Locating Afro-Cuban Religion
Locating Afro-Cuban Religion
This chapter explores the ways in which narrative structure shapes and is shaped by the presentation of race. Through a comparison of Fernando Ortiz's Los negros brujos and Lydia Cabrera's El Monte, it shows how Cuban writers use ideas of time and space to represent blackness. Ortiz constructs his study via a temporal framework that privileges positivist ideas of evolution. His desire to create a coherent national narrative creates a tension in his work between defining Afro-Cuban culture and subsuming the question of blackness into a narrative of hybridity, a tension which extends to his later work such as Contrapunteo cubano. Cabrera's use of a spatial, rather than temporal, framework of analysis allows her, unlike Ortiz, to posit a national space in which different races and cultural narratives exist.
Keywords: Fernando Ortiz, Lydia Cabrera, Los negros brujos, El Monte, narrative structure, blackness, hybridity, national space
Florida Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
