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October 4, 2002
Afro-Cuban
Author Pedro Perez-Sarduy to Speak October 16
Award-winning
Afro-Cuban author Pedro Perez-Sarduy will incorporate videos,
music, and poetry into a multimedia lecture titled "Afro-Cuba,
Afro-Cubans, Afro-Cubania: How Black Is Contemporary Cuba Becoming?"
Wednesday, October 16, at 4 pm in Dwight 101. The event is being
sponsored by the Latin American studies Program.
Roberto Márquez,
William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Latin American and Caribbean
Studies at Mount Holyoke, describes Perez-Sarduy as "one
of the key voices of his generation and an important representative
of a new and growing Afro-Latino consciousness in Cuba and throughout
the Caribbean." In his presentation, Perez-Sarduy will explore
the definitions of Cuban and Afro-Cuban, as well as more recent
calls for a race-specific agenda among sectors of the black population
in Cuba.
"There has been
a steady and increasingly public emergence of the Afro-Cuban voice,"
said Márquez. "It, of course, has always been there,
but it was more often spoken for than spoken from." Perez-Sarduy
has been speaking from that voice for several decades now, said
Márquez, who met the author in Havana in the early 1970s
and, in the mid-1990s, brought him to campus to speak to a Caribbean
literature class. He said his hope for the October presentation
is that the audience will come away with "a fuller, deeper,
and richer understanding of Cuban, and in this case Afro-Cuban,
realities and the ways in which Latin American identities are
always creatively shifting and assuming new, sometimes unexpected
forms."
A poet, journalist,
and broadcaster, Perez-Sarduy has authored and edited several
books on race relations in Cuba and elsewhere, including Afro-Cuban
Voices on Race and Identity in Contemporary Cuba; Afrocuba: An
Anthology of Cuban Writing on Race, Politics, and Culture;
and the novel Criadas de La Habana (The Maids of Havana).
He has been a radio journalist since 1965, beginning with Cuban
national radio as a current affairs journalist and with Cuban
television on the first African and Caribbean music show. Now
living in London, he has toured the United States several times
and has served as a writer-in-residence at Columbia University
and as a visiting fellow for the CUNY-Caribbean Exchange Program,
Hunter College, and the City University of New York.
Perez-Sarduy began
his work at age sixteen, when he was involved in the dismantling
of racial barriers in the segregated town square and other areas
of his hometown, Santa Clara. Since then he has followed the struggle
of Afro-Cubans, who are estimated by some to make up 63 percent
or more of Cuba's population.
Said Márquez,
"The lecture is part of the Latin American Studies Program's
ongoing concern to extend and complement our curricular offerings,
and to reach out to the larger campus community by bringing speakers
whose presence and voices put us all in more immediate touch with
the history, thought, action, and daily dramas of social and cultural
life in the Americas."
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