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. This study 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. To explore the potential of this encounter between established literary forms, developing ethnographic m ... More

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. This study 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. To explore the potential of this encounter between established literary forms, developing ethnographic methodologies, and popular culture, the book analyzes the work of four Cuban writers: Fernando Ortiz, Alejo Carpentier, Nicolás Guillén, and Lydia Cabrera. Singling out the work of Lydia Cabrera as emblematic of the experimentation with genre that characterized the age, the text constructs a series of counterpoints which place Cabrera's work in dialogue with that of her Cuban contemporaries. As it diagnoses an “ethnographic spirit” in the work of these writers, the study explores the experimental sensibility of the moment through a comparative analysis of the structural mechanics of their texts, the constructions of blackness in which illuminate the dynamic, sometimes contradictory dialogue around race in republican Cuba. A final chapter on Cabrera and African American writer Zora Neale Hurston widens the scope to locate Cuban texts within a hemispheric movement to represent black culture.