Unbecoming blackness : the diaspora cultures of Afro-Cuban America / Antonio Lopez.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

López, Antonio M.

Series:

American Literatures Initiative ; 3

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Cuban Americans--Intellectual life--20th century.

Cuban Americans.

Cuban Americans--Ethnic identity.

Black people--United States--Intellectual life--20th century.

Black people.

African Americans--Intellectual life--20th century.

African Americans.

American literature--Cuban American authors.

American literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (288 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New York : New York University Press, c2012.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In Unbecoming Blackness, Antonio López uncovers an important, otherwise unrecognized century-long archive of literature and performance that reveals Cuban America as a space of overlapping Cuban and African diasporic experiences. López shows how Afro-Cuban writers and performers in the U.S. align Cuban black and mulatto identities, often subsumed in the mixed-race and post-racial Cuban national imaginaries, with the material and symbolic blackness of African Americans and other Afro-Latinas/os. In the works of Alberto O’Farrill, Eusebia Cosme, Rómulo Lachatañeré, and others, Afro-Cubanness articulates the African diasporic experience in ways that deprive negro and mulato configurations of an exclusive link with Cuban nationalism. Instead, what is invoked is an “unbecoming” relationship between Afro-Cubans in the U.S and their domestic black counterparts. The transformations in Cuban racial identity across the hemisphere, represented powerfully in the literary and performance cultures of Afro-Cubans in the U.S., provide the fullest account of a transnational Cuba, one in which the Cuban American emerges as Afro-Cuban-American, and the Latino as Afro-Latino.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Alberto O’Farrill: A Negrito in Harlem

2. Re/Citing Eusebia Cosme

3. Supplementary Careers, Boricua Identifications

4. Around 1979: Mariel, McDuffie, and the Afterlives of Antonio

5. Cosa de Blancos:Cuban American Whiteness and the Afro-Cuban-Occupied House

Conclusion: “Write the Word Black Twice”

Notes

Index

About the Author

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 08. Jun 2020)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0-8147-6548-3

OCLC:

820787554