while living in exile in Cuba and China during the 1960s. The author examined editorial coverage on Cuba and China published in Williams’ Crusader between 1961 and 1969. An analysis of this newsletter highlights the existence and importance of a news outlet that has received little attention in histories on black journalism. It reveals the insights, contradictions, and contentions that are present in black journalists’ alternative media texts published from abroad. Carey’s notion of “historical consciousness” is helpful for understanding how black journalists’ lived experiences and perceptions have emerged from the media texts they produced. These alternative journalism texts reveal how public debates about race, racism, and class conflict have evolved as black journalists have operated across national borders. This article, therefore, contributes to scholarship on the relationship between black journalism and transnationalism by examining specific conceptualizations of race and class politics across various contexts.
