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

In Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection: Manzano, Plácido, and Afro-Latino Religion, Matthew Pettway presents an essential reframing of the lives and works of two renown AfroCuban writers, reconnecting their writing with the African Atlantic context from which it should never have been disconnected. Mary Elizabeth Ibarrola, University of Florida, New Florida Journal of Anthropology

Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection leaves a lasting impression and challenges those who write about African diasporic literatures to approach the literary archive with care?to attend to the lives of Afro-descended authors like Manzano and Plácido while patiently assessing their writing beyond the frames and tropes found in European literary traditions. Nathan H. Dize, Oberlin College, The Journal of African American History

Pettway?s work offers an example of the challenges and rewards of the recontextualization of classic works and authors. This mission is relevant not only for literary scholars, but for all scholars of the African Diaspora, and for any scholar, anthropologist, historian, or other, engaged in the writing and re-writing of social histories. In Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection: Manzano, Plácido, and Afro-Latino Religion, Matthew Pettway presents an essential reframing of the lives and works of two renown AfroCuban writers, reconnecting their writing with the African Atlantic context from which it should never have been disconnected. Mary Elizabeth Ibarrola, New Florida Journal of Anthropology

This disjunction between audience and scope is ultimately noteworthy precisely because this exciting frst book deserves to reach a much broader range of readers than it anticipates . . . I would argue that his Afrocentric analysis of Manzano and Plácido models an innovative research methodology and reading practice with broad application for the studies of the Black diaspora and Latin America. R. J. Boutelle, Hispanic Review

Pettway deliberately puts Africa back into the practice of Black liberation in Cuba and challenges previous notions that Plácido and Manzano represented mulattos who repudiated their African religious heritage. Pettway establishes that depictions of them as mulattos are problematic and whitewash their efforts of Black liberation. Furthermore, in putting Africa back into Black liberation, he adds to our understanding of Black resistance throughout the Americas. Erika Denise Edwards, Latin American Research Review

Pettway?s rich and original interdisciplinary analysis?integrating historical, anthropological, critical literature, and religious studies?makes an invaluable contribution to the construction of a new epistemological framework that seeks to understand the plural and heterogeneous cultures of the Caribbean. Cristina Soriano, New West Indian Guide

Perception is reality. In this wonderful book, Matthew Pettway opens up the hidden codes of our Afro-Hispanic cosmological perception of reality, one that since the age of slavery has given the Afro-Hispanic/Afro-Latino world tools for resistance, redefinition of ourselves and our history, and envisioning the future. In Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection, Pettway contextualizes the poems of Plácido and the autobiography and poems of Juan Francisco Manzano in a deeply researched historical and cosmogonic context. Thus, these canonical texts of classical Afro-Diasporic literature come to life, recuperating their potency as generators of a symbolism and a way of understanding time, nature, freedom and ancestry that survived colonialism, slavery and the ongoing age of white supremacy. It is a wonderful book. Mayra Santos Febres, author of numerous books of poetry, short stories, essay collections, and novels including La amante de Gardel

Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection: Manzano, Plácido, and Afro-Latino Religion is a necessary exploration into Afro-Atlantic studies. This research is a form of literary archeology that sits at the nexus of interdisciplinary scholarship. This book uses history, religion, and literary criticism to interrogate the Latin Diaspora and the associated assumptions about empire, specifically white supremacy in Cuba. In kind, the book demonstrates how insistent liberation was among the African population, both indentured and free. Likewise, Pettway?s research demonstrates how influential African religious practices and the success of the Haitian Revolution were on the collective consciousness of Africans exerting political power in the New World. DaMaris B. Hill, author of The Fluid Boundaries of Suffrage and Jim Crow: Staking Claims in the American Heartland

Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection: Manzano, Plácido, and Afro-Latino Religion is a necessary book for our times, one that convincingly argues for a place for the two leading Cuban poets of the nineteenth century, Juan Francisco Manzano and Gabriel de la Concepción ?Plácido? Valdés in the Cuban literary canon. Both of African descent, Manzano and Plácido were radical thinkers whose discursive leanings were steeped in African religiosity cloaked in Western canonical tropes of Catholicism and Greco-Roman deities. In turn a historical, theological, and literary study, Pettway here establishes these two men as intellects worthy of more concerted focus nearly two hundred years after their deaths. Vanessa K. Valdés, professor of Spanish and Portuguese and director of the Black Studies Program at The City College of New York

This book is an original study on the influence of religion in the writings of two nineteenth-century Cuban writers, that although very recognized and studied, have not been analyzed from the point of view of religion (Catholicism and African influenced). Pettway's analysis of Afro-Atlantic syncretism and the ways it intersects with literature, writing, and poetry is excellent. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in Cuban studies, Caribbean studies, religious studies and African Diaspora studies. Jossianna Arroyo-Martínez, chair/professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Warfield Center for African and African American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin