Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow

Cuba's geographic proximity to the United States and its centrality to U.S. imperial designs following the War of 1898 led to the creation of a unique relationship between Afro-descended populations in the two countries. In Forging Diaspora, Frank Andre Guridy shows that the cross-national relationships nurtured by Afro-Cubans and black Americans helped to shape the political strategies of both groups as they attempted to overcome a shared history of oppression and enslavement.

Drawing on archival sources in both countries, Guridy traces four encounters between Afro-Cubans and African Americans. These hidden histories of cultural interaction--of Cuban students attending Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute, the rise of Garveyism, the Havana-Harlem cultural connection during the Harlem Renaissance and Afro-Cubanism movement, and the creation of black travel networks during the Good Neighbor and early Cold War eras--illustrate the significance of cross-national linkages to the ways both Afro-descended populations negotiated the entangled processes of U.S. imperialism and racial discrimination. As a result of these relationships, argues Guridy, Afro-descended peoples in Cuba and the United States came to identify themselves as part of a transcultural African diaspora.

Author: Frank Andre Guridy
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 05/15/2010
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.93lbs
Size: 9.26h x 6.32w x 0.69d
ISBN: 9780807871034

About the Author
Guridy, Frank Andre: - Frank Andre Guridy is assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.