Mixed Race Studies

English 108: Crossing Racial Boundaries in Post-Civil Rights Fiction and Film: Interracial Encounters

University of California, Los Angeles
Winter 2012

Caroline Streeter, Associate Professor of English

This course looks at literature and film depicting interracial sexuality and mixed race identities in the post-Civil Rights era. Course materials depict individuals and communities that trouble and challenge conventional ideas about racial categorization and the boundaries between groups. Texts represent a wide variety of ethnic and cultural perspectives. Books include Caucasia (Danzy Senna), A Feather on the Breath of God (Sigrid Nunez), Drown (Junot Diaz) and My Year of Meats (Ruth L. Ozeki). Movies include Diva (Jean-Jacques Beineix), Jungle Fever (Spike Lee) and The Wedding Banquet (Winston Chao).

Documenting Race and Gender: Kym Ragusa Discusses “Passing” and “Fuori/Outside”

Women’s Studies Quarterly
Volume 30, Numbers 1/2, Looking Across the Lens: Women’s Studies and Film (Spring – Summer, 2002)
pages 213-220

Livia Tenzer, Managing Editor
Social Text

In her two award-winning short documentaries Passing (1996) and Fuori/Outside (1997), New York-based filmmaker Kym Ragusa explores the limits of the documentary genre in order to portray the centrality of race and ethnicity in U.S. women’s experience. Employing the narrative techniques of storytelling and the imagery of personal memory, Ragusa’s films relate a past that is broadly historical, yet anchored in the intimate relationships between a granddaughter and her grandmothers. Each film emerges from Ragusa’s research into the life of one of her grandmothers and reveals the social pressures and prejudices the older woman confronted. As her grandmothers’ lives connect to the present through the filmmaker, their stories provide crucial insight into how race and ethnicity continue to shape identity both inside and outside the family.

Passing records a story told to Ragusa by her African American grandmother about an incident that occurred in 1959 during a trip she took from New York City to Florida. Using still images, archival footage, and a soundtrack that mixes blues and gospel, Ragusa evokes the racial tensions of the time and creates a multilayered narrative around gender, class, and color. Traveling with an African American male friend (her then lover), the grandmother encounters the segregated and racially hostile South for the first time when her companion sends her into a diner in North Carolina to purchase food for a picnic. Inside, two white male customers repeatedly confront her with the question “What side of the tracks are you from?” When she realizes that they are asking her race, Ragusa’s light-skinned grandmother also realizes that her companion has presumed that she will be able to “pass.” Her courageous response to the people in the diner carries with it an aftermath of fear—will the two white men pursue them?—and unsettling questions about the supposed community among people categorized as racial outsiders by white social norms.

In Fuori/Outside Ragusa depicts the life of her Italian American grandmother, the person in her family who most resisted accepting…

The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States

Duke University Press
2010
584 pages
9.1 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4558-9
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4572-5

Edited by:

Miriam Jiménez Román, Visiting Professor of Africana Studies
New York University

Juan Flores, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis
New York University

The Afro-Latin@ Reader focuses attention on a large, vibrant, yet oddly invisible community in the United States: people of African descent from Latin America and the Caribbean. The presence of Afro-Latin@s in the United States (and throughout the Americas) belies the notion that Blacks and Latin@s are two distinct categories or cultures. Afro-Latin@s are uniquely situated to bridge the widening social divide between Latin@s and African Americans; at the same time, their experiences reveal pervasive racism among Latin@s and ethnocentrism among African Americans. Offering insight into Afro-Latin@ life and new ways to understand culture, ethnicity, nation, identity, and antiracist politics, The Afro-Latin@ Reader presents a kaleidoscopic view of Black Latin@s in the United States. It addresses history, music, gender, class, and media representations in more than sixty selections, including scholarly essays, memoirs, newspaper and magazine articles, poetry, short stories, and interviews.

While the selections cover centuries of Afro-Latin@ history, since the arrival of Spanish-speaking Africans in North America in the mid-sixteenth-century, most of them focus on the past fifty years. The central question of how Afro-Latin@s relate to and experience U.S. and Latin American racial ideologies is engaged throughout, in first-person accounts of growing up Afro-Latin@, a classic essay by a leader of the Young Lords, and analyses of U.S. census data on race and ethnicity, as well as in pieces on gender and sexuality, major-league baseball, and religion. The contributions that Afro-Latin@s have made to U.S. culture are highlighted in essays on the illustrious Afro-Puerto Rican bibliophile Arturo Alfonso Schomburg and music and dance genres from salsa to mambo, and from boogaloo to hip hop. Taken together, these and many more selections help to bring Afro-Latin@s in the United States into critical view.

Contributors: Afro–Puerto Rican Testimonies Project, Josefina Baéz, Ejima Baker, Luis Barrios, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Adrian Burgos Jr., Ginetta E. B. Candelario, Adrián Castro, Jesús Colón, Marta I. Cruz-Janzen, William A. Darity Jr., Milca Esdaille, Sandra María Esteves, María Teresa Fernández (Mariposa), Carlos Flores, Juan Flores, Jack D. Forbes, David F. Garcia, Ruth Glasser, Virginia Meecham Gould, Susan D. Greenbaum, Evelio Grillo, Pablo “Yoruba” Guzmán, Gabriel Haslip-Viera, Tanya K. Hernández, Victor Hernández Cruz, Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, Lisa Hoppenjans, Vielka Cecilia Hoy, Alan J. Hughes, María Rosario Jackson, James Jennings, Miriam Jiménez Román, Angela Jorge, David Lamb, Aida Lambert, Ana M. Lara, Evelyne Laurent-Perrault, Tato Laviera, John Logan, Antonio López, Felipe Luciano, Louis Pancho McFarland, Ryan Mann-Hamilton, Wayne Marshall, Marianela Medrano, Nancy Raquel Mirabal, Yvette Modestin, Ed Morales, Jairo Moreno, Marta Moreno Vega, Willie Perdomo, Graciela Pérez Gutiérrez, Sofia Quintero, Ted Richardson, Louis Reyes Rivera, Pedro R. Rivera , Raquel Z. Rivera, Yeidy Rivero, Mark Q. Sawyer, Piri Thomas, Silvio Torres-Saillant, Nilaja Sun, Sherezada “Chiqui” Vicioso, Peter H. Wood

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Editorial Note
• Introduction
• I. Historical Background before 1900
  • The Earliest Africans in North America / Peter H. Wood
  • Black Pioneers: The Spanish-Speaking Afroamericans of the Southwest / Jack D. Forbes
  • Slave and Free Women of Color in the Spanish Ports of New Orleans, Mobile, and Pensacola / Virginia Meacham Gould
  • Afro-Cubans in Tampa / Susan D. Greenbaum
  • Excerpt from Pulling the Muse from the Drum / Adrian Castro
• II. Arturo Alfonso Schomburg
  • Excerpt from Racial Integrity: A Plea for the Establishment of a Chair of Negro History in Our Schools and Colleges / Arturo Alfonso Schomburg
  • The World of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg / Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof
  • Invoking Arturo Schomburg’s Legacy in Philadelphia / Evelyne Laurent-Perrault
• III. Afro-Latin@s on the Color Line
  • Black Cuban, Black American / Evelio Grillo
  • A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches / Jesus Colon
  • Melba Alvarado, El Club Cubano Inter-Americano, and the Creation of Afro-Cubanidades in New York City / Nancy Raquel Mirabel
  • An Uneven Playing Field: Afro-Latinos in Major League Baseball / Adrian Burgos Jr.
  • Changing Identities: An Afro-Latino Family Portrait / Gabriel Haslip-Viera
  • Eso era tremendo!: An Afro-Cuban Musician Remembers / Graciela Perez Gutierrez
• IV. Roots of Salsa: Afro-Latin@ Popular Music
  • From “Indianola” to “Ño Colá”: The Strange Career of the Afro-Puerto Rican Musician / Ruth Glasser
  • Excerpt from cu/bop / Louis Reyes Rivera
  • Bauzá-Gillespie-Latin/Jazz: Difference, Modernity, and the Black Caribbean / Jairo Moreno
  • Contesting that Damned Mambo: Arsenio Rodriguez and the People of El Barrio and the Bronx in the 1950s / David F. Garcia
  • Boogaloo and Latin Soul / Juan Flores
  • Excerpt from the salsa of bethesda fountain / Tato Laviera
• V. Black Latin@ Sixties
  • Hair Conking: Buy Black / Carlos Cooks
  • Carlos A. Cooks: Dominican Garveyite in Harlem / Pedro R. Rivera
  • Down These Mean Streets / Piri Thomas
  • African Things / Victor Hernandez Cruz
  • Black Notes and “You Do Something to Me” / Sandra Maria Esteves
  • Before People Called Me a Spic, They Called Me a Nigger / Pablo “Yoruba” Guzman
  • Excerpt from Jíbaro, My Pretty Nigger / Felipe Luciano
  • The Yoruba Orisha Tradition Comes to New York City / Marta Moreno Vega
  • Reflections and Lived Experiences of Afro-Latin@ Religiosity / Luis Barrios
  • Discovering Myself / Un Testimonio / Josefina Baez
• VI. Afro-Latinas
  • The Black Puerto Rican Woman in Contemporary American Society / Angela Jorge
  • Something Latino Was Up with Us / Spring Redd
  • Excerpt from Poem for My Grifa-Rican Sistah, or Broken Ends Broken Promises / Mariposa (María Teresa Fernandez)
  • Latinegras: Desired Women—Undesirable Mothers, Daughters, Sisters, and Wives / Marta I. Cruz-Janzen
  • Letter to a Friend / Nilaja Sun
  • Uncovering Mirrors: Afro-Latina Lesbian Subjects / Ana M. Lara
  • The Black Bellybutton of a Bongo / Marianela Medrano
• VII. Public Images and (Mis)Representations
  • Notes on Eusebia Cosme and Juano Hernandez / Miriam Jimenez Roman
  • Desde el Mero Medio: Race Discrimination within the Latino Community / Carlos Flores
  • Displaying Identity: Dominicans in the Black Mosaic of Washington, D.C. / Ginetta E. B. Candelario
  • Bringing the Soul: Afros, Black Empowerment, and Lucecita Benítez / Yeidy M. Rivero
  • Can BET Make You Black? Remixing and Reshaping Latin@s on Black Entertainment Television / Ejima Baker
  • The Afro-Latino Connection: Can this group be the bridge to a broadbased Black-Hispanic alliance? / Alan Hughes and Milca Esdaille
• VIII. Afro-Latin@s in the Hip Hop Zone
  • Ghettocentricity, Blackness, and Pan-Latinidad / Raquel Z. Rivera
  • Chicano Rap Roots: Afro-Mexico and Black-Brown Cultural Exchange / Pancho McFarland
  • The Rise and Fall of Reggaeton: From Daddy Yankee to Tego Calderon and Beyond / Wayne Marshall
  • Do Platanos Go wit’ Collard Greens? / David Lamb
  • Divas Don’t Yield / Sofia Quintero
• IX. Living Afro-Latinidads
  • An Afro-Latina’s Quest for Inclusion / Yvette Modestin
  • Retracing Migration: From Samana to New York and Back Again / Ryan Mann-Hamilton
  • Negotiating among Invisibilities: Tales of Afro-Latinidades in the United States / Vielka Cecilia Hoy
  • We Are Black Too: Experiences of a Honduran Garifuna / Aida Lambert
  • Profile of an Afro-Latina: Black, Mexican, Both / Maria Rosario Jackson
  • Enrique Patterson: Black Cuban Intellectual in Cuban Miami / Antonio Lopez
  • Reflections about Race by a Negrito Acomplejao / Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
  • Divisible Blackness: Reflections on Heterogeneity and Racial Identity / Silvio Torres-Saillant
  • Nigger-Reecan Blues / Willie Perdomo
• X. Afro-Latin@s: Present and Future Tenses
  • How Race Counts for Hispanic Americans / John R. Logan
  • Bleach in the Rainbow: Latino Ethnicity and Preferences for Whiteness / William A. Darity Jr., Jason Dietrich, and Darrick Hamilton
  • Brown Like Me? / Ed Morales
  • Against the Myth of Racial Harmony in Puerto Rico / Afro-Puerto Rican Testimonies Project
  • Mexican Ways, African Roots / Lisa Hoppenjans and Ted Richardson
  • Afro-Latin@s and the Latino Workplace / Tanya Kateri Hernandez
  • Racial Politics in Multiethnic America: Black and Latina/o Identities and Coalitions
  • Afro-Latinism in United States Society: A Commentary / James Jennings
• Sources and Permissions
• Contributors
• Index

“White Slaves” and the “Arrogant Mestiza”: Reconfiguring Whiteness in The Squatter and the Don and Ramona

American Literature
Volume 69, Number 4 (December, 1997)
pages 813-839

David Luis-Brown, Associate Professor of Cultural Studies and English
Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California

In Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884) and The Squatter and the Don (1885) by Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton are indisputably political novels, representing conflicts over land, class position, and racial status in California in the 1870s. These novels represent Anglos, Californios, and Indians as struggling for social position following the U.S. annexation of one-half of Mexico as a result of the Mexican War of 1846-1848. However, although most critics view these texts as political, their insufficient historicization of narrative form has led them to misconstrue as antagonistic the relationship between form and reform in these novels. Despite the canon-expanding feminist criticism of Lauren Berlant, Ann Douglas, Jane Tompkins, and others, which has allowed us to read as politically engaged the previously marginalized genres of melodrama and romance, Michael Dorris associates melodrama in Ramona with improbable events, simplistic characterization, and chaste love; Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita split Squatter into “two tracks, one historical and one romantic.” Sánchez and Pita view the romance as a love story inadequate to Squatter’s historical content—conflicts over racial caste. According to the logic of such constricting definitions of romance, a politically engaged, protofeminist nineteenth-century sentimental text would be a contradiction in terms, a clearly untenable conclusion given recent feminist scholarship.

Feminist scholarship on sentimentalism has allowed us to grasp the point of view expressed by José Martí, an early admirer of Ramona. In the prologue to his 1888 translation of Ramona, Martí argues that Ramona’s sentimental qualities constitute its political strength…

Purchase the article here.

Mix Up, Mix Up: Reviewing Bob Marley as the Militant Mulatto

University of Miami
Fall 2011
ENG 106 R4/S4

Rachel Panton, Lecturer of English

In lieu of what would have been Bob Marley’s 66th birthday, we will explore the impact of Rastafari on the life and music of Marley, and on other contemporary Roots Reggae artists. We will also discuss the history of Marley’s mixed-race heritage and the ways in which race influenced his music and being. Students will be encouraged to investigate these issues, as well as develop their own inquiries about this mystical legend.

“The Case Was Very Black against” Her: Pauline Hopkins and the Politics of Racial Ambiguity at the “Colored American Magazine”

American Periodicals
Volume 16, Number 1 (2006)
pages 52-73

Sigrid Anderson Cordell, Librarian for History, American Literature, and American Culture
University of Michigan

When Pauline Hopkins’s short story. “Talma Gordon,” appeared in the October 1900 issue of the Colored American Magazine, it ran opposite a photograph of a young smiling African-American boy balancing an American flag across one arm with the other arm raised in a salute (Figure 1). By linking the black child and the American flag, this picture, entitled “The Young Colored American.” attempts to align U.S. interests with those of the black community and reflects the magazine’s aim to recover the role of African Americans in American history. The figure of the child evokes both a sense of optimism and an historical link to America’s infancy. Likewise, the photograph of the  “Young Colored American” echoes the revisionist themes of “Talma Gordon.” a story which calls into question the hagiography of the American elite and instead celebrates the figure of a mixed-race woman who has been scorned by her white father, a scion of New England society. In this story. Hopkins reflects the Colored American Magazine’s mission to “perpetuat[e] … a history of the negro race” and re-write the triumphal narratives of traditional American history. As I will argue, however, the interweaving of gender and racial politics in the narrative structure of this story both reflects and complicates the politics of the journal itself.

Throughout her literary career. Pauline Hopkins (1859-1930) deliberately incorporated politics into her work and claimed a voice for African Americans, particularly African-American women. Rather than publishing in the mainstream literary journals such as Harper’s and the Atlantic that dominated the American cultural scene at the turn of the twentieth century, Hopkins wrote for periodicals specifically targeted to the black community, such as the Colored American Magazine. What sets her fiction and journalism apart from that of her female contemporaries—both black and white—is her blunt depiction…

Purchase the article here.

Crossing the Color Line: Narratives of Passing in American Literature

St. Mary’s College of Maryland
English 400.01
Fall 2008

Christine Wooley, Assistant Professor of English
     
This course will consider representations of passing (and thus also miscegenation) in nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. culture. While passing has often been depicted-and dismissed-as an act of racial betrayal, more recent criticism has suggested that we view these depictions of racial transgression and deception in more complicated ways. In this class, we will analyze various narratives centered around passing and miscegenation as sites through which we can better examine-and understand-the construction of racial identities in particular historical and political contexts. We will ask whether or not narratives about passing and miscegenation challenge the stability of racial categories. Likewise, we will pay close attention to how such narratives also engage issues of class, ethnicity, and gender. Syllabus may include works by authors such as Harriet Wilson, William Wells Brown, Lydia Maria Child, Frances Harper, William Dean Howells, Pauline Hopkins, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, George Schuyler, Toni Morrison, and Philip Roth. In addition, this class will also draw on a selection of historical and legal documents, current critical works on race, and films such as The Jazz Singer and Imitation of Life.

Crossing the Color Line: Racial Passing in American Literature

Wesleyan University
AMST 322 / ENGL 319
Fall 2015

Amy Cynthia Tang, Assistant Professor of English

Narratives of racial passing having long captivated readers and critics alike for the way in which they provocatively raise questions about the construction, reinforcement, and subversion of racial categories. This course will consider several examples of the “literature of passing” as it has been established as a category within African American literature alongside more ambiguously classified 20th-century narratives of ethnic masquerade and cultural assimilation as a way of exploring how literary and film texts invoke, interrogate, and otherwise explore categories of race, gender, class, and sexual identity.

Key texts will include James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Nella Larsen’s Passing, Douglas Sirk’s film Imitation of Life, Richard Rodriguez’s memoir Hunger of Memory, Chang-Rae Lee’s novel A Gesture Life, and Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain.

The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars

Cambridge University Press
September 1993
396 pages
228 x 152 mm
ISBN: 9780521458757
DOI: 10.2277/0521458757

Elazar Barkan, Professor of International and Public Affairs
Columbia University

This fascinating study in the sociology of knowledge documents the refutation of scientific foundations for racism in Britain and the United States between the two world wars, when the definition of race as a biological concept was replaced by a cultural notion of race. Discussing the work of the leading biologists and anthropologists who wrote about race between the wars, Dr. Barkan argues that the impetus for the shift in ideologies of race came from the inclusion of outsiders—women, Jews, and leftists—into the mainstream of scientific discourse.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I: ANTHROPOLOGY
  • 1. Constructing a British identity
    • Colors into races. A transition to modern British anthropology. The founding fathers. Mummies, bones and stones. The shift in British archaeology. A British glimpse at race relations.
  • 2. American diversity
    • Haunted sentinels. European skulls and the primitive mind. The Boasians. American physical anthropology. The politics of coexistence. Dionysia in the Pacific.
• PART II: BIOLOGY
  • 3. In search of a biology of race
    • NewGenics. The statistician’s fable. Race crossing in Jamaica. A Canadian in London: rigid Reginald Ruggles Gates.
  • 4. The limit of traditional reform
    • A racist liberal: Julian Huxley’s early years. Herbert Spencer Jennings and progressive eugenics. A conservative critique: Raymond Pearl. Bridging race formalism and population genetics.
  • 5. Mitigating racial differences
    • Lancelot Hogben. “Africa view” – Huxley’s changing perspectives. J. B. S. Haldane: a defiant aristocrat. Medicine and eugenics: expanding the environment. Eugenics reformed.
• PART III: POLITICS
  • 6. Confronting racism: scientists as politicians
    • 1933 – Early hesitations. Britain – Race and Culture Committee. We Europeans. The American scene. An international interlude. The Paris Congress. The population committee. Out of the closet.
• EPILOGUE
• Bibliography
• Index

Trans-American Modernisms: Racial Passing, Travel Writing, and Cultural Fantasies of Latin America

University of Southern California
August 2009
311 pages

Ruth Blandón

Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH)

In my historical examination of the literary works of Nella Larsen, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Carl Van Vechten, I investigate U.S. modernists’ interest in Latin America and their attempts to establish trans-American connections. As they engage with and write about countries such as Brazil, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Costa Rica, and Venezuela as utopian spaces, these writers often tend to relegate Latin America to the status of a useful trope, one that allows them to negotiate a variety of identitarian and sexual anxieties.

The domestic political landscape that informs the desire for migration to the Latin Americas—whether real or fantastical—in the early twentieth century leads to Johnson’s depiction of the savvy and ambitious titular character in his first and only novel, Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, to Van Vechten’s, Larsen’s, and Fauset’s fantastical Brazil in their respective Nigger Heaven, Passing, and Plum Bun. Hughes’s translation of Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén’s poetry illustrates his straddling of national and color lines through the translation of language. These writers react to Jim Crow laws, one-drop rules, and color lines in their connections to and fantasies of the Latin Americas. What then of writers who make similar trans-American connections and constructions, but who write from a space of relative privilege, however resistant they are to that privilege? Consider William Carlos Williams, who negotiates the pressures of assimilation in the United States as he attempts to assert his Afro Puerto Rican and Anglo Dominican heritages. Although Williams is commonly recalled as an “all-American” poet, his works betray his constant attempts to harness three perpetually shifting and overlapping identities: that of a son of immigrants, of a first generation “American,” and of a son of the Americas.

The trans-American connections I reveal span the fantastical to the truly cross-cultural. In placing United States modernism and the Harlem Renaissance within a larger hemispheric context, I shift our sense of U.S. modernism in general, but also of the Harlem Renaissance’s place within U.S. modernism in particular.

Table of Contents

• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• List of Figures
• Abstract
• Introduction
• Chapter One:
  • Reading, Misreading, and Language Passing in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man and Along This Way
  • Blackness under the law
  • James Weldon Johnson’s Along This Way
  • The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man
  • Conclusion
• Chapter Two:
  • Brazilian Schemes and Utopian Dreams in Nella Larsen’s Passing, Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun, and Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven
  • Historical Context
  • From Liberia to Brazil—A Change of Venue
  • Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven
  • Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun, “Home,” and Brazil
  • Larsen’s Passing and Brazil as Utopia/Dystopia
  • Conclusion: Utopia vs. Brazilian Reality
• Chapter Three:
  • All-American Me: William Carlos Williams’s Construction and Deconstruction of the Self
  • Cultural Context—Casta and Passing
  • Blurring Cultural Boundaries: “Only the whites of my eyes were affected.”
  • The Specter of Blackness: “I had visions of being lynched…”
  • In The American Grain: “I am—the brutal thing itself.”
  • Translation: “El que no a vista Sevilla, […] no a vista maravilla!”
  • Conclusion: “I’ll keep my way in spite of all.”
• Chapter Four:
  • “Look Homeward Angel Now”: Travel, Translation, and Langston Hughes’s Quest for Home
  • Langston Hughes in Mexico and Cuba—1907-1948: Mexico
  • Cuba
  • Langston Hughes and Nicolás Guillén in Spain
  • Translation, Analogy, and the “I”
  • Of Poetry, Jazz, Son, and Rumba
  • The Translations
  • Conclusion: Translating, Travel, and “Home”
• Bibliography

List of Figures

• Figure 1: James Weldon Johnson, photographed by Carl Van Vechten in 1932.
• Figure 2: “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.” Pablo Picasso, 1907.
• Figure 3: “Noire et Blanche.” Man Ray, 1926.
• Figure 4: “Blues.” Archibald Motley, 1929.
• Figure 5: “An Idyll of the Deep South.” Aaron Douglas, 1934.
• Figure 6: Bessie Smith, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1936.
• Figure 7: Billie Holiday, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1949.
• Figure 8: The Williams Family
• Figure 9: “De Español y Mulata; Morisca.” [“From Spaniard and Mulatto, Morisca.”] Miguel Cabrera, 1763.
• Figure 10: “De Mestizo y d India; Coyote.”[“From Mestizo and Indian, Coyote.”] Miguel Cabrera, 1763.
• Figure 11: William Carlos Williams, circa 1903.
• Figure 12: Elena Hoheb Williams
• Figure 13: Langston Hughes
• Figure 14: Diego Rivera with Frida Kahlo, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1932.
• Figure 15: Nicolás Guillén

Read the entire dissertation here.