Review

Black Legacies Worldwide: On Sarah M. Quesada’s The African Heritage of Caribbean and Latinx Literature

Ruins of the Lobito Lighthouse destroyed during the Angolan Civil War, in which Cuba intervened as covered by Gabriel García Márquez. Photo: Claus Bunks.

“I don’t got to tell you that I’m Black. I expect you to know it.”
Cardi B

Sarah M. Quesada, The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature. Cambridge
University Press, 2022.

“Large, vibrant, yet oddly invisible” is how the editors of a recent volume on Afro-Latinx culture describe the community, spread across various nations in the Americas, including the United States.1 As my epigraph suggests, all too often Black/Latinx is considered a dichotomy, with icons like Cardi B, and before her Celia Cruz, deemed no more than curious exceptions, if recognized as Black at all. The U.S. Census, always instrumental in shaping popular categories of race and ethnicity, perpetuates the false binary. Whereas the fourth question in the last year’s census establishes whether the resident is of “Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin,” the fifth asks directly about race, with “White,” “Black or African American,” and “American Indian or Alaska” as the featured options. While an Afro-Latinx resident could, of course, respond affirmatively to the former, and then choose “Black” in the latter, the census does not readily suggest such overlap. Indeed, in the examples provided for Black, we have Jamaican, Haitian, Nigerian, and Somali but no mention of Spanish- or Portuguese-speaking countries, not even Brazil.

A similar splintering of Afro-Latinx heritage has been perpetuated in contemporary literature, when despite the recent success of authors such as Elizabeth Acevedo, Mayra Santos-Febres, and Junot Díaz, publishers seem to believe that Latinx and Black is too much difference to handle for the average American reader, far more than the acceptable dose needed for exoticism. That’s what makes Sarah Quesada’s new book, The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature, so important. Moving beyond worn-out discussions around magical realism—say, the interwovenness of myth and reality in underdeveloped parts of the globe—Quesada argues that the Black archive within the fiction of authors widely-read in the United States has been overlooked. The writers she focuses on include Gabriel García Márquez, Achy Obejas, and Junot Díaz, among others. At a time when the country is still struggling with Confederate monuments and their interpretation of the Civil War, Quesada attributes a memorializing force to literature, one that can expose the erasures of collective memory and offer a way out of our entrenched ways of talking about Africa (5). Rather than commodifying the continent, distorting and effacing its histories, or reducing it to a fearful being in need of patronage, Latinx and Caribbean literature, Quesada argues, rehabilitates a submerged African heritage (15-20).

Take Quesada’s rereading of García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), a novella that, with its manageable length and relatively straightforward diction, remains a popular choice in Spanish courses as well as surveys of World Literature. Prevalent readings myopically fixate on the story’s inventive narration, which—spoiler alert—“foretells” its climax in the very first sentence, if not in the title. By contrast, Quesada takes a seemingly passing reference to a wrecked slave ship from the sixteenth century, whose lost Senegalese “souls” presumably gave Cartagena de India’s Bay of Souls its name, and discusses the significance of this narrative detail through García Márquez’s coverage of the Angolan War (117-20). Employed by the Prensa Latina, an initiative of Ernesto “Che” Guevara that sought to counter US propaganda, the author personally traveled to Angola to report on the victory against the Portuguese and U.S. troops, in which the Cuban mission played a crucial role. This triumphant moment, imbued with revolutionary optimism, was taken as the first step towards “Latin-Africa,” a dream of transnational solidarity with imperialist undertones (for Fidel Castro, Angola was Cuba). Quesada reminds us that García Márquez was working on his novella as early as 1974, but could only finish it upon his return from Angola (119-127). In her account, The Chronicle of a Death Foretold signals the “impending doom” of Latin-Africa, memorializing a hope for transnational solidarity that waned with U.S. interventionism (123). Where others find ingenious technique stripped out of historical context, Quesada identifies a lament for an obliterated Latin-African heritage.

In order to activate the Black archives of Latinx literature but simultaneously defy historicism’s teleological temporality, Quesada organizes her chapters in reverse chronological order. The book begins with a rereading of Junot Díaz’s dystopic story “Monstro” through archival reports about Vodun’s zombies and African proverbs recovered at a memorial site of the UNESCO Slave Route, showcasing Díaz’s critique of anti-Black sentiment in the contemporary Caribbean. The next chapter revisits the 1990s in Cuba and Nigeria, a time of commodification in Havana and Badagry, exposing the Cuban-American author Achy Obejas’s novel Ruins to the writings of Nigerian authors Wole Soyinka and Pius Adebola Adesanmi. After the chapter on García Márquez and the obliterated legacies of Cuban internationalism, the book closes with a study of the canonical Latinx authors Tomás Rivera and Rudolfo Anaya, whose works articulate a global South relation between the Congo and U.S. Southwest through, however, a disfigured image of African spirituality the authors inherited from the period of imperial rule.

Quesada’s book is the latest entry in a generational turn to recovering the Afro-Latinx heritage. Giving visibility to authors almost always excluded from national canons, anthologies such as Darién J. Davis’s  Slavery and Beyond: The African Impact on Latin America and the Caribbean (1995) and Miriam DeCosta-Willis’s Daughters of the Diaspora (2003) laid the groundwork for a subfield that is coming into full bloom today. Historical studies such as George Reid Andrews’s Afro-Latin America: 1800-2000 (2004) claimed the agency of Afro-Latinx populations in the political and cultural history of the region, and recent works such as Theodore W. Cohen’s Finding Afro-Mexico (2021) continue in their steps. With its shared interest in the political stakes of memory, a good reading companion to Quesada’s book is Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez’s Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Remappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature (2020). Last but not least, Lorgia García Peña’s The Borders of Dominicanidad (2016), Translating Blackness (2022), and Community as Rebellion (2022) form a triptych that takes up questions of coloniality and Black Latinidad from the Dominican Republic to its diasporas across the globe, from the nation-state’s official narratives to the exclusive spaces of U.S. institutions of higher education. Through their scholarship and activism, these and other intellectuals have combatted the rampant erasure of Afro-Latinx people, their history, and their culture.

It is through her trans-disciplinary, trans-continental study of literary memorialization that Quesada provides a fresh addition to this scholarly corpus, which will surely proliferate in the years to come. One path the field might take involves further deprovincialization. I am thinking about studies that examine the contact, collusion, and conflict between racial paradigms across the globe, both historically and in the present. The sociologist Michelle Christian, for instance, has recently proposed a “global critical race and racism framework,” one that would attend to the persistence of white supremacy across the world while being attuned to the structural and ideological differences between national contexts.2 In Cultural Studies, this would imply comparative analyses of racial oppression and its subversion across media, as well as a renewed attention to texts and authors that traverse racial frameworks. The famous case of James Baldwin comes to mind: as is well known, the African-American author found some degree of solace from the anti-Black violence through his extended stays in France and Turkey, despite these countries’ own histories of ethnic and racial discrimination. As a scholar of food, I am equally interested in Juanita Harrison, a Black woman from the U.S. South who traveled the world on a budget in the 1930s and wrote a memoir that recounts her food adventures.

Anti-Blackness takes on myriad forms—from erasure to denigration, from disavowal to desire. And as Frank B. Wilderson III forcefully shows in Afropessimism, it is a global phenomenon, as much present in Europe and the United States as in nations of the global South such as Palestine, Turkey, and Colombia.3 With this welcome turn in humanistic scholarship happening across the globe, we will surely see more studies that revisit the persistent legacies of African enslavement, as well as the continent’s role in shaping the cultural and intellectual history of the world. The work of these scholars remains vital. Because if we are not to be swayed into Wilderson’s position—namely, that categories of life and the human universally rest on Black exclusion and death and, consequently, that all non-Black attempts at solidarity are doomed a priori—we need scholarship that reinscribes Blackness into the human and the Humanities at large.4 Perhaps then we can open our essays with bold performances of Afro-Latinidad such as Cardi B singing La Insuperable’s “Cero gogas” (Zero Haters), rather than an extra-musical statement by the artist on her personal origins.

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Endnotes

  1. Alejandro de la Fuente and George Reid Andrews (editors), Afro-Latin American Studies: An Introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
  2. Michelle Christian, “A Global Critical Race and Racism Framework: Racial Entanglements and Deep and Malleable Whiteness,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 5, no. 2 (2019): 169–85.
  3. Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2020), 12-13.
  4. Ibid., 15-16.