Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection: Manzano, Plácido, and Afro-Latino Religion

Juan Francisco Manzano and Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés (Plácido) were perhaps the most important and innovative Cuban writers of African descent during the Spanish colonial era. Both nineteenth-century authors used Catholicism as a symbolic language for African-inspired spirituality. Likewise, Plácido and Manzano subverted the popular imagery of neoclassicism and Romanticism in order to envision black freedom in the tradition of the Haitian Revolution.

Plácido and Manzano envisioned emancipation through the lens of African spirituality, a transformative moment in the history of Cuban letters. Matthew Pettway examines how the portrayal of African ideas of spirit and cosmos in otherwise conventional texts recur throughout early Cuban literature and became the basis for Manzano and Plácido's antislavery philosophy. The portrayal of African-Atlantic religious ideas spurned the elite rationale that literature ought to be a barometer of highbrow cultural progress.

Cuban debates about freedom and selfhood were never the exclusive domain of the white Creole elite. Pettway's emphasis on African-inspired spirituality as a source of knowledge and a means to sacred authority for black Cuban writers deepens our understanding of Manzano and Plácido not as mere imitators but as aesthetic and political pioneers. As Pettway suggests, black Latin American authors did not abandon their African religious heritage to assimilate wholesale to the Catholic Church. By recognizing the wisdom of African ancestors, they procured power in the struggle for black liberation.

Author: Matthew Pettway
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 12/30/2019
Pages: 344
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.16lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.77d
ISBN: 9781496825018


Review Citation(s):
Choice 09/01/2020

About the Author
Matthew Pettway is assistant professor of Spanish at University of South Alabama. Pettway has published articles in PALARA (Publication of the Afro-Latin/American Research Association), Zora Neale Hurston Forum, American Studies Journal, and Del Caribe in addition to entries in The Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography. He also contributed the inaugural essay to the volume Black Writing, Culture, and the State in Latin America.