This intersectional and epistemological study of Nancy Morejón’s 1982 Nación y mestizaje en Nicolás Guillén resolves the tension, which intrigued most of her critics, between her political commitment and sophisticated lyricism. The author examines Morejón’s unquestionable revolutionary support and adhesion to Guillén’s conceptualization of la nación mestiza—instrumental for the cohesiveness promoted by the revolutionary regime—through the comprehensive analysis of her family socioeconomic background, the coincidence of her arrival to adolescence with the revolutionary triumph in 1959, and her affiliation to the editorial group El Puente (1961–65). Intersectionality allows an understanding of how Morejón’s self-identification and self-representation as a black revolutionary female writer condition her elaboration of counternarratives that thwart the Eurocentric and patriarchally constructed national history. The essay reveals rarely examined contradictions between Morejón’s and Guillén’s poetry and discusses how the writers’ shared essentialist views on nationhood fail to ultimately deconstruct the hegemonic Eurocentric epistemology they vowed to upend. (In Spanish; an English translation is available online)
Nancy Morejón, Nicolás Guillén y el cimarronaje aún necesario en Cuba contemporánea
odette casamayor-cisneros is a Cuban-born writer and scholar and associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Focused on the Afro–Latin American and Afro-Latinx experiences, her current academic and literary book projects examine self-identification processes and the production of counterhegemonic knowledge in the global African diaspora. She is the author of Utopía, dystopía e ingravidez: Reconfiguraciones cosmológicas en la narrativa postsoviética cubana (2013) and the short-story collection Una casa en los Catskills (2016).
Odette Casamayor-Cisneros; Nancy Morejón, Nicolás Guillén y el cimarronaje aún necesario en Cuba contemporánea. Small Axe 1 July 2021; 25 (2 (65)): 109–124. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-9384300
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