Uniting Blacks in a Raceless Nation

Blackness, Afro-Cuban Culture, and Mestizaje in the Prose and Poetry of Nicolás Guillén

Miguel Arnedo-Gómez

• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781611487596
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Cuban writer Nicolás Guillén has traditionally been considered a poet of mestizaje, a term that, whilst denoting racial mixture, also refers to a homogenizing nationalist discourse that proclaims the harmonious nature of Cuban identity. Yet, many aspects of Guillén's work enhance black Cuban and Afro-Cuban identities. Miguel Arnedo-Gómez explores this paradox in Guillén's pre-Cuban Revolution writings placing them alongside contemporaneous intellectual discourses that feigned adherence to the homogenizing ideology whilst upholding black interests. On the basis of links with these and other 1930s Cuban discourses, Arnedo-Gómez shows Guillén's work to contain a message of black unity aimed at the black middle classes. Furthermore, against a tendency to seek a single authorial consciousness—be it mulatto or based on a North American construction of blackness—Guillén's prose and poetry are also characterized as a struggle for a viable identity in a socio-culturally heterogeneous society.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Afro-Cuban Reformulations of Afrocubanismo and Mestizaje in 1930s Cuba
• Racism and the Myth of Racial Equality in Nicolás Guillén’s 1930s Essays on Racial Inequality
• Guillén’s Afro-Cuban Other and Black Intraracial Discrimination in Motivos de son
• The Search for a Mulatto Identity in Motivos de son , “Balada de los dos abuelos,” “El apellido,” and “Son número 6”
• Renegrifying Sóngoro cosongo and “La canción del bongó”
• Guillén’s Black Masculinist Visions of the Mulata ’s Cross-Racial Proclivities
• Reaffirming the Afro-Cuban Subject, from Mestizaje to Heterogeneity
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author