Unbecoming blackness
Subtitle: the diaspora cultures of Afro-Cuban America
By: Antonio López
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 271
ISBN-13: 9780814765463; 9780814765470; 9780814765487; 9780814765494
Subjects: Cuban Americans; Ethnic identity; Blacks; Intellectual life; American literature; Cuban American authors; African Americans
Description: "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 postracial 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 Lachatañeré́, 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."
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Alberto O'Farrill : a negrito in Harlem; title: Re/citing Eusebia Cosme; title: Supplementary careers, Boricua identifications; title: Around 1979 : Mariel, McDuffie, and the afterlives of Antonio; title: Cosa de blancos : Cuban-American whiteness and the Afro-Cuban-occupied house.