Unbecoming blackness: the diaspora cultures of Afro-Cuban America

Lopez, Antonio M. Unbecoming Blackness: The Diaspora Cultures of Afro-Cuban America. New York: New York UP, 2012. 282 pp.In Unbecoming Blackness: The Diaspora Cultures of Afro-Cuban America, Antonio Lopez engages with the complexities of Afro-Cuban identity as it is encountered, constructed, and performed within the context of the United States. Lopez explores cases of aesthetic performance ranging from the 1920s to the contemporary moment, locating in each of these cases a common space of afrolatinidad, which he defines as "the Afro-latino condition in the United States, which Afro-Cuban Americans share with other Latinas/os of African descent, including, but not limited to, those with origins in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Colombia, and Venezuela" (4). Central to his argument is how Afro-Cubans both share the space of afrolatinidad as well as the (white) space of cubanoamericanidad, a seemingly more inclusive term of the multiracial nature of Cuban migration to the United States in the twentieth century. In this shift of framework from cubanoamericanidad to afrolatinidad, this book calls into question the myth of a normative Cuban American whiteness. Moreover, the Afro-Cuban American articulation of blackness, as Lopez suggests, is also a way of destabilizing mestizaje as it is used in support of a postracial Cuban identity.Though a scholar with a particular interest in Cuban diasporic literature, Lopez considers a wider view of Cuban American performance as it takes place through different media and genres. Lopez pays particular attention to the relationships built between Afro- Cuban Americans and fellow Cuban Americans, as well as with the larger Latino population and African Americans. Thus the methodology of this work is truly innovative in its capacity to connect multiple conversations and discourses in various disciplines, including African American and Latino studies. Lopez draws specifically on the work of Brent Edwards, scholar of African diaspora and Ricardo Ortiz, scholar of Cuban diaspora, to illustrate the overlap between both discourses within the space of Afro-Cuban America.The book uses a key anecdotal moment as its point of departure: an interview between Afro-Cuban poet Nicolas Guillen, journalist Gustavo Urrutia, and Consuela Serra, daughter of Rafael Serra, a famous Cuban journalist and independence leader. In this interview, Guillen notes the "purity" of Serra's Spanish, in spite of her having lived in the United States for fourteen years. This notion of an "Afro-Cuban American voice tainted by the English language" (3) becomes a symbolic paradigm for Lopez's study of the Afro-Cuban experience in the United States through literature and performance. The impulse to control this "linguistic promiscuity" latent within Afro-Cuban American migration is driven by the larger Cuban population to dismantle the concept of the United States as a place of refuge for Afro-Cubans. When speaking to Guillen and Urrutia on the presence of racism in the United States, Serra mentions having "no complaints about New York" (qtd. in Lopez 2). This concept of the United States as a fruitful space for artistic careers continues to permeate the works of literature and performance that Lopez analyzes. The title of Lopez's book can thus be traced to this idea of the United States as offering a refuge from the growing racial injustice in Cuba. As Lopez writes, for many Cubans both on and off the island, the growing preference of Afro-Cuban artists for the space of the United States may be perceived dually as "unbecoming, as an 'unseemly' association with black subalterns (African Americans, fellow Afro-Cuban Americans) in the Anglo-racist United States, and as an unbecoming of one's island-Cuban black identity, its 'becoming,' as a revision or even an undoing, Afro-Latino" (8). This perception of Afro- Cuban migration to the United States held by the wider Cuban population becomes an important framework for Lopez's analysis of Afro-Cuban American performance. …