Author: Mariela GutiérrezPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296
Book Description
An Ethnological Interpretation of the Afro-Cuban World of Lydia Cabrera (1900-1991)
Author: Mariela GutiérrezPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296
Book Description
Lydia Cabrera and the Construction of an Afro-Cuban Cultural Identity
Author: Edna M. Rodríguez-PlatePublisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807876283
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 214
Book Description
Lydia Cabrera (1900-1991), an upper-class white Cuban intellectual, spent many years traveling through Cuba collecting oral histories, stories, and music from Cubans of African descent. Her work is commonly viewed as an extension of the work of her famous brother-in-law, Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, who initiated the study of Afro-Cubans and the concept of transculturation. Here, Edna Rodriguez-Mangual challenges this perspective, proposing that Cabrera's work offers an alternative to the hegemonizing national myth of Cuba articulated by Ortiz and others. Rodriguez-Mangual examines Cabrera's ethnographic essays and short stories in context. By blurring fact and fiction, anthropology and literature, Cabrera defied the scientific discourse used by other anthropologists. She wrote of Afro-Cubans not as objects but as subjects, and in her writings, whiteness, instead of blackness, is gazed upon as the "other." As Rodriguez-Mangual demonstrates, Cabrera rewrote the history of Cuba and its culture through imaginative means, calling into question the empirical basis of anthropology and placing Afro-Cuban contributions at the center of the literature that describes the Cuban nation and its national identity.
Afro-Cuban Short Stories by Lydia Cabrera (1900-1991)
Author: Lydia CabreraPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 284
Book Description
Afro-Cuban Short Stories by Lydia Cabrera (1900-1991)
El Monte
Author: Lydia CabreraPublisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478023341
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 606
Book Description
First published in Cuba in 1954 and appearing here in English for the first time, Lydia Cabrera’s El Monte is a foundational and iconic study of Afro-Cuban religious and cultural traditions. Drawing on conversations with elderly Afro-Cuban priests who were one or two generations away from the transatlantic slave trade, Cabrera combines ethnography, history, folklore, literature, and botany to provide a panoramic account of the multifaceted influence of Afro-Atlantic cultures in Cuba. Cabrera details the natural and spiritual landscape of the Cuban monte (forest, wilderness) and discusses hundreds of herbs and the constellations of deities, sacred rites, and knowledge that envelop them. The result is a complex spiritual and medicinal architecture of Afro-Cuban cultures. This new edition of what is often referred to as “the Santería bible” includes a new foreword, introduction, and translator notes. As a seminal work in the study of the African diaspora that has profoundly impacted numerous fields, Cabrera’s magnum opus is essential for scholars, activists, and religious devotees of Afro-Cuban traditions alike.
The Sacred Language of the Abakuá
Author: Lydia CabreraPublisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496829476
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 463
Book Description
In 1988, Lydia Cabrera (1899–1991) published La lengua sagrada de los Ñáñigos, an Abakuá phrasebook that is to this day the largest work available on any African diaspora community in the Americas. In the early 1800s in Cuba, enslaved Africans from the Cross River region of southeastern Nigeria and southwestern Cameroon created Abakuá societies for protection and mutual aid. Abakuá rites reenact mythic legends of the institution’s history in Africa, using dance, chants, drumming, symbolic writing, herbs, domestic animals, and masked performers to represent African ancestors. Criminalized and scorned in the colonial era, Abakuá members were at the same time contributing to the creation of a unique Cuban culture, including rumba music, now considered a national treasure. Translated for the first time into English, Cabrera’s lexicon documents phrases vital to the creation of a specific African-derived identity in Cuba and presents the first “insider’s” view of this African heritage. This text presents thoroughly researched commentaries that link hundreds of entries to the context of mythic rites, skilled ritual performance, and the influence of Abakuá in Cuban society and popular music. Generously illustrated with photographs and drawings, the volume includes a new introduction to Cabrera’s writing as well as appendices that situate this important work in Cuba’s history. With the help of living Abakuá specialists in Cuba and the US, Ivor L. Miller and P. González Gómes-Cásseres have translated Cabrera’s Spanish into English for the first time while keeping her meanings and cultivated style intact, opening this seminal work to new audiences and propelling its legacy in African diaspora studies.
Afro-Cuban Tales
Author: Lydia CabreraPublisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 196
Book Description
As much a storyteller as an ethnographer, Lydia Cabrera was captivated by a strange and magical new world revealed to her by her Afro-Cuban friends in early twentieth-century Havana. In Afro-Cuban Tales this world comes to teeming life, introducing English-speaking readers to a realm of tenuous boundaries between the natural and the supernatural, deities and mortals, the spiritual and the seemingly inanimate. Here readers will find a vibrant, imaginative record of African culture transplanted to Cuba and transformed over time, a passionate and subversive alternative to the dominant Western culture of the Americas. In this charmed realm of myth and legend, imaginative flights, and hard realities, Cabrera shows us a world turned upside down. In this domain guinea hens can make dour Asturians and the king of Spain dance; little fat cooking pots might prepare their own meals; the pope can send encyclicals about pumpkins; and officials can be defeated by the shrewdness of turtles. The first English translation of one of the most important writers on African culture in the Americas, the collection provides a fascinating view of how African traditions, myths, stories, and religions traveled to the New World—of how, in their tales, Africans in the Americas created a New World all their own.
Across Borders
Author: Joerg RiegerPublisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739175343
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 154
Book Description
While work in theology and religious studies by scholars in Latin America and by Latino/a scholars in the United States has made substantial contributions to the current scholarship in the field, there are few projects where scholars from these various contexts are working together. Across Borders:Latin Perspectives in the Americas Reshaping Religion, Theology, and Life is unique, as it brings leading scholars from both worlds into the conversation. The chapters of this book deal with the complexities of solidarity, the intersections of the popular and the religious, the example of Afro-Cubanisms, the meaning of popular liberation struggles, Hispanic identity formation at the U.S. border, and the unique promise of studying religion and theology in the tensions between North and South in the Americas.
Cuban Studies 40
Author: Louis A. Perez, Jr.Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822978482
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 219
Book Description
Includes essays on: the role of race in the revolution of 1933; the subject of disaster in eighteenth-century Cuban poetry; developments in Cuban historiography over the past fifty years; a profile of the work of historian Jos Vega Suol; and a remembrance of essayist and literary critic Nara Arajo, who also contributed an article on travel in Cuba for this volume.
Women and Water in Global Fiction
Author: Emma StanilandPublisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000622037
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 228
Book Description
Symbols and tropes of liquidity have long been connected to notions of the feminine and, therefore, with orthodox constructions of femininity and womanhood. Underpinning these ideas is the vital importance of water as life force, which has given it a central place in cultural vocabularies worldwide. These symbolic economies, in turn, inform the discourses through which positive or negative associations of women with water come to bear impact on the social positioning of female gendered identities. Women and Water in Global Fiction brings together an array of studies of this phenomenon as seen in writing by and about women from around the world. The literature explored in this volume works to make visible, decodify, celebrate, and challenge the cultural associations made between female gendered identities and all kinds of watery tropes, as well as their consequences for key issues connected to women, society, and the environment. The collection investigates the roots of such symbolisms, examines how they inform women’s place in the socio-cultural orders of diverse global cultures, and shows how the female authors in question use these tropes in their work as ways of (re)articulating female identities and their correlative roles.
Author: Gladys Amor