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Unbecoming Blackness: The Diaspora Cultures of Afro-Cuban America

Unbecoming Blackness: The Diaspora Cultures of Afro-Cuban America

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2014 Runner-Up, MLA Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies
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 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.

ISBN-13: 9780814765470

Media Type: Paperback(New Edition)

Publisher: New York University Press

Publication Date: 11-26-2012

Pages: 282

Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

Series: American Literatures Initiative #3

Antonio López is Assistant Professor of English at George Washington University.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Unbecoming Blackness promises to make a transformative impact on Cuban American Literary Studies; it will certainly put López on the map as one of the field’s most important and groundbreaking scholars.”-Ricardo Ortíz,author of Cultural Erotics in Cuban America

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

1 Alberto O'Farrill: A Negrito in Harlem 18

2 Re/Citing Eusebia Cosme 61

3 Supplementary Careers, Boricua Identifications 112

4 Around 1979: Mariel, McDuffie, and the Afterlives of Antonio 154

5 Cosa de Blancos: Cuban American Whiteness and the Afro-Cuban-Occupied House 185

Conclusion: "Write the Word Black Twice" 213

Notes 219

Index 261

About the Author 273