The Story of Raúl Grigera (1886-1955) and the African Diaspora in 20th-Century Argentina

FAIN: FA-251469-17

Paulina Laura Alberto
Regents of the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1382)

A book-length study of race in Argentina centered on narrative accounts of the Afro-Argentine cultural figure Raúl Grigera (1886-1955).

I am applying to the NEH to support full-time writing of my second book. Black Legend uses the case of a famous Afro-Argentine man, the dandy-turned-beggar Raúl Grigera, to tell the untold history of blacks and blackness in Argentina’s long twentieth century. I read the hundreds of published stories about “el negro Raúl” alongside archival records of his life to reveal how exaggerated tales of degraded and disappearing blackness sustained national whiteness in the twentieth century, as well as to craft the first counter-narrative of black presence and self-fashioning for that period. More broadly, by exploring Raúl’s case as a striking example of the role of storytelling in disseminating and reinforcing racial ideologies, the book offers a situated contribution from the humanities to scholarship (mostly in social and medical sciences) on narrative’s uniquely compelling powers and on the implications of narrative persuasion for understanding, and combating, racism and its persistence.

Associated Products

Black Legend: The Many Lives of Raúl Grigera and the Power of Racial Storytelling in Argentina (Book)
Title: Black Legend: The Many Lives of Raúl Grigera and the Power of Racial Storytelling in Argentina
Title: Black Legend: The Many Lives of Raúl Grigera and the Power of Racial Storytelling in Argentina
Author: Paulina L. Alberto
Author: Paulina L. Alberto
Abstract: Celebrities live their lives in constant dialogue with stories about them. But when these stories are shaped by durable racist myths, they wield undue power to ruin lives and obliterate communities. Black Legend is the haunting story of an Afro-Argentine, Raúl Grigera ("el negro Raúl"), who in the early 1900s audaciously fashioned himself into an alluring Black icon of Buenos Aires' bohemian nightlife, only to have defamatory storytellers unmake him. In this gripping history, Paulina Alberto exposes the destructive power of racial storytelling and narrates a new history of Black Argentina and Argentine Blackness across two centuries. With the extraordinary Raúl Grigera at its center, Black Legend opens new windows into lived experiences of Blackness in a "White" nation, and illuminates how Raúl's experience of celebrity was not far removed from more ordinary experiences of racial stories in the flesh.
Abstract: Celebrities live their lives in constant dialogue with stories about them. But when these stories are shaped by durable racist myths, they wield undue power to ruin lives and obliterate communities. Black Legend is the haunting story of an Afro-Argentine, Raúl Grigera ("el negro Raúl"), who in the early 1900s audaciously fashioned himself into an alluring Black icon of Buenos Aires' bohemian nightlife, only to have defamatory storytellers unmake him. In this gripping history, Paulina Alberto exposes the destructive power of racial storytelling and narrates a new history of Black Argentina and Argentine Blackness across two centuries. With the extraordinary Raúl Grigera at its center, Black Legend opens new windows into lived experiences of Blackness in a "White" nation, and illuminates how Raúl's experience of celebrity was not far removed from more ordinary experiences of racial stories in the flesh.
Year: 2022
Year: 2022
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Type: Single author monograph
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-1-108-8455
ISBN: 978-1-108-8455
Copy sent to NEH?: No
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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