Literary Sisterhood: Afro-Cuban History and Ritual in the Writings of Georgina Herrera and Teresa Cárdenas

• In Event: Beleza pura: afrodescendencia, resistencia y diasporas

Abstract

There are moments when it becomes possible to observe the creation of a legacy. This deep sense of history and continuity appears in the writings of Georgina Herrera and Teresa Cárdenas. Two renowned voices of Cuban literature today, they emerge as artists and literary creators of the legacy of Africans in Cuba, within the pre-revolutionary, revolutionary, and post-revolutionary cultural settings. Their writings at times converge, routing towards similar literary interests, expressed in their preferred genres – poetry for Herrera, short story, the short novel, and children’s writings for Cárdenas. Maternal love, maternal loss, the voice of enslavement, symbolic representations of spirituality, imaginary female self-representation, and idealized configurations of the African continent provide opportunity to suggest moments of convergence, even as in style and literary setting they draw on very different sources of inspiration and often vary in their objects of representation.

Author

• Dawn A Duke, University of Tennessee