Spirit of the Crossroads

AfroSpiritus
Written By Open Plaza

Dr. Matthew Pettway opens pathways with a reading from his debut book, Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection

Ruins of Ingenio El Molino [Los Molinos], Matanzas, Cuba, 2014. In his autobiography, 19th-century poet Juan Francisco Manzano describes this sugar plantation as the site of his greatest suffering. Photo: Claudia Regina

Ruins of Ingenio El Molino [Los Molinos], Matanzas, Cuba, 2014. In his autobiography, 19th-century poet Juan Francisco Manzano describes this sugar plantation as the site of his greatest suffering. Photo: Claudia Regina

 

Dr. Matthew Pettway reads from “Present but Unseen: African Cuban Spirituality and Emancipation in the Literature of Juan Francisco Manzano,” the fourth chapter of his debut book, Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection: Manzano, Plácido, and Afro-Latino Religion (University Press of Mississippi, 2019). He narrates how enslaved 19th-century poet Juan Francisco Manzano finds himself at a crossroads, both spiritually and intellectually, as he prepares his escape from the plantation in Matanzas to Havana.  Manzano appeals to his santos de devoción, and to one saint in particular: San Antonio, who is also Elegguá in Yoruba cosmology in Cuba.

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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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