Our Black América: Transnational Racial Identities in Twentieth-Century Cuba and Brazil Anne Marie Guarnera Arlington, VA Maste

Our Black América: Transnational Racial Identities in Twentieth-Century Cuba and Brazil Anne Marie Guarnera Arlington, VA Master of Arts, University of Virginia, 2010 Bachelor of Arts, Bryn Mawr College, 2006 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese University of Virginia May, 2017 Professor Gustavo Pellón Professor Eli Carter Professor Anne Garland Mahler Professor Brian Owensby Guarnera 2 Acknowledgements As the saying goes, “it takes a village to raise a child.” To raise two young children while writing a dissertation takes a veritable army. During the three years that I have chipped away at this project, my very own army of advisors, friends, and family members have encouraged and supported me, and I would like to recognize their important contributions to this project. My advisor, Gustavo Pellón, has believed in this project from the very beginning, and has devoted significant amounts of his time and energy to seeing it through. From helping me to secure funding for my archival research, to tutoring me in Cuban literature and history, to patiently entertaining my (many) questions about how to approach a project of this magnitude, he has been a constant source of support and encouragement to me. Professor Eli Carter has also been essential to this project, sharing with me his expertise in Brazilian culture and literature and providing me with feedback on my writing that has sharpened my skills both as a thinker and as a writer. Professor Brian Owensby’s seminar on historical method, which I took during my last semester of coursework at UVa, made me have second thoughts about not having pursued my PhD in History! I was privileged to learn from Professor Owensby about historical empathy, rigorous historical hermeneutics, and the strategic value of a footnote—all things that I have done my best to put to use in this dissertation. I am also grateful to Professor Anne Garland Mahler, who supported this project immediately and enthusiastically as a new faculty member in our department. A very special thanks is also due to two teachers of mine. First, to Luca Prazeres, whose excellent teaching of the Portuguese langage allowed me to pursue my interest in Brazilian literature and whose sheer joy in the classroom has been an inspiration to me for many years. Second, I am indebted to Conceição Evaristo, who introduced me to the work of Guarnera 3 Solano Trindade, and who kindly and generously spurred me on when I was first beginning this research. I also owe a good deal of thanks to the many organizations that have supported this project financially. I am grateful for the support of the Jefferson Scholars Foundation, and for the encouragement that I found there through Doug Trout, Karen Tapscott, Bill Wilder, and Carmen Warner. I would also like to recognize the Mellon Foundation, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, the University of Virginia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the University of Virginia’s Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese for their financial support of my archival research. My friends and family have also been an indispensible source of inspiration and practical help during the writing of this dissertation. During my time at UVa, many friends in the Spanish Department and elsewhere on grounds contributed to this project in ways both big and small. I am overwhelmed with gratitude to Diana Morris and Jill Venton, who, for the past seven years, have prayed for me and modeled to me how to be a faithful Christian mother and academic. Christy and Jon Hanes encouraged me during our year in Milwaukee with their boundless hospitality and deep friendship. Thank you also to my small group ladies here in Arlington, for celebrating with me as each chapter was completed and for urging me on in the last months of this project. My parents-in-law provided much cheerleading and extra babysitting help during my most intense writing season, and my mother always made time to talk me through my most stressful moments and never once wavered in her belief that I could finish this. My sister moved to Milwaukee to care for my oldest son so that I could get this project off the ground, and my sister-in-law has been a much-valued comrade in this adventure of parenting while PhD-ing. My husband was an essential sounding board for my ideas, and, despite his own demanding career, Guarnera 4 reviewed many drafts of my work and endured many circular conversations about the direction of this project. Our children, Xavier and Felix, will not remember me writing this, but they too contributed to the process—by forcing me to refine my systems of productivity and by relieving me, through many sleepless nights and busy, joyful days, of any neuroses that I could have developed in relation to my writing. Finally, many women cared for my sons while I was researching and writing this dissertation, and I am especially grateful to Helen Tolan, Kat and Liz Borkovec, and Hilda Lazo for the loving care that they provided to Xavier and Felix. Guarnera 5 Table of Contents Introduction Discovering Black Transnationalism in Martí’s América 6 Chapter 1 The Origins of Black Transnationalism and its Introduction to Latin America 14 Chapter 2 An Elusive Equality: Race Relations in the History of Cuba, 1868-1959 71 Chapter 3 The Black Body as Site of Resistance in Nicolás Guillén’s Poetry 90 Chapter 4 Regino Pedroso’s Quest for a Black Humanity 117 Chapter 5 A History of Black Subjectivities within Brazil’s “Racial Democracy” 146 Chapter 6 Solano Trindade and Quilombo Resistance 197 Chapter 7 Abdias do Nascimento’s Radical Response to Mestiçagem 224 Conclusion From the Black Belt Thesis to Black Lives Matter 260 Guarnera 6 Introduction: Discovering Black Transnationalism in Martí’s América Since the early 2000s, renewed scholarly investigations into black transnationalism have produced fresh insight into the formation and function of racial identities in a globalized world. In literary studies, for example, scholars such as Brent Hayes Edwards and Vera Kutzinski have contributed significantly to our understanding of the transnational relationships between black writers of the early twentieth century. Additionally, historians such as Marc Gallicchio and Minkah Makalani have used their work to document the development of twentieth-century black radical thought across continents and hemispheres. This research has helped to define—and re- define—those movements of the early twentieth century in which “black subjects could strengethen their individual nationalist struggles through international racial formations, transnational, race-based networks.” Taken together, “these alternatives represented the hope for an engaged, black internationalism that could generate new conceptions of ‘citizenship,’ new conceptions of the meaning of a ‘national community’” (Stephens, “Black Transnationalism” 605). With the exception of Kutzinski, however, the majority of scholarship on black transnationalism has eschewed any extended consideration of how this historical phenomenon affected the Luso-Hispanic world. From Toussaint to Tupac (2009), a seminal anthology on black transnationalism, fails completely to acknowledge Afro-Latin contributions to black consciousness movements of the past century and even Davarian Baldwin and Makalani’s excellent collection Escape from New York (2013)—which is explicitly devoted to studying forms of black transnationalism “beyond Harlem”—counts only two of its nineteen contributions as related to black struggles in Latin America. Therefore, despite the excellent and extensive corpus of scholarship on black transnationalism now established across multiple disciplines, there exists no authoritative study of this movement in the Luso-Hispanic context. Guarnera 7 Without research into this area, we are left with an incomplete view of both the complexity and reach of black transnationalism in the early-to-mid-twentieth century. Yet we know that during this time period, a good number of Afro-Latin American authors were writing explicitly on the topic of race. Scholars such as Richard Jackson and Miriam DeCosta-Willis have worked tirelessly to expose the rich corpus of writings by Afro- and Afra-Hispanic writers, and Eduardo Duarte has done the same in the context of Afro-Brazil. This dissertation seeks to marry the research of these critics with the most recent studies on black transnationalism and in doing so, identify the (as yet unarticulated) connections between Hispanophone and Lusophone authors of African descent. Black transnationalism, as it turns out, was not a phenomenon confined to the United States, Britain, France, and French Caribbean territories, but one that exercised considerable influence throughout Latin America. Studying only Anglophone and Francophone manifestations of this ideology risks marginalizing the very real contributions that Luso-Hispanic writers have made to racial consciousness movements—including black transnationalism itself—in the Western Hemisphere. As this dissertation demonstrates, a number of black Latin American writers—all of whom were also engaged activists—used the principles and practices of black transnationalism to challenge their countries’ hegemonic paradigms of national racial identity: mestizaje, in the case of Cuba, and mestiçagem in the case of Brazil. In doing so, these individuals permanently altered the direction of Cuban and Brazilian racial

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