Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a collection of fourteen essays
by scholars and creative writers from Africa and the Americas. Called
one of two significant critical works on Afro-Hispanic literature to
appear in the late 1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of Carter
G. Woodson and Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as well as
the essays of scholars whose interpretations were shaped by the Black
aesthetic. The early essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in
Spanish medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an historical
context for understanding 20th-century creative works by
African-descended, Hispanophone writers, such as Cuban Nicolás Guillén
and Ecuadorean poet, novelist, and scholar Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay
analyzes the significance of Negritude in Latin America.
This collaborative text set the tone for later conferences in which
writers and scholars worked together to promote, disseminate, and
critique the literature of Spanish-speaking people of African descent.
For example, Antonio Olliz Boyd's examination of Blackness in Latin
American literature is an unwitting call-and-response to Ortiz's
analysis of negritud. Similarly, Martha Cobb and Sylvia Wynter examine
concepts of race and representation in Spanish peninsular literature
from the Moorish conquest through the Siglo de Oro. John F. Matheus
describes the portrayal of Blacks in early Latin American literature,
while Lemuel Johnson and Constance Sparrow de García Barrio focus their
analyses on Cuban and Puerto Rican poetry.
This edition of BHL includes a new introduction, which traces the
development of Afro-Hispanic creative writing and literary criticism in
the past thirty years. The field has been enriched by the publication of
three important journals, organization of seminars and conferences, and
application of new critical methodologies. This edition also includes a
bibliographic essay that describes the creative production of
Afro-Hispanic writers, particularly women, Latinos, and Ecuatoguineans
who have emerged in the last three decades. The updated bibliography
describes the publications of scholars, such as Richard L. Jackson and
Marvin A. Lewis, who have broadened the field to include analyses of
genres, themes, countries, and individual authors.
This collection introduced many academics to a new discipline, defined
and shaped the contours of that discipline, and provided an aesthetic
that led to the development of other theories. Cited by a literary
critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the field of Afro-Hispanic
Literature . . . on which most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth,
'" *Blacks in Hispanic Literature, thus, helped to lay the groundwork
for the evolution of Afro-Hispanic Studies.
*
