Quince Duncan explains in “Anancy y el tigre en la literatura oral afordescendiente” the power of the storyteller lies in his or her ability to observe first-hand the dynamics of social class, nationality, ethnicity, race, gender, culture, politics, religion and philosophy to reinvent reality. African based oral traditions are politically charged as storytellers produce knowledges about Afro-diasporic communities and the broader societies within which their communities exist. Or as Sylvia Wynter articulates in “Human Being as Noun? Or Being Human as Praxis? Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn: A Manifeseto” story telling is how societies and their members come into being. Like Indigenous literary traditions, Afro-diasporic literary traditions have not traditionally been recognized as legitimate forms of knowledge production in Latin America and the Caribbean. As a result, Afro-descendant humanity has not been valued. In order to recognize Black storytelling and Black humanity, as Tom Cummins and Joanne Rappaport argue in Beyond the Lettered City, we must see literacy as written, oral and visual to stop the fetishization of the alphabetic text that excludes marginalized communities.
The papers in this panel build on Duncan, Cummins and Rappaport, and Wynter’s work to propose interpretations of Afro-diasporic engagement in Africa-based oral traditions that break free from hegemonic methods of understanding cultural production and knowledge that exclude Afro-diasporic literacies, cultural traditions, knowledges and humanity. Walton analyzes how Pan-African ideals are produced in music in Colombia to argue song, dance and other oral traditions are a means of expressing African ancestral solidarity and liberation from centuries of oppression. Similarly, Perez Gomez builds on Walton’s analysis of music and orality that build ancestral solidarity in his examination of how the role of the contemporary Caribbean storyteller is perceived and depicted in Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau’s Solibo Magnificent and in Cuban writer Lydia Cabrera’s short story “Los Compadres”. Perez Gomez argues oral transmission of information is a traditional instrument of shared knowledge and resistance that has been propagated and transformed from oral to written language in the Caribbean. In dialogue with Perez Gomez and Walton, Castro proposes the rhythms and lyrics of Colombian musical group Kombilesa Mi (2021) tell the history of the San Basilio maroon community and call for autonomy. All of the papers evidence how written literary culture and oral traditions such as music, poetry, narrative and rap blend creatively in Afro-diasporic forms of literacy and cultural production. Afro-diasporic literacy cannot be siloed as either purely literary or purely oral nor can its legitimacy as a form of cultural production in Latin America and the Caribbean be ignored.
Each presenter will have 18 minutes to present their work after a brief introduction of each presenter by the presider. After all of the presenters have presented their work, there will be at least 15 minutes of unstructured discussion.