| FEL-262943-19 | Research Programs: Fellowships | Devyn Spence Benson | Black Consciousness in Cuba: The Untold Revolution, 1968-1978 | 7/1/2019 - 6/30/2020 | $60,000.00 | Devyn | Spence | Benson | | | | Davidson College | Davidson | NC | 28036-9405 | USA | 2018 | Latin American History | Fellowships | Research Programs | 60000 | 0 | 60000 | 0 | A book-length study about Afro-Cuban
intellectual life during the 1970s.
This project recovers the untold history of the 1960s and 1970s black consciousness movement in Cuba by examining the works of Afro-Cuban intellectuals. While most of the existing literature locates black consciousness in the English- and French-speaking Caribbean and assumes that Cuban intellectuals bought into Latin American myths of racial democracy, my research highlights how Cubans were not only aware, but inspired by Caribbean black consciousness ideologies. Significantly, as the space for political debates about persistent racism narrowed in Cuba after 1961, Afro-Cubans shifted their critiques of the revolution’s racial policies into the cultural realm through art, fiction, and film. Afro-Cubana women played dominant, but hereto unexamined roles by combining antiracism and anti-sexism. This examination of Afro-Cuban activism after the 1959 revolution bridges the gap in scholarship about race in Cuba that currently jumps from 1961 to 1989. |