Uniting Blacks in a Raceless Nation: Blackness, Afro-Cuban Culture, and Mestizaje in the Prose and Poetry of Nicolás Guillén

Posted in Books, Caribbean/Latin America, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Monographs on 2016-07-04 21:01Z by Steven

Uniting Blacks in a Raceless Nation: Blackness, Afro-Cuban Culture, and Mestizaje in the Prose and Poetry of Nicolás Guillén

Bucknell University Press
May 2016
274 pages
Size: 6 x 9
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-61148-758-9
eBook ISBN: 978-1-61148-759-6

Miguel Arnedo-Gómez, Senior Lecturer
Spanish and Latin American Studies Program
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

The Cuban writer Nicolás Guillén has traditionally been considered a poet of mestizaje, a term that, whilst denoting racial mixture, also refers to a homogenizing nationalist discourse that proclaims the harmonious nature of Cuban identity. Yet, many aspects of Guillén’s work enhance black Cuban and Afro-Cuban identities. Miguel Arnedo-Gómez explores this paradox in Guillén’s pre-Cuban Revolution writings placing them alongside contemporaneous intellectual discourses that feigned adherence to the homogenizing ideology whilst upholding black interests. On the basis of links with these and other 1930s Cuban discourses, Arnedo-Gómez shows Guillén’s work to contain a message of black unity aimed at the black middle classes. Furthermore, against a tendency to seek a single authorial consciousness – be it mulatto or based on a North American construction of blackness – Guillén’s prose and poetry are also characterized as a struggle for a viable identity in a socio-culturally heterogeneous society.

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