Cuban Performances of Blackness as the Timeless Past Still Among Us

Abstract

“Congo” spirits, “black witches,” African slaves, and maroons are ubiquitous historical figures in religious and folklore performances of eastern Cuba, where they are represented through collocations of Bozal speech register, stereotypical “African” vocal and bodily mannerisms and dance forms, and distinctive uses of deictics that present first‐person, historical‐present accounts of past events. I trace an interdiscursive web across which these racially marked semiotic forms constitute a Cuban racializing discourse that makes blackness highly salient and highly marked by emphasizing a chronotope of blackness as “a timeless past still among us.” This racial chronotope, re‐enacted through different performance genres with diverse purposes, contributes to multiple projects of historical subjectivity. [interdiscursivity, historical subjectivity, racialization, folklore, performance, Cuba]

Mobilizations of Race, Place, and History in Santiago de Cuba's Carnivalesque

“…The contrast between Blackness as danger and as cultural difference allows some racist discourse to circulate covertly, deniably, and without much challenge. This is the case for “folkloric” Blackness in Cuba, where Blackness can also become a marker of nationalist pride and cultural resistance, as with the widely circulated, heroic figures of the cimmarón (escaped slave) and mambí (independence fighter) (Wirtz , ).…”

“…The song's lyrics present an aural map of the island of Cuba in recounting the mambí army's movement from Eastern Cuba, Baraguá, to central Cuba's cities of Camagüey, then Santa Clara, then Matanzas, then the western capital Havana, and on to Pinar del Río's western tip, at Mantua. This sweep of the island resulted in a revolutionary triumph that would be echoed in 1959, where Fidel's rebels claimed victory in Santiago, then held a celebratory procession across the island along much the same route, to take power in Havana (Wirtz ). Carnivalesque motion, in Cuban historical imagination, not only models but also directly scaffolds liberatory political mobilization.…”

Boasian Legacies in Linguistic Anthropology: A Centenary Review of 2011

“…Urciuoli's (2011) discussion essay does an excellent job not only of pointing to connections among the group of articles collected there but also of staking out a powerful approach to the construction of race through discourse. The articles treat environmental racism (Blanton 2011), the construction of Mexican immigrant illegality (Dick 2011), and narratives of crime (Wortham et al 2011) in the United States, ritual performances of racial pasts in Cuba (Wirtz 2011), and racism implicit in neighborly Italian conversations (Pagliai 2011). As Urciuoli puts it, the articles expose different aspects of the production of hegemonic metacultural discourses (Hill 2008, Urban 2001), commonsense racial knowledge that structures the world of the racially marked: “The metacultural effect of the “scary narrative” is shown by Pagliai and by Wortham et al; the metacultural power of law and policy is shown by Dick and by Blanton; the metacultural outcome of performance is shown by Wirtz” (Urciuoli 2011:E117).…”

Sloganization and the Political Pragmatics of Interdiscursivity: The Social Life of a Haitian Political Critique

“…In tracing the “social life” of the aloral critique (Agha ; Spitulnik ), I attend to the “interdiscursive webs” that connect past and future speech events (Wirtz ) and to the processes of entextualization and circulation through which the text created “felt continuities across speech events” (Agha :2; see also Silverstein ). Such links indicate a degree of communicative competence assumed to be shared by participants as a condition of “successful” indexicality (Spitulnik ).…”