El discurso de la descolonización en la obra de Nicolás Guillén

Guillén, both in poetry and in journalistic prose. Colonialism therefore presents itself as a common enemy, in stark contradiction to the freedom sustained and sung with the best encouragement by Cuba’s national poet. From this perspective, we will analyze not only the victimization that Black people were subjected to because of slavery, but also their rebellions and their participation in shaping the Cuban national profile.

Drawing on the Past, Regenerating the Present: A Comparison of the Works of Ayi Kwei Armah and Nicolás Guillén

<p>Novelist Ayi Kwei Armah and poet Nicolás Guillén are, respectively, Ghanaian and Cuban writers who embody the efforts of mid-twentieth-century artists to depict the day-to-day socio-political conditions and struggles of societies seeking to move beyond histories of racial and economic oppression. Both engage powerfully and controversially with ongoing debates around damaging colonial histories and disappointing contemporary realities. The achievement of independence did not usher in the new, improved nations sought by way of struggle and suffering in either country. Uncompromisingly, Armah’s and Guillén’s works portray both the irredeemable parts of colonial histories and those that can be put to the benefit of the present, together with the tension that this disparity between expectation and achievement engenders. Granted the varied nature of the subject matter of the works of the two authors and the seeming lack of relation between them, this study makes use of a selection of theoretical frameworks to find common ground for analysing their work. The analysis of Nicolás Guillén’s poetry is based on concepts fundamental to Latin American social and cultural criticism, notably, the ideology of whitening or blanqueamiento, cultural mixing or mestizaje, and feminist criticism. The study of Ayi Kwei Armah’s first novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968) employs socio-cultural theories including traditional Ghanaian concepts such sankofa and the Akan symbol of adinkra, together with Jean Paul Sartre’s concept of the “engaged writer.” This thesis argues that, in spite of their different national and ethnic backgrounds, both writers draw on traditional aspects of African culture to provide the impetus for social and cultural regeneration in their societies. Critics have read Armah as presenting disillusioned and decadent images of Ghana and promoting limited roles for women in his work. Guillén too has been portrayed by critics as offering an objectified representation of women in his poetry of the 1920s and 1930s and has been accused of ignoring, as a poet of meztizaje or ethnic mixture, the issues of Blacks and Blackness. This thesis contests these limiting critical positions, arguing that the writers’ representations of women, Blacks and Blackness are more positive and progressive than has been allowed. Acknowledging the burden of racist histories, the false promise of postcolonial liberation, the blatant corruption and the unrealised expectations of their times, they nevertheless allow for the possibility of regeneration in the societies they both dissect and, in part, restore.</p>

Drawing on the Past, Regenerating the Present: A Comparison of the Works of Ayi Kwei Armah and Nicolás Guillén

<p>Novelist Ayi Kwei Armah and poet Nicolás Guillén are, respectively, Ghanaian and Cuban writers who embody the efforts of mid-twentieth-century artists to depict the day-to-day socio-political conditions and struggles of societies seeking to move beyond histories of racial and economic oppression. Both engage powerfully and controversially with ongoing debates around damaging colonial histories and disappointing contemporary realities. The achievement of independence did not usher in the new, improved nations sought by way of struggle and suffering in either country. Uncompromisingly, Armah’s and Guillén’s works portray both the irredeemable parts of colonial histories and those that can be put to the benefit of the present, together with the tension that this disparity between expectation and achievement engenders. Granted the varied nature of the subject matter of the works of the two authors and the seeming lack of relation between them, this study makes use of a selection of theoretical frameworks to find common ground for analysing their work. The analysis of Nicolás Guillén’s poetry is based on concepts fundamental to Latin American social and cultural criticism, notably, the ideology of whitening or blanqueamiento, cultural mixing or mestizaje, and feminist criticism. The study of Ayi Kwei Armah’s first novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968) employs socio-cultural theories including traditional Ghanaian concepts such sankofa and the Akan symbol of adinkra, together with Jean Paul Sartre’s concept of the “engaged writer.” This thesis argues that, in spite of their different national and ethnic backgrounds, both writers draw on traditional aspects of African culture to provide the impetus for social and cultural regeneration in their societies. Critics have read Armah as presenting disillusioned and decadent images of Ghana and promoting limited roles for women in his work. Guillén too has been portrayed by critics as offering an objectified representation of women in his poetry of the 1920s and 1930s and has been accused of ignoring, as a poet of meztizaje or ethnic mixture, the issues of Blacks and Blackness. This thesis contests these limiting critical positions, arguing that the writers’ representations of women, Blacks and Blackness are more positive and progressive than has been allowed. Acknowledging the burden of racist histories, the false promise of postcolonial liberation, the blatant corruption and the unrealised expectations of their times, they nevertheless allow for the possibility of regeneration in the societies they both dissect and, in part, restore.</p>

“EL MUERTO, INEXPLICABLEMENTE, SE MULTIPLICÓ”. REVOLUCIÓN Y MALUNGAJE EN CÉSAR VALLEJO, NICOLÁS GUILLÉN Y JESÚS COS CAUSSE

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Redefining Mestizaje: How Trans-Caribbean Exchanges Solidified Black Consciousness in Cuba

This essay recovers the history of 1960s and 1970s black movements in Cuba through an examination of works by Afro-Cuban intellectuals and their meetings with Caribbean thinkers to show the coexistence of mestizaje and black consciousness as a defining, but overlooked, feature of black activism in Cuba. While the existing literature locates black consciousness in the English- and French-speaking Caribbean, this essay highlights how Afro-Cubans in Spanish-speaking countries were not only aware of but also adapted Caribbean ideologies to local circumstances. Using oral histories, cultural productions, and meetings between Caribbean intellectuals, this examination of Afro-Cuban activism reframes the period leading up to Nancy Morejón’s 1982 Nación y mestizaje en Nicolás Guillén to show that the poet was one of many artists-activists who resurrected black history, revalued African culture and black identity, and promoted Caribbean black consciousness in Cuba despite state attempts at censorship. For Morejón that meant offering a definition of mestizaje that goes through and coexists with black consciousness.

Nancy Morejón, Nicolás Guillén y el cimarronaje aún necesario en Cuba contemporánea

This intersectional and epistemological study of Nancy Morejón’s 1982 Nación y mestizaje en Nicolás Guillén resolves the tension, which intrigued most of her critics, between her political commitment and sophisticated lyricism. The author examines Morejón’s unquestionable revolutionary support and adhesion to Guillén’s conceptualization of la nación mestiza—instrumental for the cohesiveness promoted by the revolutionary regime—through the comprehensive analysis of her family socioeconomic background, the coincidence of her arrival to adolescence with the revolutionary triumph in 1959, and her affiliation to the editorial group El Puente (1961–65). Intersectionality allows an understanding of how Morejón’s self-identification and self-representation as a black revolutionary female writer condition her elaboration of counternarratives that thwart the Eurocentric and patriarchally constructed national history. The essay reveals rarely examined contradictions between Morejón’s and Guillén’s poetry and discusses how the writers’ shared essentialist views on nationhood fail to ultimately deconstruct the hegemonic Eurocentric epistemology they vowed to upend. (In Spanish; an English translation is available online)

Introduction: Literature and the State in Nancy Morejón

This essay introduces a special section on the Afro-Cuban poet and intellectual Nancy Morejón’s 1982 book Nación y mestizaje en Nicolás Guillén (Nation and Mestizaje in Nicolás Guillén). It sets up the contributors by surveying the literary and political trajectory of Morejón’s career in the years leading up to the publication of the book, focusing in part on her silencing by the Cuban state because of earlier activities centered on Afro-Cuban rights. The essay considers the themes and arguments of Nación y mestizaje, recognizing the surfaces, depths, and fissures of its actual and apparent doctrinaire lauding of Guillén as exemplar of Cuba’s cultural politics.

Mas yo resto: Entrevista con Nancy Morejón

In this interview, Cuban poet Nancy Morejón talks about her early work, her involvement with Ediciones El Puente, her poetry publishing hiatus from 1967 to 1979, and her literary criticism on the work of Nicolás Guillén. (In Spanish; an English translation is available online)