(Download) "Finding a Place for !Ecue-Yamba-O!: Carpentier's Tenuous Dialogue with Afrocubanismo." by Romance Notes ~ Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Finding a Place for !Ecue-Yamba-O!: Carpentier's Tenuous Dialogue with Afrocubanismo.
- Author : Romance Notes
- Release Date : January 22, 2009
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 197 KB
Description
1. Alejo Carpentieri earliest novel has never been a mainstay of the Latin American canon. Hastily written in a Havana prison in 1927 and published on a small scale in 1933, Ecue-Yamba-O! reads like an experiment in avant-garde fragmentation and elemental expressions of otherness. The work has been widely interpreted as an atypical overture to Carpentier's later masterpiece fiction. (1) That critical interpretations of the novel have either discounted or at least devalued its substance should not detract from his engagement with a surge of national reinterpretations of blackness during the 1920s and 1930s. Three competing phenomena were emerging at the time of the novel's release: 1) a creative movement that featured so-called afrocubanista tendencies in poetry, fiction, music, and visual art; 2) a hefty corpus of social scientific research on Afro-Cuban folk traditions; 3) reinterpretations of the national imaginary that sought to reconcile racial disparities while establishing a framework for progress and modernization. In this study I will examine the ostensible connections between Ecue-Yamba-O! and artistic/academic manifestations of afrocubanismo in the Cuban Republic. 2. Wade notes that the afrocubanista "trend" took hold of literary circles in the 1920s and 1930s "with authors such as Alejo Carpentier and Nicolas Guillen leading the way" (33). The observation reveals a crucial stumbling block in critical approaches to Afro-Cuban literature. That the work of white novelist and a mulatto poet are forced into the same categorical definition creates a series of complexities that want for reconciliation. Obvious genre distinctions aside, the stylistic and thematic differences between Ecue-Yamba-O! and Guillen's inaugural Motivos de son (1930) are as numerous as they are significant. The novel reads like a rudimentary exercise in avant-garde experimentation and even partakes of primitive, grotesque representations of the Afro-Cuban subject. (2) The poems, on the other hand, read like authentic expressions of the AfroCuban experience conceived within a position of access and privilege to that tradition. Carpentier himself recognizes that his early work leaves much to be desired. In addressing the place of academic research in the novel from the privileged perspective of hindsight, he shares his frustration with what he sees as the novel's documentary shortcomings.