Sketches of Black People by White Catalan-Cuban Intellectuals: Transculturation in Fernando Ortiz’s and Jaume Valls’s Afrocubanismo in 1920s Havana

Abstract

The study of the raise of Afrocubanismo enables understanding of how, during the 1920s, Cuban nationalism adapted in order to exploit the recombinant qualities common to the territories of the Caribbean. Drawing on Fernando Ortiz’s, Stuart Hall’s and Paul Gilroy’s theories on the formation and construction of identities, this article brings a focus on the positions of enunciation within the practices of representation of blackness by cultural theorist Fernando Ortiz and visual artist Jaume Valls, in order to illustrate their role and the role of other members of the Catalan-Cuban intellectual community in the movement of Afrocubanismo and the reshaping of the idea of Cuban national identity during the 1920s. The analysis includes a comparison of graphic artists Lluis Bagaria’s and Jaume Vall’s representations of blackness in the Catalan-Cuban journal La Nova Catalunya (Havana, 1908–1959) in order to illustrate the processes of transculturation expressed through the representation of black subjects in the journal as part of the wider processes of recreation of identities within the Catalan-Cuban intellectual community during the first three decades of the twentieth century. The article addresses the limitations of nationalistic points of view to grasp de complexities of diasporic realities and highlights the usefulness of the concept of transculturation to understand processes of formation of identities in twentieth-century Cuba.