Afro Cuban Tales

Author : Lydia Cabrera
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
Page : 193 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 2004-01-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780803264380

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Afro-Cuban Tales by Lydia Cabrera Pdf

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.

Author : Lydia Cabrera
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 284 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2008
Category : Fiction
ISBN : IND:30000122517117

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Afro-Cuban Short Stories by Lydia Cabrera (1900-1991) by Lydia Cabrera Pdf

Afro-Cuban Short Stories by Lydia Cabrera (1900-1991)

Author : Edna M. Rodríguez-Plate
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
Page : 216 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2005-11-16
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780807876282

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Lydia Cabrera and the Construction of an Afro-Cuban Cultural Identity by Edna M. Rodríguez-Plate Pdf

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.

Author : Eugenio Matibag
Publisher : University Press of Florida
Page : 429 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2018-02-26
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781947372610

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Afro-Cuban Religious Experience by Eugenio Matibag Pdf

The books in the Florida and the Caribbean Open Books Series demonstrate the University Press of Florida’s long history of publishing Latin American and Caribbean studies titles that connect in and through Florida, highlighting the connections between the Sunshine State and its neighboring islands. Books in this series show how early explorers found and settled Florida and the Caribbean. They tell the tales of early pioneers, both foreign and domestic. They examine topics critical to the area such as travel, migration, economic opportunity, and tourism. They look at the growth of Florida and the Caribbean and the attendant pressures on the environment, culture, urban development, and the movement of peoples, both forced and voluntary. The Florida and the Caribbean Open Books Series gathers the rich data available in these architectural, archaeological, cultural, and historical works, as well as the travelogues and naturalists’ sketches of the area in prior to the twentieth century, making it accessible for scholars and the general public alike. The Florida and the Caribbean Open Books Series is made possible through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, under the Humanities Open Books program.

Author : Rómulo Lachatañeré
Publisher : Markus Wiener Publishers
Page : 186 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2005
Category : History
ISBN : IND:30000100604721

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Afro-Cuban Myths by Rómulo Lachatañeré Pdf

African cults and religions enrich all aspects of Cuba's social, cultural and everyday life, and encompass all ethnic and social groups. Politics, art, and civil events such as weddings, funerals, festivals and carnivals all possess distinctly Afro-Cuban characteristics. Miguel Barnet provides a concise guide to the various traditions and branches of Afro-Cuban religions. He distinguishes between the two most important cult forms - the Regla de Ocha (Santeria), which promotes worship of the Oshira (gods), and the traditional oracles that originated in the old Yoruba city of lle-lfe', which promote a more animistic worldview. Africans who were brought to Cuba as slaves had to recreate their old traditions in their new Caribbean context. As their African heritage collided with Catholicism and with Native American and European traditions, certain African gods and traditions became more prominent while others lost their significance in the new Afro-Cuban culture. This book, the first systematic overview of the syncretization of the gods of African origin with Catholic saints, introduces the reader to a little-known side of Cuban culture.

Author : Mariela Gutiérrez
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 296 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2008
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : UTEXAS:059173025227678

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An Ethnological Interpretation of the Afro-Cuban World of Lydia Cabrera (1900-1991) by Mariela Gutiérrez Pdf

Author : Elvia Pérez Nápoles
Publisher : Libraries Unlimited
Page : 192 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2004-09-30
Category : Fiction
ISBN : UTEXAS:059173016322055

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Desde Los Vientos de Manguito by Elvia Pérez Nápoles Pdf

Discusses the origins of Cuban folklore and presents traditional children's games, recipes, and tales, including stories from the country, Afro-Cuban traditions, and tales of animals and fantastic creatures.

Author : Salvador Bueno
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2003
Category : Fiction
ISBN : IND:30000087100230

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Cuban Legends by Salvador Bueno Pdf

This collection of Cuban legends aims to bring readers the best of a time-honoured tradition of storytelling in Cuba. The tales are retold by a diverse group of Cuban literary figures, their stories embracing a broad spectrum of Cuban history from the remote past to the modern era.

Author : Olívia Maria Gomes da Cunha
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 772 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2020-05-18
Category : History
ISBN : 9789004429307

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The Things of Others: Ethnographies, Histories, and Other Artefacts by Olívia Maria Gomes da Cunha Pdf

The Things of Others: Ethnographies, Histories, and Other Artefacts deals with the things mainly, but not only, mobilized by anthropologists in order to produce knowledge about the African American, the Afro-Brazilian and the Afro-Cuban during the 1930s.

Author : Julia Cuervo Hewitt
Publisher : Bucknell University Press
Page : 403 pages
File Size : 48,6 Mb
Release : 2009
Category : History
ISBN : 9780838757291

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Voices Out of Africa in Twentieth-century Spanish Caribbean Literature by Julia Cuervo Hewitt Pdf

Hewitt (Spanish and Portuguese, Pennsylvania State U.) explores the representation of Africa and "Afro-Caribbean-ness" in Spanish Caribbean literature of the 20th century. Her main argument "is that the literary representation of Africa and "Africanness," meaning practices, belief systems, music, art, myths, popular knowledge, in Spanish-speaking Caribbean societies, constructs a self-referential discourse in which Africa and African "things" shift to a Caribbean landscape as the site of the (M)Other." Or, in other words, these representations imaginatively rescue and simultaneously construct a "Caribbean cultural imaginary conceived as the Other within that associates Africa with a cultural womb." Among the texts she explores are Fernando Ortiz's interpretations of the "Black Carnival" in Cuba, the early Afro-Cuban poems of Alejo Carpentier, the Afro-Cuban stories of Lydia Cabrera, a number of literary representations of the figure of the runaway slave, and two works by Puerto Rican novelist Edgardo Rodiguez Julia.

Author : Lydia Cabrera
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
Page : 463 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2020-12-28
Category : History
ISBN : 9781496829474

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The Sacred Language of the Abakuá by Lydia Cabrera Pdf

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.

Author : Emily A. Maguire
Publisher : University Press of Florida
Page : 235 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2018-07-02
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780813063560

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Racial Experiments in Cuban Literature and Ethnography by Emily A. Maguire Pdf

“An important contribution to U.S.-Caribbean dialogues in the field of Afro-Diasporic literatures and cultures.”—Jossianna Arroyo, author of Travestismos culturales: literature y etnografía en Cuba y Brasil “Maguire’s close readings of women ethnographers like Lydia Cabrera and Zora Neale Hurston result in a very original approach to dealing with the topic of race and how it overlaps with the categories of gender. Outstanding work!”—James Pancrazio, author of The Logic of Fetishism: Alejo Carpentier and the Cuban Tradition "Ingeniously tells the story of the tensions between artist and ethnographer that inform the Cuban national narrative of the twentieth century. Racial Experiments in Cuban Literature and Ethnography is essential reading for a large audience of students and scholars alike within Caribbean, American, and African Diaspora studies."--Jaqueline Loss, author of Cosmopolitanisms and Latin America In the wake of independence from Spain in 1898, Cuba’s intellectual avant-garde struggled to cast their country as a modern nation. They grappled with the challenges presented by the postcolonial situation in general and with the location of blackness within a narrative of Cuban-ness in particular. In this breakthrough study, Emily Maguire examines how a cadre of writers reimagined the nation and re-valorized Afro-Cuban culture through a textual production that incorporated elements of the ethnographic with the literary. Singling out the work of Lydia Cabrera as emblematic of the experimentation with genre that characterized the age, Maguire constructs a series of counterpoints that place Cabrera’s work in dialogue with that of her Cuban contemporaries—including Fernando Ortiz, Nicolás Guillén, and Alejo Carpentier. An illuminating final chapter on Cabrera and Zora Neale Hurston widens the scope to contextualize Cuban texts within a hemispheric movement to represent black culture. Emily A. Maguire is associate professor of Spanish at Northwestern University.

Author : C. J. Cherryh
Publisher : Astra Publishing House
Page : 434 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2008-12-02
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781101662274

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Downbelow Station by C. J. Cherryh Pdf

The Hugo Award-winning classic sci-fi novel about interstellar war. The Beyond started with the Stations orbiting the stars nearest Earth. The Great Circle the interstellar freighters traveled was long, but not unmanageable, and the early Stations were emotionally and politically dependent on Mother Earth. The Earth Company which ran this immense operation reaped incalculable profits and influenced the affairs of nations. Then came Pell, the first station centered around a newly discovered living planet. The discovery of Pell's World forever altered the power balance of the Beyond. Earth was no longer the anchor which kept this vast empire from coming adrift, the one living mote in a sterile universe. But Pell was just the first living planet. Then came Cyteen, and later others, and a new and frighteningly different society grew in the farther reaches of space. The importance of Earth faded and the Company reaped ever smaller profits as the economic focus of space turned outward. But the powerful Earth Fleet was sitll a presence in the Beyond, and Pell Station was to become the last stronghold in a titanic struggle between the vast, dynamic forces of the rebel Union and those who defended Earth's last, desperate grasp for the stars.

Author : Inés María Martiatu
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 232 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 2008
Category : Fiction
ISBN : UTEXAS:059173022081703

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Over the Waves and Other Stories by Inés María Martiatu Pdf

Appearing for the first time outside of Cuba, this bold collection of short stories provides an intimate and critical view of Afro-Cuba. Inés María Martiatu's stories--presented in a unique "split" English/Spanish edition--span postcolonial Cuba of the early twentieth century, the First Republic, the "victorious revolution," and contemporary life in the streets of Havana. Taking real risks as an Afro-Cubana, Martiatu confronts conflicts about identity, race, marginalization, and discrimination. The history of the Caribbean, as part of the African diaspora, is reflected in the textures of life in Cuba, its music, rituals and myths, the Church and Santería, past and present. While race is unquestionably fundamental to the stories, they are at the same time rooted in the universality of the human experience. The vantage is that of an unflinching, yet compassionate observer of society--one who simultaneously turns an introspective mirror on the complicated layers of self.

Author : Solimar Otero
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 137 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2020-03-24
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780231550765

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Archives of Conjure by Solimar Otero Pdf

In Afrolatinx religious practices such as Cuban Espiritismo, Puerto Rican Santería, and Brazilian Candomblé, the dead tell stories. Communicating with and through mediums’ bodies, they give advice, make requests, and propose future rituals, creating a living archive that is coproduced by the dead. In this book, Solimar Otero explores how Afrolatinx spirits guide collaborative spiritual-scholarly activist work through rituals and the creation of material culture. By examining spirit mediumship through a Caribbean cross-cultural poetics, she shows how divinities and ancestors serve as active agents in shaping the experiences of gender, sexuality, and race. Otero argues that what she calls archives of conjure are produced through residual transcriptions or reverberations of the stories of the dead whose archives are stitched, beaded, smoked, and washed into official and unofficial repositories. She investigates how sites like the ocean, rivers, and institutional archives create connected contexts for unlocking the spatial activation of residual transcriptions. Drawing on over ten years of archival research and fieldwork in Cuba, Otero centers the storytelling practices of Afrolatinx women and LGBTQ spiritual practitioners alongside Caribbean literature and performance. Archives of Conjure offers vital new perspectives on ephemerality, temporality, and material culture, unraveling undertheorized questions about how spirits shape communities of practice, ethnography, literature, and history and revealing the deeply connected nature of art, scholarship, and worship.