Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection

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Dr. Elías Ortega-Aponte and Dr. Matthew Pettway discuss his debut book on how two 19th-century Cuban writers envisioned emancipation through the lens of African spirituality

 

Dr. Elías Ortega-Aponte and Dr. Matthew Pettway discuss his debut book Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection: Manzano, Plácido, and Afro-Latino Religion (University Press of Mississippi, 2019). Dr. Pettway examines how the portrayal of African ideas of spirit and cosmos in otherwise conventional texts recur throughout early Cuban literature and became the basis for the antislavery philosophy of writers Juan Francisco Manzano and Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés (Plácido). With cultural roots in Puerto Rico and in Trinidad, respectively, Dr. Ortega-Aponte and Dr. Pettway engage in a conversation on AfroLatinidades that flows like, in the memorable words of 19th-century poet Lola Rodríguez de Tió, “two wings of the same bird.”

 
 
 

This book is an original study on the influence of religion in the writings of two nineteenth-century Cuban writers, that although very recognized and studied, have not been analyzed from the point of view of religion (Catholicism and African influenced)…This book will be of interest to students and scholars in Cuban studies, Caribbean studies, religious studies and African Diaspora studies.

—Jossianna Arroyo-Martínez, Chair/Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Warfield Center for African and African American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin

 
 
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Elías Ortega-Aponte

Dr. Elías Ortega-Aponte, a Professor of Religion, Ethics, and Leadership, is the President of Meadville Lombard Theological School in Chicago, IL. Dr. Ortega is an interdisciplinary scholar who received his MDiv and PhD (Religion and Society, Magna Cum Laude) from Princeton Theological Seminary (2005, 2011). He also holds a B.A. in Communications Arts & Sciences and Philosophy and Religion from Calvin College. Prior to Meadville Lombard Theological School, Dr. Ortega served as Associate Professor of Social Theory and Religious Ethics at Drew University Theological School. He is a member of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) Commission on Institutional Change.

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Matthew Pettway

Dr. Matthew Pettway is Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of South Alabama, where he teaches Afro-Latin American, Caribbean, and Spanish literatures, and is associated with the Africana Studies Program. A native of Detroit, MI, Dr. Pettway holds a PhD in Hispanic Cultural Studies and an MA in Spanish and Latin American Literatures from Michigan State University. His research examines race, slavery, and African ideas of spirit and cosmos in nineteenth-century black Cuban literature. Dr. Pettway has a keen interest in how Afro-Latin Americans who endured extreme trauma in the colonial era took hold of the aesthetic and spiritual tools available to them to conceive a poetics of emancipation. His research is part of a broader project of literary and historical recovery, akin to what Toni Morrison has termed “a kind of literary archaeology.” Dr. Pettway’s work has appeared in American Studies Journal, PALARA, The Zora Neale Hurston Forum, The Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography, the Cuban journal Del Caribe, and his article “The Altar, The Oath and the Body of Christ: Ritual Poetics and Cuban Racial Politics of 1844” is the inaugural chapter in Black Writing, Culture and the State in Latin America, edited by Jerome Branche (Vanderbilt University Press, 2015). Dr. Pettway’s first book, Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection: Manzano, Plácido and Afro-Latino Religion (2019), is part of the Caribbean Studies Series of the University Press of Mississippi.

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