Cuban gothic : racial democracy and horror writing in the republic
Keywords: Iberian and Latin American Cultures.

"Cuban Gothic: Racial Democracy and Horror Writing in the Republic" examines how pre-revolutionary Cuban literature addressed racial segregation through the lens of horror. Born as a nation after the abolition of slavery, independent Cuba was thought by white creole elites as a national community freed of racism. However, numerous writers from distinct political and racial backgrounds manifested discontent with the way in which Cuba was becoming a modern nation. This skeptical mood crystallized in a series of monstruous representations of race, giving shape to a literary mode that I call Cuban Gothic. From pessimistic intellectuals who wrote about Cuba as a stillborn baby, to racist ideologues who saw blacks as evolutionary throwbacks, to anti-colonial authors who described the sugarcane fields as gigantic spiders who sucked value out of black labor; Cuban writers resorted to Gothic tropes that epitomize the afterlife of slavery in the midst of the republican era. I explore the emergence of a twentieth-century imaginary of racial horror out of three discourses inherited from the nineteenth-century: first, abolitionist narrative, that denounced the abusive nature of master-slave relations; second, scientific studies about human races; third, orally-transmitted Afro-Cuban mythic and folkloric traditions. Ranging from historical essays, to anthropological and folkloric compendia, to journalistic chronicles and experimental novels; my sources show from multiple angles how fear played a role in the way Cubans experienced the legacy of slavery. Building on the distinction between the Gothic genre and a broader "Gothic mode, " I contend that the teleological orientation of Cuban nationalism and its expressions in aesthetic debates prevented a fully recognizable Gothic genre from emerging in independent Cuba. The ultimate goal of this work is to retrace a racial-horror writing as a Gothic mode that can be read in some of Cuba's canonical literary texts. Chapter One centers on Fernando Ortiz, known as the father of Cuban anthropology. Aside from advocating the de-racialized study of "transculturation", Ortiz used monstrous figures throughout his writings to represent racial relations. Tracing Ortiz's use of popular religion in his scientific production, I explore the presence of spirits in his work as indicative of the spectral persistence of race in theories of culture. Chapter Two analyzes Lydia Cabrera's "El monte" to show how the author's treatment of supernaturalism in the context of Afro-Cuban religious practices subverts "natural" distinctions like men/woman or human/nonhuman, while relying upon the power asymmetry that characterized domestic settings governed by the heirs of colonial haciendas. Cosmic fear of African gods channeled colonial master-slave relations, thus turning nineteenth-century racism into a necessary element to understanding Cabrera's representation of black religious performance. Chapter Three reads "The Kingdom of This World, " Alejo Carpentier's fictionalized rendering of the Haitian Revolution. By calling attention to an early version of the novel's third part, I foreground the importance of Gothic literature in Carpentier's elaboration of historical events, while showing the strategies by which he tried to erase his Gothic influences as he formulated his main theoretical contributions: the Latin American Marvelous Real and his notion of Baroque aesthetics as the authentic Latin American artistic "spirit.".