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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
Ngugi’s proposal
for literary appreciation requires a politically engaged and historically
informed analytical effort. Chiefly
grounded in African Postcolonial discourse, Ngugi’s framework urges the debunking
of Western aesthetic classifications that have favored Western or Westernized literatures
and calls for examination of textual creations from a non-hierarchical dialogic
perspective. Thus, a globalectic approach
opens a promising theoretical path to study marginalized literary traditions,
such as the Afro-Hispanic one. Additionally,
the appropriateness to employ Ngugi’s globalectic method for the study of
Afro-Hispanic literature also conforms to the parallelism between the postcolonial
movement in East Africa described by Ngugi in his book and the postcolonial
movement developed by Black intellectuals and writers in the Americas, including
the Hispanic World. Same as their
African counterparts, Black intellectuals in the Americas informed their own
fight for liberation by drawing on some of the movements and ideas pointed out
by Ngugi, such as Negritude, Marxism, the Harlem Renaissance, and Fanonism.
Furthermore, the very term of “globalectics” also speaks to the circularity of ideas and people that characterizes the literature of the African Diaspora in the Hispanic world. Richard Jackson illustrated the scope of these exchanges in his 1981 article “The Shared Vision of Langston Hughes and Black Hispanic Writers,” as he described the political commitment to civil rights and democracy in the artistic conversations (written and oral) between Hughes (who spoke Spanish) and Black writers from Colombia (Zapata Olivella), Ecuador (Adalberto Ortiz), Uruguay (Pilar Barrios), Perú (Nicómedes Santa Cruz) and Cuba (Nicolás Guillén). In recent times, many of these conversations and literary collaborations have occurred in conferences organized by universities in the United States and Latin America centering on topics related to cultural politics and literature. Nancy Morejón and Georgina Herrera (Cuba), Cristina R. Cabral (Uruguay), Blas Jimenez (Dominican Republic), Lucia Charun Illescas (Peru), Wilson Cubena (Panama), Quince Duncan, Eulalia Bernard and Dlia McDonald (Costa Rica) are only a few of the many authors that have attended these meetings. 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 |