Awards

• Commended for MLA Prize 2011

Overview

2014 Runner-Up, MLA Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies In Unbecoming Blackness, Antonio López uncovers an important, otherwise unrecognized century-long archive of literature and performance that reveals Cuban America as a space of overlapping Cuban and African diasporic experiences. López shows how Afro-Cuban writers and performers in the U.S. align Cuban black and mulatto identities, often subsumed in the mixed-race and postracial Cuban national imaginaries, with the material and symbolic blackness of African Americans and other Afro-Latinas/os. In the works of Alberto O’Farrill, Eusebia Cosme, Rómulo Lachatañeré, and others, Afro-Cubanness articulates the African diasporic experience in ways that deprive negro and mulato configurations of an exclusive link with Cuban nationalism. Instead, what is invoked is an “unbecoming” relationship between Afro-Cubans in the U.S and their domestic black counterparts. The transformations in Cuban racial identity across the hemisphere, represented powerfully in the literary and performance cultures of Afro-Cubans in the U.S., provide the fullest account of a transnational Cuba, one in which the Cuban American emerges as Afro-Cuban-American, and the Latino as Afro-Latino.

Full Product Details

9780814765463

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Reviews

Unbecoming Blackness promises to make a transformative impact on Cuban American Literary Studies; it will certainly put Lopez on the map as one of the field's most important and groundbreaking scholars. -Ricardo Ortiz, author of Cultural Erotics in Cuban America

Unbecoming Blackness promises to make a transformative impact on Cuban American Literary Studies; it will certainly put Lopez on the map as one of the field's most important and groundbreaking scholars. -Ricardo Ort'z, author of Cultural Erotics in Cuban America

Author Information

Antonio López is Assistant Professor of English at George Washington University.

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