Carpentier, Alejo (1904–1980)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheila Pardee
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Magical Realism ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Alejo Carpentier ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Political Dissent ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Cuban Art ◽  
African Heritage ◽  
The Haitian Revolution

Alejo Carpentier, Cuban novelist and musicologist, formed important connections between the European and Latin American modern literature of the 20th century. He was a founder of the avant-garde Afro-Cuban movement, incorporating African heritage into Cuban art, theater, and music. Exiled in France from 1929–1939 for political dissent, he associated with surrealists and was for a time heavily influenced by their work. In France, he finished the novel he had started in a Cuban prison: ¡Ecue-Yamba-O! [Praise be to God!] (1933). Following his return to Cuba, a trip to Haiti inspired his novel, El reino de este mundo [The Kingdom of this World] (1948), an imaginative recreation of the Haitian revolution and its aftermath. In his prologue to this novel, he introduced the term lo real maravilloso Americano, or magical realism, as it was later known.

Caribbean-Atlantic Discourses of Race, Equality, and Humanity in the Age of Revolution

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (6) ◽  
pp. 507-527
Author(s):  
Michele Reid-Vazquez
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Latin American ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Age Of Revolution ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
African Heritage ◽  
The Haitian Revolution

As geopolitical warfare intensified in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, free individuals of African heritage increasingly disputed European ideologies that condemned them as naturally inferior and lacking in humanity. With the onset of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) and the Latin American wars for independence (1810-1825), individuals and groups of African descent circulated their own views. I argue that free Blacks from colonial Saint Domingue, Jamaica, and Cuba employed similar rhetorical strategies across the French, British, and Spanish empires. Their speeches, petitions, and declarations forged distinct Afro-Atlantic counter-discourses that proclaimed their equality and advocated for their human and civil rights.

scholarly journals The Vulture of History in The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 113-126
Author(s):  
Fernando Valerio-Holguín
Keyword(s):  
Historical Novel ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Sacred Space ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Alejo Carpentier ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Paul Klee ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
Angel Of Death

In thesis IX of the Theses on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin indicates, from the painting “Angelus Novus” by Paul Klee, that the Angel of History has his face turned back, contemplating a catastrophe. He wants to stay, but the great wind of progress is pushing him forward into the future, leaving rubble on its pass. The new historical novel The Kingdom of this World by Alejo Carpentier narrates the long and tortuous process of the Haitian Revolution and beyond. At the end of the novel, there is a great green wind that sweeps across the Northern Plain and the ruins of the old sugar mill. In Carpentier's novel, there is a “wet vulture”, which I will call the Vulture of History, which is thrown over Bois Caïman, the sacred space where the revolution originated. My purpose in this essay is to explore the Vulture of History as a baroque allegory of the Haitian Revolution. Unlike the angel from Benjamin's thesis, who wants to go back to the past to reconstruct history, Carpentier's vulture is an angel of death who feeds on the detritus of history.

scholarly journals Voices of Mexican history in Sophia Segovia's novel «The Murmur of Bees»

2021 ◽  
pp. 93
Author(s):  
Liudmila Okuneva
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Magical Realism ◽  
Mexican Revolution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Mexican History

The article examines the novel by the Mexican writer Sofia Segovia «The Murmur of Bees», published in Russian in 2021. The novel, written in the genre of Latin American "magical realism", describes the dramatic events of the period of "revolutionary caudillism" that followed the Mexican revolution of 1910—1917. The novel, which is a literary discovery of the year, provides an interpretation of revolutionary events that is unusual for official historiography.

“Murder, Robbery, Rape, Adultery, and Incest”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Faherty
Keyword(s):  
National Development ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Future ◽  
Before And After ◽  
True Source ◽  
Cultural Mores ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

This essay considers how and why Federalist writers turned to the medium of fiction after the Revolution of 1800 in order to continue to express their concerns about the dangers of a Jeffersonian ascendency and the future of national development. By exploring the connections between rhetorical practices before and after Jefferson’s election, I argue that Federalist writers deployed the same tropes and metaphors to reflect on the loss of their authority despite the shift in genre from newspaper editorial to the novel form. Central to this practice was the use of reflections on the Haitian Revolution which served to represent the instabilities of plantation culture and its capacity to erode cultural mores. The essay focuses on Martha Meredith Read’s Margaretta (1807) as an emblematic example of the ways in which Federalist writers sought to deploy representations of planter decadence as a means of critiquing Jeffersonian power. Yet more than simply critiquing Jeffersonianism, Read also seeks to reframe the tenets of Federalism by advocating that properly ordered domestic spheres are the true source of cultural stability.

Circuits

2019 ◽  
pp. 177-195
Author(s):  
Michelle Burnham
Keyword(s):  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
Secret History

This chapter reads the dynamics of gender and racial violence in Leonora Sansay’s 1808 novel Secret History in transoceanic context. Even as the French Atlantic triangle generated enormous wealth through enormous exploitation, encounters and events in the transnational Pacific were laying bare the unequal terms and coercive relations that underpinned such triangles and the circuits that spun around them. Set in Saint Domingue during the Haitian Revolution, the novel situates the violence of both marital and plantation intimacies within the turning global circuits of sexual-economic drive and their production of disproportion and inequality. By presenting French European and French creole desire in terms of a sexualized colonialism and a pornographic capitalism, Secret History exposes the rotations of capitalist drive as a violent obscenity, and revolution as its violent offspring.

scholarly journals Brazilian Transcreation and World Literature

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 316-341
Author(s):  
Isabel Gómez
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Critical Edition ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Publishing House ◽  
Cultural Hybridity ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Spanish Translation ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
National Allegory ◽  
Culture Of Origin

How does one translate an avant-garde classic? How might a translation mediate between experimentalism and canonicity as a work travels away from its culture of origin? This article studies Héctor Olea’s Spanish translation of Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma (1928) as one response to these questions from a Latin American translation zone. First translated for the Barcelona publishing house Seix Barral (1977), his work soon traveled back across the Atlantic to be re-edited into a critical edition for Biblioteca Ayacucho (1979). This article examines letters from the publisher’s archive to demonstrate that debates over the novel as avant-garde art, literary ethnography, or Brazilian national allegory influenced their views on translation. By including two incompatible translation approaches—transcreation and thick translation—the volume reveals an unresolved paradoxical treatment of cultural hybridity at the heart of the text.

Clarence Cameron White’s Ouanga! in the World of the Harlem Renaissance

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen M. Bryan
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Western Hemisphere ◽  
American Opera ◽  
African Heritage ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

This chapter examines Clarence Cameron White's Ouanga! in the context of the Harlem Renaissance. Produced by White in collaboration with John Frederick Matheus, Ouanga! is an important example of African American opera in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It draws upon Haiti's role as the first independent black-ruled state in the Western Hemisphere, as well as the prominence of its African heritage and the voudon religion. This chapter first provides a brief synopsis of the impact and legacy of the Haitian revolution on American society in the 1920s before discussing the genesis of Ouanga!, along with its use of physical representation and description to heighten the contrast between the concepts of old and new. It also considers social and religious structures represented in Ouanga! as well as its musical representation of Haitian culture. It argues that Ouanga! illuminates the history, heritage, and complexity of Haitian culture by combining two conceptions of Haiti: a highly romanticized view of Haiti's revolutionary history with an African American response to twentieth-century society and culture.

Colonial wars in Cuba and the Philippines in the Nineteenth Century

Itinerario ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 59-79
Author(s):  
Alistair Hennessy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
National Liberation ◽  
The Haitian Revolution

The wars in which Spain was involved in the nineteenth century were those of a declining, not an expanding imperialism. They were not frontier wars, nor wars of conquest but rather wars of national liberation, comparable to the War of American Independence, the Haitian Revolution or the wars of Latin American Emancipation at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

scholarly journals O RECURSO DO MÉTODO – UMA LEITURA INTERTEXTUAL

Organon ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 18 (37) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tatiana Selva Pereira
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Alejo Carpentier ◽  
American Identity ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Theories ◽  
The World ◽  
Literary Device ◽  
Definition Of

This essay studies the Cuban novel El Recurso del Método by the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier,precursor of the “marvelous realism” in the Americas from a comparative perspective of literary theories andnotions such as intertextuality, the cultural decolonization process, deterritorialization, literary and culturalhybridism and the search for cultural identity within the historical, social and political framework ofCarpentier’s literary rendering. Some fundamental notions about the historical evolution of comparativeliterature are dealt with to better comprehend the importance of Carpentier’s literary work, his contribution to agenuine Latin American identity as well as the inclusion of this peripheral literature into the world literature.Providing some examples of this literary device present in the novel, the origin and definition of the so-called“marvelous reality” are focused. The intertextual nature of Carpentier’s text and its carnavalized discourse, itshybrid features and the transcultural issues are outlined in this essay as well.

“An Observance of Silence to the Events”

2019 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 58-70
Author(s):  
Shelby Johnson
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Caribbean History ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
The Wanderer ◽  
The French Revolution

Abstract Juliet Granville, the protagonist of Frances Burney’s novel The Wanderer (1814), enters the novel fleeing the French Revolution and disguised in blackface. This article argues that Juliet’s act of racial counterfeiting implicitly gestures toward the Haitian Revolution without naming that historical touchstone and emblematizes a theory of trace histories that Burney articulates in the novel’s dedication. There, she sketches an agonistic vision of history through what she calls “traces,” where events “though already historical, have left traces” that have been “handed down . . . from generation to generation” and tarry in the present. Burney frames the trace as an afterlife of an event that cannot be quite integrated into the broader scope of “history” as such but which leaves behind profound formal remainders. Burney’s dedication thus theorizes how to read Romantic-era novels for those fragments of form, and Juliet’s disguise replots erasures of Caribbean history as a problem of reading.

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