Miedo, celebración y otredad racial en el cambio de siglo: Hacia la construcción del negro en el discurso artístico-literario cubano (1880-1933)

The disrupting visual and literary languages of the turn of the 19th century to the 1930’s constitute an area of research as a moment of crystallization of the Cuban national consciousness or identity. Writers and artists in Hispanic Caribbean region had to face the challenge of finding ways to include highly racialized elements (such as religion and popular culture) within the rhetorical space of the elites, in other words, what Angel Rama has labeled the "Republic of letters". The result of these efforts not only opened a new kind of negotiation of the idea of nation, but also meant the arrival of a cultural production that had to be transformed to assimilate blackness without rejecting or denouncing it. In this sense, my research tries to answer questions such as: How does the process of incorporating racialized elements of popular life in the many narratives of high culture work? What changes had an effect on the economy of literary and visual production in order to negotiate this incorporation? How did literary and visual texts create perceptions of blackness in the Cuban cultural landscape? How do representations of blackness in the nation context build transnational imaginaries and identity? In an effort to answer some of these questions, my research draws on the use of postcolonial theories applied on continental Africa to deconstruct literary and visual representations of the black presence in Cuba and Puerto Rico and trace these continuities through notions of black primitive degradation between the end of the 19th century to the first half of the 20th century. I contend that blackness in Cuba today is determined by colonial representations which persisted in the narratives of emancipation and cultural celebration. These colonial representations reflected the survival of colonial discourse and racial ideology in the Cuban popular consciousness, even when rendered invisible through postcolonial discourse. My research builds on the relations of reception and