A Cultural History of Underdevelopment: Latin America in the U.S. Imagination (New World Studies) by John Patrick Leary

Author:John Patrick Leary [Leary, John Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2016-11-10T05:00:00+00:00

5Latin America, in Solidarity

Havana Reads the Harlem Renaissance

THE NEXT two chapters consider U.S. responses to Latin American radicalism in the cultural field—that is, in literature, film, and other forms of mass culture. These chapters examine the combination of yearning, curiosity, and fear that Latin American political movements held for those in the United States with few personal ties to Spanish America—that is, those whose political attachments to Latin America were affiliative, as Edward Said used the term (in which one links oneself to others by social, political, or professional practices) as opposed to filiative (an attachment to the country of one’s birth or one’s ancestors).1 Some of these intellectuals made their work in the spirit of solidarity. Others, as we shall see in chapter 6, were fascinated by the spectacle of the Latin American body in revolt, treating revolutionary politics as dictated by cultural sensibilities, gender conventions, and political pathologies imagined as “Latin.”2

My focus in these chapters is on those writers and intellectuals for whom these international encounters with radical change challenged or confirmed exceptionalist narratives of American freedom and development. This chapter considers a particular case study: Langston Hughes’s trips to Cuba during its Afro-Cuban revival and his reception by afrocubanista authors and critics. Hughes and the writers he met in Cuba—poets like Nicolás Guillén and Regino Pedroso, and critics and translators like Gustavo Urrutia and José Antonio Fernández de Castro—identified each other as anti-imperialists and as members of a diasporic avant-garde (although Fernández was himself white). At the same time, they were Cubans and North Americans, citizens of two nations with a long, recent history of conflict, occupying unequal positions in the global cultural economy. In 1927 and 1930 –31, Hughes went to Cuba in search of a hemispheric American history of Black struggle and culture, at a moment of anticolonial militancy in the diaspora and beyond. What Hughes found was no instinctual filiation, but the laborious practice of making this affiliative history manifest, through the personal connections he tried to build and the literary translations he made—a labor, in other words, of solidarity.

Solidarity is struggle across lines of filial identity like language, nationality, or race, through which one seeks mutual (and not just common) advantage against shared enemies. It requires one to give up some loyalty in the service of some other, ultimately greater one, as in socialist internationalism’s disavowal of nationalism (for example, prioritizing one’s status as a worker over one’s position as a German); or to expand those identifications (to see oneself as a member of a multilingual, multinational Black diaspora, for example, and not just of a nation or even a national Black community). It requires these attachments, arguing to do otherwise is to condemn yourself to solitary defeat. Hence Marx and Engels’s famous call to solidarity in the last sentence of The Communist Manifesto: “Working Men of All Countries, Unite!” This line is framed by the ironic pair of sentences that precede it. “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains,” the Manifesto reads.

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