Lydia Cabrera and Afro-Caribbean Imaginaries

doi:10.1017/9781009168359.017

16 - Lydia Cabrera and Afro-Caribbean Imaginaries

from Part III - Literary and Intellectual Culture in the Twentieth-Century Republic

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 August 2024

Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann

Edited by

Vicky Unruh and

Jacqueline Loss

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Vicky Unruh: Affiliation:
University of Kansas
Jacqueline Loss: Affiliation:
University of Connecticut

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Summary

This chapter unpacks the relationship between the ethnographic and literary work of Lydia Cabrera, which draws extensively on Black Cuban informants, and work by generators of Afro-Caribbean imaginaries, including Francophone writers Aimé Césaire and Suzanne Césaire and Anglophone writers Sylvia Wynter and Edward Kamau Brathwaite, in order to show that these writers’ distinct approaches to translation illuminate their diverse contributions to these imaginaries. After analyzing the roles of authorship and translation in Cabrera’s fiction and nonfiction, the chapter showcases her choices in translating Aimé Césaire and her impact on his and Suzanne Césaire’s translation of Léo Frobenius’s ethnographic work. These activities are then compared with the work of Wynter and Brathwaite, teasing out Cabrera’s contributions to dismantling the racial hierarchies produced by colonialism and slavery, while at the same time signaling ways in which she reproduced the communicative inequality of that legacy.

Keywords

Lydia Cabrera (1899–1991)ethnography and literature Cabrera and Black Cuban informants Cabrera and translation Cabrera and Francophone and Anglophone writers Cabrera and Aimé Césaire (1913–2008)Cabrera and Suzanne Césaire (1915–1966)Cabrera and Sylvia Wynter (1928–)Cabrera and Kamau Brathwaite (1930–2020).

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature , pp. 263 - 275

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009168359.017 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2024

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