Representations of Black Womanhood in Cuban Literature (1882-1976)

This dissertation examines how Black womanhood has been reinscribed and used in Cuban literature to articulate ideas of race and nation across different historical periods and literary genres. I argue that political and literary elites reproduced stereotypical images of Black women rooted in the nation’s history slavery and nationalist ideologies of blanqueamiento (whitening) and mestizaje (miscegenation), while Afro-Cuban female authors who assumed a Black and female perspective contested this legacy by challenging dominant ideas of nation, race, and gender, and attributing agency and historical participation to women of African descent. Through a close-reading of narrative, poetry, and journalism, I analyze the reproduction and evolution of constructions and representations of the mulata and mujer negra in six works that follow a progression of time as Cuba goes through different historical periods: Cecilia Valdés (1882), Motivos de Son (1930) Songoro Cosongo (1931), West Indies Ltd. (1937) Parajes de una época (1976), and Minerva: Revista quincenal dedicada a la mujer de color (1888-1889). This research contributes to the field of race and literary studies in Cuba and the Hispanic Caribbean by situating the male, patriarchal, and hegemonic perspective of canonical authors in dialogue with the perspective of Afro-Cuban women authors who claimed their own voice as feminine and black. This subaltern perspective has been neglected in relation to the historical periods, literary genres, and canonical authors that I address in this dissertation, which scholars, until now, have solely analyzed in isolation. Chapter one studies the relationship between nation and black femininity in Cirilo Villaverde's novel Cecilia Valdés. I argue that the figure of the mulata fictionally recreates the rejection of racial heterogeneity, at a moment in the national-building process when reformistas and Creoles imagined a white Cuba free of the “black threat,” the African descendant population, prior to the rise of mestizaje as a nationalist discourse. Chapter two studies the figures of the mulata and the mujer negra in Nicolás Guillén’s Afrocubanist poetry collections, Motivos de Son, Sóngoro cosongo, and West Indies Ltd. I argue that the figures of the mulata and the mujer negra in Guillén’s poetry reproduce nineteenth-century portrayals of Black women by white and male writers embedded in the ideology of the mestizo nation. Chapter three examines the magazine Minerva: Revista quincenal dedicada a la mujer de color, and the poem “Mujer negra” by Nancy Morejón. I argue that the Black women writers of Minerva and Morejón’s poetry not only challenge long-standing patriarchal constructions of Black womanhood rooted in colonialism and enslavement, but attribute to Afro-Cuban women an active and leading role in the nation. While Minerva’s post-abolition texts re-imagine Black female identities outside of the prescribed roles of laborer and concubine, the protagonist of Morejón’s poem powerfully imagines an Afro-feminine subject who recovers lost memories of the African diaspora and repositions Black women from the margins to the very center of Cuban history.