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“You Are the Prisoner, the Discoverer, the Founder, the Liberator”: Contextualizing Decolonial Paths of Afro-Hispanic Literature in Latin America, Equatorial Guinea and Spain
Elisa Rizo The absence of Black authors from the mainstream cultural politics of Spanish speaking Latin America (with the exception of Cuba, since the Revolution), reveals a persistent politics of cultural and racial exclusion. The fact is that Afro-Hispanic writing has existed for a long time in the region. Early 19th century expressions comprise free-slaved accounts, prose, and journalism; and, starting in the 1930’s, poetry, novel, short story, drama, and essay begins to flourish. For its part, Equatorial Guinea, despite having been independent from Spain only since 1968, has a relatively rich and burgeoning literary community. The literature by Afro-Latin American immigrants in Spain, on the other hand, is quite recent and hence very little known. In any case, these literary productions are not generally included in the mainstream discussion of Hispanic Literatures. Ultimately, to engage in a discussion of Afro-Hispanic texts on the same footing as “mainstream” literature written in Spanish (or any language) will entail new paradigms of thought. * In his 2012 book, Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowledge, acclaimed Kenyan author and critic Ngugi wa Thiong’o proposes a “globalectical” vision that is “derived from the shape of the globe, is the mutual containment of hereness and thereness in time and space, where time and space are also in each other” (60). Within this idea, he offers a method called “globalectical reading” to approach literatures produced in divergent origins and linguistic expressions from an egalitarian and free-thinking perspective. For Ngugi: Globalectical reading means breaking open the prison house of imagination built by theories and outlooks that would seem to signify the content within is classified, open to only a few. This involves declassifying theory in the sense of a making it accessible –a tool for clarifying interactive connections and interconnections of social phenomena and their mutual impact in the local and global space, a means of illuminating the internal and external, the local and the global dynamics of social being. This may also mean the act of reading becoming also a process of self-examination. (61) Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 |
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Essays in this Forum
Break out of the Prison House of Hierarchy!
by Mukoma Wa Ngugi A Globalectical Imagination by Ngugi wa Thiong'o World Literature and the Postcolonial: Ngugi's Globalectics and Glissant's Poetics by Duncan McEachern Yoon “You Are the Prisoner, the Discoverer, the Founder, the Liberator”: Contextualizing Decolonial Paths of Afro-Hispanic Literature in Latin America, Equatorial Guinea and Spain by Elisa Rizo Globalectics Beyond Postcoloniality by Carole Boyce Davies |