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Books by Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Daughters of the Diaspora: Afra-Hispanic Writers
(2003 /
Singular Like a Bird: The Art of Nancy Morejon
(1999)
The
Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells (1995) /
Erotique Noire/Black Erotica
(1992) /
Homespun
Images
( 1989) /
Notable Black Memphians
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Three Decades of
Afro Hispanic Literary Studies
By
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
In the 1970s,
Howard University was in the vanguard of Black Studies,
with scholars and writers such as John Oliver Killens,
Léon
Damas,
Stephen Henderson, and
Haki Madhubuti offering courses, developing
programs, and creating works rooted in the Black Arts
Movement and
The Black Aesthetic. When I joined Howard's
faculty in 1970 as a professor of Spanish, my
association with these artists and thinkers—and,
through them, with
George Lamming,
Wilfred Cartey, and
Keorapetse Kgositsile—had
a great impact on my creative and intellectual
development. In the Department of Romance Languages, I
learned of earlier faculty members, such as Valaurez
Spratlin, who had taught courses on the Negro in Spanish
literature, and
Mercer Cook, who had introduced students to Black
literature in French.
I was particularly
excited by the research of department colleagues such as
Martha Cobb and
Stanley Cyrus—later
joined by
Annette Dunzo and
Ian Smart—who
taught courses on Afro-Hispanic poetry and fiction, in
which students read the works of Cuban Nicolás Guillén
and Ecuadorian
Nelson Estupiñán Bass—authors
whom I had never heard of in my graduate study of
European languages and literatures. Aware of my mis-education,
I began reading, presenting papers, publishing articles,
organizing seminars, and teaching courses on these
gifted writers. When I became chair of the department in
1974, my colleagues and I developed a Ph.D. program with
a concentration in Afro-Hispanic literature, the first
program of its kind in the country. We also brought
African-descended, Hispanophone writers, such as
Ecuadorian
Adalberto Ortiz and Colombian
Manuel Zapata Olivella, to Howard to lecture and
read from their works. By then, I had also met
professors from other universities, like Ann Young,
Lemuel Johnson, and
Sylvia Wynter, many of whom were examining
negritud in Hispanic literature, Négritude in
Francophone letters, and Blackness in Anglophone
literary texts.
In the midst of
this creative fervor, I decided to publish a collection
of essays on Afro-Hispanic literature by noted scholars
because, in the mid-seventies, the academic discipline
of Afro-Hispanic Studies was not recognized and the
Black presence in Hispanic letters was virtually
invisible. Until then, there were only two book-length
studies of Blacks in Spanish and Latin American letters:
one by
Lemuel A. Johnson and the other by
Richard L. Jackson, both of which dealt primarily
with the cult of whiteness in the works of mainstream
European and Spanish American writers. It was
significant, therefore, that
Blacks in Hispanic Literature was
published in 1977—following,
as it did, the advent of Black Studies programs in the
United States—because
this foundational text laid the groundwork for important
critical studies that followed.
Blacks in Hispanic Literature was
also significant because it was the first collection of
articles on Afro-Hispanic literature—a
collection that included the essays of established
scholars such as Johnson and novelist/dramatist/essayist
Sylvia Wynter, as well as those of
previously-unpublished academics like
Martha Cobb and
Antonio Olliz Boyd, who would later produce
important texts in the field. Furthermore, it was a
collaborative work that brought together the essays of
researchers and creative writers from Africa, the
Caribbean, and Latin America; and such collaboration
became a hallmark of later journals, conferences, and
edited collections. With the inclusion of essays by Carter G. Woodson,
Valaurez B. Spratlin, and John F. Matthews—pioneers
of African and African American history and literature—it
provided an historical context for understanding the
emergence and later development of Afro-Hispanic
literary studies. The work of these early scholars
demonstrated clearly that Diasporan Spanish American
literature was rooted in the oral literatures of Africa
and the literary texts of Spain.
Evidence of the
collection's significance was its acquisition by
university libraries, inclusion on course syllabi, and
citation in scholarly articles, books, and conference
papers. The book was reviewed in prestigious journals,
such as Research in African Literature and
the Journal of Spanish Studies, in which it was
cited as one of "two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature" that appeared in the late
1970s. Scholars in the field have indicated that
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is still
relevant; in a 2002 article, published in the Journal
of Dagarre Studies, one noted that the collection
"provides a valuable historical review for the medieval
and Golden Age periods," and in 2004, another called it
"the seminal study in the field of Afro-Hispanic
Literature . . . on which most scholars in the field
'cut their teeth.'" More recently, it was cited in the
introduction to a 2008 collection of essays by
Jerome Branche and listed in a bibliography compiled
by
Runoko Rashidi; and two of the essays were
referenced in a 2004 article by Warren Jones, III, as
well as in a 2008 book edited by Richard M. Juang.
In the three
decades since the publication of
Blacks in Hispanic Literature, the field
of Afro-Hispanic literary studies has been enriched by
the research of noted critics; proliferation of artistic
works by Black Hispanophone writers; publication of
three important journals; application of new critical
methodologies for interpreting the literature; and
studies that focus on single countries and individual
writers. Two of the seminal figures in the development
of the field have been
Richard L. Jackson, one of the first scholars to
identify writers, trace themes, develop bibliographies,
and establish a canon; and
Marvin A. Lewis, whose work as a professor, mentor,
administrator, conference organizer, editor of two
journals, and author of five books has left an indelible
stamp on Afro-Hispanism. The scholarship of Lewis and
Jackson is paralleled by the enormous productivity of
Black, Spanish-speaking writers in Africa and the
Americas, including Cuban
Marta Rojas, Ecuadorian
Argentina Chiriboga, and
Donato Ndongo Bidyogo of Equatorial Guinea.
The
Afro-Hispanic Review has been a major instrument
in the evolution of Afro-Hispanic scholarship. Founded
in 1982 by
Ian I. Smart, Henry J. Richards, and the late
Stanley A. Cyrus, who served as editor, it was
first located in Washington, DC. Initially, it was
founded as a part of the Afro-Hispanic Institute—an
academic press designed to publish books and a journal.
The Review fostered scholarship on well known
writers and also focused attention on less familiar
writers such as Colombians
Arnoldo Palacios and
Carlos Arturo Truque. In 1986, when it became an
official publication of the University of
Missouri-Columbia under the editorship of
Marvin A. Lewis and
Edward Mullen, the
Afro-Hispanic Review was acknowledged as the
primary academic forum for research in the literature
and culture of Spanish-speaking people of African
ancestry. During his twenty-year editorship of the
journal, Lewis brought Afro-Hispanic writers to the
United States; organized conferences, NEH seminars, and
panels at CLA and MLA conventions; and published "A
20-Year Retrospective" as well as special issues
dedicated to
Arozarena,
Morejón,
[Yvonne] Truque [or?]
Carlos Truque, and Zapata Olivella. When the
Afro-Hispanic Review was transferred to
Vanderbilt University in 2005, the new editor,
William Luis, wrote that it was "the oldest and most
distinguished journal to consider the African Diaspora
experience in the Hispanic World."
Two other journals
have shaped the development of Afro-Hispanic literature
and literary criticism. The first issue of PALARA
(Publication
of the Afro-Latin/American Research Association)
appeared in fall 1997, under the editorship of Marvin A.
Lewis and Laurence E. Prescott. Founded as a
multi-lingual and multi-disciplinary journal that
publishes research on the Diaspora, it was published by
the Afro-Romance Institute of the University of
Missouri-Columbia and includes articles, reviews,
creative works, and papers from its conferences
throughout the Americas. In 2005, the journal was
relocated to Purdue University, where it is now edited
by
Antonio Tillis. The other important journal is
Diáspora: Journal of the Annual Afro-Hispanic Literature
and Culture Conference, which published the
papers of conferences—held
in Spain, Latin America, and the United States between
1988 and 2007—organized
and coordinated by
Elba D.
Birmingham-Pokorney.
Such conferences
were important in affording opportunities for presenting
papers, stimulating further research, establishing
relationships between writers and literary critics,
introducing recently-published creative writing,
exposing scholars to new critical methodologies, and
stimulating intellectual exchanges in informal
gatherings. In 1985,
Karen
Becnel Moore organized the Afro-Latin American
Conference—one
of the first—at
Dillard University, where we met Costa Rican writer
Quince Duncan. During the 1990s, Lewis hosted
several international research conferences at the
University of Missouri-Columbia. At each, there were
about twenty-five participants, including Colombian
Yvonne América Truque, Uruguayan
Cristina Cabral, Dominican
Blas Jiménez, and other writers, whose books—unavailable
in the US—we
bought and ordered for courses. One symposium dealt with
the poetry of
Nancy Morejón while another, entitled "Spain in
Africa and Latin America: The Other Face of Literary
Hispanism," focused on Ecuatoguinean literature. Lewis
also coordinated a 2001 NEH Summer Institute for
College and University Teachers on "Teaching the African
Diaspora: An Afro-Romance Approach" at the University of
Missouri. The energy, enthusiasm, camaraderie, and
intellectual stimulation that we felt at these
conferences were immeasurable. In fact, I conceived the
idea for a book on Black Hispanophone women writers—published
in 2003—at
the 1991 gathering.
Although most early
scholars of Afro-Hispanic literature were shaped,
intellectually, by Black aesthetic precepts—and
that is apparent in my introduction to
Blacks in Hispanic Literature—we
developed, in the course of three decades, various
methods, notably text-specific methods, of interpreting
literature. While critics of Afro-Hispanic literature
became fluent in the methodologies of
New
Criticism—based
on
structuralist,
post-structuralist,
culturalist,
deconstructionist,
reader-response, and
psychoanalytic theories—many
(and I am one of them) continue to believe that
Diasporan literature cannot be divorced from the
cultural and historical context out of which it emerges.
Consequently, scholars have found that the theories and
praxis of
culturalism,
new historicism, and
postcolonialism are particularly relevant to the
interpretation of texts by writers of African descent.
Since the 1970s, feminist studies, especially those on
African, Caribbean, and African American literatures,
have widened the perspectives of literary critics such
as
Janet Jones Hampton,
Rosemary Geisdorfer Feal, and the late
Caroll Mills Young. Two other phenomena have
deepened and broadened approaches to literary
interpretation in the field: media studies, especially
those in film and the visual arts; and the idea that a
cultural production—a
poem, house, painting, calypso, soccer—is
a text that can be "read."
Although literary
critics have brought new interpretations to texts,
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is still
relevant because it laid the foundation for the
articles, books, courses, conferences, bibliographies,
and journals that have been produced in the last three
decades. It did so by introducing scholars to an
innovative and challenging academic discipline, by
defining and shaping the contours of that discipline,
and by providing an aesthetic that could be defended or
disputed.
Bibliography
Branche, Jerome, ed.
Colonialism and Race in Luso-Hispanic Literature.
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008.
Gayle, Addison.
The Black Aesthetic. Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
1971.
Jackson, Richard L.
The Black Image in Latin American Literature.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
1976.
Johnson, Lemuel A.
The Devil, the Gargoyle and the Buffoon: The Negro as
Metaphor in Western Literature. Port Washington,
N. Y.: Kennikat Press, 1971.
Jones, Warren, III.
"The Black Presence in Spanish Literature." The
Louisiana Weekly (22 November 2004).
Juang, Richard M. and Noelle
Marrisette, eds.
Africa and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History.
Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2008.
Rashidi, Runoko. "The
African Star Over Europe: A Selected Bibliography of the
African Presence in Early Europe."
The
Global African Community.
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and creative
writers from Africa and the Americas. Called one of two
significant critical works on Afro-Hispanic literature
to appear in the late 1970s, it includes the pioneering
studies of Carter G. Woodson
and Valaurez B. Spratlin,
published in the 1930s, as well as the essays of
scholars whose interpretations were shaped by the Black
aesthetic. The early essays, primarily of the
Black-as-subject in Spanish medieval and Golden Age
literature, provide an historical context for
understanding 20th-century creative works by
African-descended, Hispanophone writers, such as Cuban Nicolás Guillén
and Ecuadorean poet, novelist, and scholar Adalberto Ortiz,
whose essay analyzes the significance of Negritude in
Latin America.
This collaborative
text set the tone for later conferences in which writers
and scholars worked together to promote, disseminate,
and critique the literature of Spanish-speaking people
of African descent. For example, Antonio Olliz Boyd's
examination of Blackness in Latin American literature is
an unwitting call-and-response to Ortiz's analysis of
negritud. Similarly, Martha Cobb and Sylvia Wynter
examine concepts of race and representation in Spanish
peninsular literature from the Moorish conquest through
the Siglo de Oro. John F. Matheus describes the
portrayal of Blacks in early Latin American literature,
while Lemuel Johnson and Constance Sparrow de García
Barrio focus their analyses on Cuban and Puerto Rican
poetry.
This edition of BHL
includes a new introduction, which traces the
development of Afro-Hispanic creative writing and
literary criticism in the past thirty years. The field
has been enriched by the publication of three important
journals, organization of seminars and conferences, and
application of new critical methodologies. This edition
also includes a bibliographic essay that describes the
creative production of Afro-Hispanic writers,
particularly women, Latinos, and Ecuatoguineans who have
emerged in the last three decades. The updated
bibliography describes the publications of scholars,
such as Richard L. Jackson and Marvin A. Lewis, who have
broadened the field to include analyses of genres,
themes, countries, and individual authors.
This collection
introduced many academics to a new discipline, defined
and shaped the contours of that discipline, and provided
an aesthetic that led to the development of other
theories. Cited by a literary critic in 2004 as "the
seminal study in the field of Afro-Hispanic Literature .
. . on which most scholars in the field 'cut their
teeth,'" Blacks in Hispanic Literature, thus, helped to
lay the groundwork for the evolution of Afro-Hispanic
Studies.
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Contents
Preface
Miriam DeCosta
Introduction
Sylvia Wynter
The Eye of the Other: Images of the Black in
Spanish Literature
Martha Cobb
Afro-Arabs, Blackamoors and Blacks: An
Inquiry into Race Concepts through Spanish
Literature
Howard M. Jason
The Negro in Spanish Literature to the End
of the Siglo de Oro
Carter G. Woodson
Attitudes of the Iberian Peninsula (in
Literature)
Valaurez B. Spratlin
The Negro in Spanish literature
John F. Matheus
African Footprints in Hispanic-American
Literature
Antonio Olliz Boyd
The Concept of Black Awareness as a Thematic
Approach in Latin American Literature
Adalberto Ortiz
Negritude in Latin American Culture
Shirley M. Jackson
Fact from Fiction: Another Look at Slavery
in Three Spanish American Novels
Leslie Wilson
La Poesia Negra: Its Background, Themes
and Significance
Constance Sparrow de
García Barrio The Image of the Black
Man in the Poetry of Nicolás Guillén
Miriam DeCosta,
Social lyricism and the Caribbean Poet/Rebel
Lemuel Johnson,
El Tema Negro: The Nature of
Primitivism in the Poetry of Luis Palés
Matos
Ann Venture Young
The Black Woman in Afro-Caribbean Poetry
Miriam DeCosta
Selected Bibliography
Source:
HKU |
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Miriam DeCosta-Willis, author
and college professor, was born 1 November 1934, in
Florence, Alabama. She received her B.A. at Wellesley
College in 1956; her M.A. Johns Hopkins in 1960; her
Ph.D. Johns Hopkins in 1967 in Romance Languages. In
1967 she joined the faculty of Memphis State University
as the first African American member, and while there
agitated for more black staff members. When King was
assassinated in 1968 she was in the march that erupted
into violence and the police used mace on her.
DeCosta-Willis
became a professor of Spanish and in 1970 chairperson of the
Department of Romance Languages at Howard University. At Howard, she was exposed to Afro-Hispanic
authors. In 1975 DeCosta-Willis left Howard and in 1979
returned to teaching at LeMoyne-Owen College. She
remained there for ten years before taking a position at
George Mason University. Leaving in 1991, DeCosta-Willis
took a position with the University of Maryland, where
she remained until her retirement in 1999.
DeCosta-Willis served for ten years as an associate editor of
SAGE: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women. She is co-founder and a former chairperson of the
Memphis Black Writers Workshop, and has served on the Memphis
Arts Council advisory committee and a review panelist
for the National Endowment for the Humanities. DeCosta-Willis
has four grown children. She divides her time between
Washington, D.C., and Memphis.
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Popular Literary Depictions of Black African Weddings in
Early Modern Spain
By Aurelia
Casares and Marga Barranco
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African American popular and scholarly
interest in Central and South America, 1960 to 2005
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Images of Blacks and Africa in Spanish Literature
Reflections on Recent Trends
By Andrew M.
Sobiesuo
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Hispanic-American Writers (Harold Bloom)
/
The African Experience in Spanish America
(Leslie B., Jr. Rout)
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An English Anthology of Afro-Hispanic
Writers of the Twentieth Century (Elba D.
Birmingham-Pokorny)
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Theodora Roosevelt Boyd
Former Howard
Chair of the Department of Romance Languages
Theodora Boyd was
born to James and Jeannette Boyd on June 6, 1906 in
Charleston. Her parents found out early on that their
daughter was an extremely gifted child. She was educated
in the public schools of Newton, Mass., and by 1923,
Theodora had been afforded an opportunity few
African-Americans would be able to partake in, and she
seized it with fervor and great determination. . . . .
After earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1927,
Theodora began a teaching career that would span 50
years starting at Clark College in Atlanta, Ga. Spending
two years there, she continued on at Radcliffe, earning
a Master's in 1930. She headed back out into the
teaching world, this time, to Texas Teacher's College in
Tyler, Texas. . . . While the Great Depression had
crippled the nation, after one year in Texas, Theodora
continued to find work, and jumped at an opportunity to
teach physical education and French at St. Augustine's
College in Raleigh, N.C.
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Also during this time,
she sought her Doctorate at Radcliffe and
became head of the French department at St.
Augustine's. From 1931 to 1935, she spent
her summers attending Harvard University
summer school, but it was not until 1943
that she received her Ph.D, Phi Beta Kappa.
She also went on to earn a Certificate de La
Langue Française, de Civilization Française
from the Sorbonne (The University of Paris).
. . . Following her stint at St.
Augustine's, she taught at a number of
places, including, Alabama State Teacher's
College, Delaware State College, and St.
Paul's University before her final stop,
Howard University.
It was there in 1961 Theodora taught French
and Humanities and by 1969, she became the
first female to serve as Chair of the
Department of Romance Languages at Howard. .
. . She took on the challenge of being the
first woman to head up Howard's Department
of Romance Languages, succeeding
internationally renowned scholars like
Valaurez Spratlin and Dr.
Mercer Cook. Spratlin is noted for being the first
African-American to earn a doctorate in
Spanish as well as serving as Chair at
Howard from 1927-1961. |
Cook, who
immediately preceded Theodora, was appointed ambassador
to the Republic of Niger by President Kennedy in 1961.
He held that post for three years. In 1970, Theodora
sent a letter to DeCosta-Willis, whose father
Dr. Frank DeCosta,
Sr, she had known quite well. DeCosta-Willis was
teaching at
Memphis State University in Memphis, Tenn., at the
time and was the first African-American to teach there
in 1967. She was there when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
was assassinated in 1968.
Theodora had contacted DeCosta-Willis to see if she
would be interested in joining her at Howard. She
accepted the offer and fondly remembered her time there.
. . . When 68-year-old Theodora stepped down from her
role as Chair in 1974, she left the door wide open for
the 40-year-old DeCosta-Willis to follow her lead.
Theodora stayed on board as a part-time professor until
1976.
Theodora never married or had any children, and by 1977,
her health had deteriorated. She moved back to her
family's home in South Carolina and was cared for by
relatives until she died on December 26.
Source:
Ivy50
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An Introduction to the Literature of
Equatorial Guinea
Between Colonialism and Dictatorship
By Marvin A. Lewis
. . .
the first book-length critical study of this
literature, a multigenre analysis
encompassing fifty years of poetry, drama,
essays, and prose fiction. Both resident and
exiled authors offer insights into the
impact of colonialism and dictatorship under
Spanish rule and consider the fruits of
“independence” under the regimes of
Francisco Macías Nguema and Teodoro Obiang
Nguema. Examining these works from the
perspective of postcolonial theory, Marvin
A. Lewis shows how writings from Equatorial
Guinea depict the clash of traditional and
European cultures and reflect a dictatorship
that produced poverty, misery, and
oppression. He assesses with particular care
the impact of the Macías reafricanization
process and its manifestations in
literature.
In
showing how the views of the nation
correspond and diverge in works of writers
such as Maria Nsue Angue, Donato
Ndongo-Bidyogo, and Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel,
Lewis brings to light artists who articulate
their concerns in Spanish but are African in
their souls. In analyzing the works of both
renowned and emerging writers, he marks the
themes that contribute to the formation of
national identity: Hispanic heritage, the
myth of Bantu unity, “bonding in adversity”
during the Nguema regime, and the
Equatoguinean diaspora. |
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Manuel Zapata Olivella and the “Darkening”
of Latin American Literature
By
Antonio D. Tillis
Manuel
Zapata Olivella and the “Darkening” of Latin
American Literature is an examination of the
fictional work of one of Latin America’s
most prolific, yet overlooked, writers. Born
in Colombia to parents of mixed ancestry,
Zapata Olivella used his novels to explore
the plight of the downtrodden in his nation
and by extension the experience of blacks in
other parts of the Americas. Author Antonio
D. Tillis offers a critical examination of
Zapata Olivella’s major works of fiction
from the 1940s to the 1990s. . . Tillis
focuses on the development of the “black
aesthetic” in Zapata Olivella’s stories, in
which the circumstances of the people of
African heritage are centered in the
narrative discourse. Tillis also traces
Zapata Olivella’s novelistic effort to
incorporate the Africa-descended subject
into the literature of Latin America. A
critical look at the placement of Afro–Latin
American protagonists reveals the
sociopolitical and historical challenges of
citizenship and community. In addition, this
study explores tenets of postcolonial and
postmodern thought such as place,
displacement, marginalization,
historiographic metafiction, and
chronological disjuncture in relation to
Zapata Olivella’s fiction. Tillis concludes
that the novelistic trajectory of this
Afro-Colombian writer was one that brought
into literary history an often overlooked
subject: the disenfranchised citizen of
African ancestry. By expanding and updating
the current scholarship on Zapata Olivella,
Tillis leads us to new contexts for and
interpretations of this author’s work. |
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