George Palacios is not a current member as of 9 May.
These papers examine works of literature in French and Spanish that strategically employ West African, African Diasporic, or Afro-Latinx modes of thought or conceptualization to decolonize the Black Atlantic. The papers will allow for unstructured audience discussion.
“Cos Causse’s Ontological Swerve into African Philosophical Traditions”
Eclipsed by the titans of Afro Cuban poetry, Nicolás Guillén and Nancy Morejón, the lesser-known poet Jesús Cos Causse merits renewed attention. Born in Santiago Cuba in 1945, Jesús Cos Cause grew up in grinding poverty. His studies at the University of Havana were briefly interrupted by the ‘59 Revolution. Cos Causse’s passion for poetry was manifest not only in verse, but in his capacity as editor, anthologist, organizer, and emissary.
His poetics connects the material conditions of poverty with the legacy of chattel slavery and underscores the strategies of resistance in the form of various motifs drawn from the Afro Cuban oral tradition. He draws upon the domestic sphere to signify the value of strong familial bonds, and in the public sphere, the political solidarity central to liberation movements on a national and international stage.
His poetry is most haunting when chilling scenes from days of chattel slavery are recalled through the storytelling of an elder, or when first-hand accounts of poverty are retold from a black boy’s perspective in midcentury Cuba. However, Cos Causse’s most significant poetry is when he remembers the horrors of times past only to affirm life and, thus, hope. He chooses to articulate hope by transcending a materialist understanding of the world, abandoning Western ontology, and wholly embracing the basic tenets of life, death and rebirth in Muntu philosophy. I discuss the merits of Cos Causse’s ontological swerve, and the possible Afro-Cuban sources, in selected poems from Ballads of a Drum and Other Poems (Balada de un tambor y otros poemas).
"The New World Muntu: Rethinking the African Diaspora through Manuel Zapata Olivella’s Aesthetic Work"
The multifaceted articulation of Afro-diasporic identities in times of globalization provides us with a framework to critically assess the historical reality of ways of being, inhabiting, and knowing that is persistently de-Europeanized in their formation and attributes, and simultaneously differentiated from the modern local-national normative and hegemonic identities in Latin America. Having as a point of departure key narratives by Manuel Zapata Olivella, I delve into the complexity of the articulations of cultural and aesthetic identities in Afro-diasporic communities in Colombia. Therefore, this study is centered on two interrelated concepts Manuel Zapata Olivella developed through his vast writing project. The first concept, “The New World Muntu,” as put forth in his masterpiece Changó, el gran putas (1983), re-centers historically, socially, and politically Afro-diasporic agency in Hispanic literature and culture. The second concept, “Old House / New House,” as it appears in his El árbol brujo de la libertad (2002), establishes how Zapata Olivella reinterpreted the New World Muntu by considering what has been silenced and/or subsumed by master narratives of the discourse of the humanities represented by history, philosophy, theology, and literature.
“Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Black Ontology”
In the fall of 1956, the prominent poet and statesmen Léopold Sédar Senghor stood among a group of prominent Black writers, artists and intellectuals hailing from different parts of the world attending the “Premier Congrès International des Ecrivains et Artistes Noires” (The First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists). Organized under the flagship journal and publishing house, Presence Africaine, the event signaled a key moment in the then two decade history of the Francophone transnational modernist literary and cultural movement known as Negritude. By the time of the Congress, a younger crop of writers and intellectuals had begun to critically assess the tenets of the movement. Frantz Fanon, for instance, in the chapter “The Lived Experience of the Black Man” in White Skin, Black Masks (1952), dramatized his initial flirtations with Negritude to ultimately reject it. The young and prolific Haitian poet René Dépestre, inserting himself in a debate between the French writer Louis Aragon (at the time a leader in the French Communist Party) and the Martinican poet/dramatist Aimé Césaire, eventually sided with Aragon’s negative appraisal of the movement. Senghor’s delivered lecture at the Congress, « L’esprit de la civilization, ou les lois de la culture négro-Africaine », while ostensibly a nuanced academic account of African subjectivity and cultural traditions in relation to European rationalism, opened up by subtly addressing the critics of Negritude. I will provide an analysis of Senghor’s lecture at the Congress that focuses on its response to the Negritude critics.