{"id":24973,"date":"2012-08-26T17:12:46","date_gmt":"2012-08-26T17:12:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=24973"},"modified":"2015-02-01T22:09:53","modified_gmt":"2015-02-01T22:09:53","slug":"our-america-that-is-not-one-transnational-black-atlantic-disclosures-in-nicolas-guillen-and-langston-hughes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=24973","title":{"rendered":"“Our America” That is Not One: Transnational Black Atlantic Disclosures in Nicol\u00e1s Guill\u00e9n and Langston Hughes"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Our America” That is Not One: Transnational Black Atlantic Disclosures in Nicol\u00e1s Guill\u00e9n and Langston Hughes<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture<\/a>
\nVolume 22, Number 3<\/a> (Fall 2000)
\npages 87-113
\nDOI: 10.1353\/dis.2000.0007<\/a><\/p>\n

Monika Kaup<\/a><\/strong>, Associate Professor of English
\nUniversity of Washington<\/em><\/p>\n

In the past two decades, discontent with the exclusions operative in nationalist frameworks of American and Latin American Studies has placed issues of transnationalism, hybridization, and a diasporic view of cultures at the center of attention. As a provisional academic base for this desire to think more globally, scholars have invented a new tradition, so to speak the transnational and burgeoning field of hemispheric American Studies. Thus, the recent collection, Jos\u00e9 Mart\u00ed\u2019s \u201cOur America\u201d: From National to Hemispheric Cultural Studies<\/em>, calls for such a change of paradigms. In their introduction, the editors single out Cuba, the birthplace of poet and revolutionary Jos\u00e9 Mart\u00ed<\/a>, as a fertile location for their project:<\/p>\n

For Cuba lies at the intersection of Our America\u2019s two principal transnational cultural formations: the geocultural system we have come to know as the Black Atlantic and the complex region of interactions among the Spanish, Native American, and English peoples (extending from the Caribbean to California) that we have come to call the Latino Borderlands. (Belnap and Fern\u00e1ndez 11)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Cuba\u2019s nationalism, from\u00a0Jos\u00e9 Mart\u00ed and Cuba\u2019s late-19th century Wars of Independence to post-1959 formations under Castro<\/a>, has always been a mestizo<\/em> and mulato<\/em> nationalism. One reason was that in Cuba abolition was not a consequence, but a condition of independence (Sommer, Foundational Fictions<\/em> 125): in contrast to the U.S. and most of Latin America with the exception of Puerto Rico, Cuba achieved independence only in 1898, thanks to the full participation of Afro-Cubans in the anti-colonial wars against Spain, whose investment in Cuban independence was motivated by their desire for racial justice. Indeed, Cuba\u2019s population in the modern era, \u201cslightly over half Spanish in origin and slightly under half black or mulatto, with a small number of Chinese\u201d (Bethell 20), suggests an encounter of the two distinct NewWorld diasporas known as the \u201cBlack Atlantic\u201d and Mart\u00ed\u2019s Spanish-speaking \u201cOur America\u201d on equal terms.<\/p>\n

While the discourse of mestizaje<\/a><\/em> and racial amalgamation<\/a> nourishes Cuba\u2019s nationalism, and while the notion of cubanidad<\/em> is built on the myth of racial synthesis, this symbolic reconciliation has repressed actual and continuing conflicts of race and their memory. Indeed, 20th century Cuban history, culture, and literature bear testimony to the uncanny reassertion of resistant diasporic black voices sublated into the dominant mestizaje<\/em> nationalism. One major purpose of this essay is to examine the relationship between the Black Atlantic and Jos\u00e9 Mart\u00ed\u2019s \u201cOur America\u201d cultural formations intersecting in Cuba, as pointed out in the passage quoted above as a troubled and unstable one. Whereas \u201cOur America\u201d stands for the homecoming of Blacks in the interracial nationalism of Mart\u00ed\u2019s Latin America, the Black Atlantic stands for the continuing homelessness of Blacks in the Americas, and the memory of exile, displacement, and the violence of the Middle Passage<\/a>…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Our America” That is Not One: Transnational Black Atlantic Disclosures in Nicol\u00e1s Guill\u00e9n and Langston Hughes Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture Volume 22, Number 3 (Fall 2000) pages 87-113 DOI: 10.1353\/dis.2000.0007 Monika Kaup, Associate Professor of English University of Washington In the past two decades, discontent with the exclusions operative in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,21,1196,8,20],"tags":[673,11649,11648,488,653,8382],"class_list":["post-24973","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-latincarib","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-cuba","tag-discourse-journal-for-theoretical-studies-in-media-and-culture","tag-jose-marti","tag-langston-hughes","tag-monika-kaup","tag-nicolas-guillen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24973","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24973"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24973\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24973"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24973"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24973"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}