The artistic movement of Afrocubanismo in the late 1920s and 1930s was central to debates on the Cuban nation and questions of inclusion and exclusion. An unprecedented interest in Afro-Cuban forms of expression emerged in this period, especially in the fields of literature, music and the visual arts. These cultural forms were seen to express what one of its most prominent advocates, Fernando Ortiz, defined as “Cubanidad”, the essence of Cubanness that was to unite the island. However, the celebration of Afro-Cuban cultural forms was fraught with ambivalence and contradictions, as racist discourses permeated most of the writings on Afrocubanismo published in magazines such as Estudios Afrocubanos.

Afrocubanismo was a movement with wide-ranging networks in the transatlantic world, most significantly with artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance in New York. This seminar will deal with the cultural movement and its political implications, both in the context of Cuban republican nation building and the transnational dialogues it sparked on black culture and identity.

This seminar is held in English, but the final term paper can be written in either German or English