The Havana Afrocubano Movement and the Harlem Renaissance

Abstract

FROM THE WRITINGS OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS AND TONI MORRISON IN North America to those of José Martí and Carlos Moore in Cuba, intellectuals and writers in the Americas have played a role in creating political and social identities for the descendants of Africans in this hemisphere. From the 1920s through the 1940s, parallel intellectual movements took place in New York and Havana that attempted to find voice and identity for the descendants of Africans in the United States and Cuba. The Afrocubano movement in Havana not only found a voice for Africans in Cuba but also redefined the definition of what it meant to be Cuban, making it difficult for Cubans to assert Cuban national identity without embracing both European and African cultures. In contrast, New York’s Harlem Renaissance embarked on a different intellectual project. Rather than redefining American national identity, the movement constructed an African American identity within American and European culture so that African American culture would become admirable and comparable to Anglo American culture. In the process Harlem Renaissance writers created a culture that was ennobled but also one that would parallel Anglo-American culture rather than fundamentally change the dominant discourse in the decades to come. Writers of the Negritude movement (Aimé Césaire and Leopold Senghor, principally) did the same for Africans in Europe