In their 1936 book, Negro Folk Songs as Sung By Lead Belly, folklorists John Lomax and his son Alan presented a section, “Lead Belly Tells His Story,” as reliable autobiography. Research has demonstrated that the words presented as Huddie Ledbetter’s (Lead Belly’s) were not transcribed from speech, but written and edited by the Lomaxes, building on and augmenting stories Ledbetter allegedly told them. This book sets out to explore, through primary source research, a more accurate story of Ledbetter’s early life up through his months spent traveling and working with the Lomaxes.

John and Alan Lomax first encountered Huddie Ledbetter at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola in the summer of 1933, while they were recording songs for a book eventually titled American Ballads and Folk Songs. A year later, they recorded him again, including an appeal he made to Louisiana governor O.K. Allen. This chapter explores the history of Angola, conditions there during Ledbetter’s incarceration, and Ledbetter’s extensive efforts to achieve his own early release.

Moving into New York City, the Lomaxes and Ledbetter are eager to cash in on the interest in the performer. Everyone from Macmillan publishing to The March of Time (the radio show and its brand-new newsreel) seek to engage in contracts with Lomax on Ledbetter’s behalf. Fearful that Ledbetter will find his own opportunities in Harlem, the Lomaxes relocate to a borrowed farmhouse in Connecticut, 50 miles from the city, and John has Ledbetter sign a management agreement. In exchange, Ledbetter’s fiancée Martha Promise is brought north from Shreveport for a well-publicized wedding. Amidst the chaos of the March of Time film shoot, Lomax has Ledbetter sign a revised management contract, adding a cut for Alan and reducing Ledbetter’s share.

This chapter traces the rigorous intellectual work of philosopher-pedagogues José de la Luz y Caballero, Félix Varela y Morales, and Enrique José Varona, demonstrating their shared anti-authoritarian pedagogy, exemplified not only in how they transformed the teaching of philosophy and science at the University of Havana, but also in their liberal and republican views of politics and their model roles as public intellectuals engaged in the righting of social ills. The analysis demonstrates that the three men’s philosophical and pedagogical arguments were modernizing and progressive for their time and might therefore appear to challenge the class and racial interests supporting the tyrannical regime imposed by Spain on the island. At the same time, the chapter complicates this view of their contributions to education and philosophy with examples of their periodic blind spots with regard to authoritarian abuses around them or their failures to speak out against such abuses.

This chapter unpacks the hegemonic attitudes within the extensive anticolonial project of Cuban feature-length and documentary film from 1959 to 1989. The chapter first explores the centrality in and contributions to the New Latin American cinema movement of Cuba, the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC), and Cuban film directors Julio García Espinosa, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Humberto Solás, and Santiago Álvarez. At the same time, the chapter makes visible the many accomplished though lesser-known creative agents who helped shape these directors’ model of auteur esthetics, demonstrating how films by Sara Gómez and Nicolás Guillén Landrián also constitute fundamental and critical contributions to the Cuban cinematic canon of the period, which typically privileged the contributions of white men.

This chapter on Cuba’s avant-gardes of the 1920s and early 1930s focuses on writers associated with the Grupo Minorista and the Revista de Avance, examining their cultivation of porous intellectual communities and the attention they paid to everyday expressive forms in seeking to translate Cuban orality into writing. These writers, the chapter argues, sought new ways of characterizing Cuban experience and identity, engaging critically with their surroundings and positioning themselves as consequential cultural actors. The chapter portrays the Minoristas’ approach to the tertulia as an affective assemblage that thrives on difference and artful disagreement, welcomes international visitors, and, while being capacious enough to include women, clings to gender stereotypes. It also draws connections between the group’s tertulias and the international cosmopolitan interactions forged by the conversational qualities of the Revista de Avance, with a literary and linguistic “art of eavesdropping,” stylistic self-consciousness, interstitial participant-observer positions, and hierarchical views of culture projected by such Minorista writing as the crónicas and essays of Jorge Mañach.

This chapter argues that reading music and musicians is fundamental to understanding Cuban literature and its temporality, geography, and community-formation. After tracing some of the standard ways in which critics have aimed to connect music to the literary, the chapter suggests more social approaches to what it might mean for literary or cultural studies scholars to take music in more fully as part of social life. This conception of the social, the chapter argues, is not one to which a new or revolutionary socialism aspired after Cuba’s revolution, but rather something more ancient, less prescribed, more improvisatory, and experienced with others. Attention to popular music and the worlds it forges through the chapter’s analysis of a postrevolutionary musical primer, as well as to lyrics, sounds, and even visuality, grounds the chapter’s conception of music as an entrée into epochs beyond the historical confines of a particular musical entity or event. The complete somatic experience of music’s nuance, irony, submerged histories, happenings, and temporal overlaps can enliven and expand what literary scholars might conceptualize as an individualized “close reading.”

Chapter 5 interrogates the multiple meanings of dismembered hands in the 1880s as the changes made by Reconstruction were steadily clawed back. Given the centrality and materiality of touch, the representation of hands is not only verbal but also visual – the author interrogates how hands are not just imagined in text but also imaged in drawings and cartoons. At the core of the chapter are some of the drawings Thomas Nast made about the politics around Reconstruction. Then the chapter moves from images of interacting hands to actual shaking hands during the twenty-fifth anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg, which brought together veterans of both the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia in 1888. The chapter ends with A Hazard of New Fortunes, by William Dean Howells. Hazard is especially interesting because of a secondary character, Berthold Landau, a German 1848-er who lost his hand in the Civil War. Overlaid by a North-South romance, Hazard’s ambivalence toward Landau and Howells’s decision to kill him off are another sign of the abandonment of white commitment to Black freedom.

This chapter addresses the developments in literary and intellectual culture following the 1959 triumph of the Cuban Revolution, including the complex debates about the relationship between form and content that featured in the literature and the literary landscape of the new revolutionary society. Outlining the national and international contexts in which cultural policy was being developed and implemented, and within and against which individual and grouped actors, discourses, and texts were contributing to a heterogeneous understanding of literature in the revolution, the chapter underscores the relationship in the 1960s and 1970s among literature, cultural trends, processes of legitimization, political actions, and newly founded state institutions. In this context, the chapter then investigates how intermedial creations – and,m more specifically, the testimonio, a genre portrayed as a “radical anticolonial and decolonizing experiment” – negotiate individual agency and collective identity.

This chapter analyzes the life writing of Mercedes Merlin, who wrote about Cuba, and other topics, entirely in French, after adopting Paris as her intellectual home. The analysis teases out the singularities and paradoxes of her relatively late inclusion – a process the chapter notes in other recent scholarship – in the historical imaginary of Cuban literature. That imaginary, the chapter argues, is prone to privileging signs of emancipation and racial justice in nineteenth-century writing, whereas Merlin, even as she depicted Cuban slavery’s cruelties, did not call for its abolition. Yet, even while her work exhibits some disturbing views of Black and mixed-race people, the chapter suggests that her nuanced considerations of Black subjects intimate a glimmer of proto-abolitionism. The chapter further demonstrates and details that, for Merlin, the rhetoric of life writing provided an avenue to tell her own story and that of other rebellious lives, such that her work projects a notion of freedom, not only in its subject matter but also in its inventive mix of autobiography and fiction.

Chapter 4 focuses on the importance of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Using Albion Tourgée’s 1883 novel Bricks without Straw, Oliver Otis Howard’s account of his time as director of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and archival records of the Bureau itself, the novel is read as a fictional reenactment of the work of Reconstruction. Bricks without Straw features two male protagonists, one Black, one white. The emancipated Nimbus lives in Red Wing, a self-sustaining Black-owned Southern community. Hesden Le Moyne, the scion of the leading family in town, is a Union sympathizer but is pressured to join the Confederate Army and loses his left arm in battle. Hesden returns from the war both a pacifist and an abolitionist. In the novel, amputation forces readers to focus on the present and move beyond the past, in recognition that the past of the intact body is irrecoverable. The past of a South organized around the enslavement and exploitation of Black Americans is buried, like Hesden’s lost arm, discarded in favor of a future that puts Black self-determination at its core. Moreover, Black and white characters work together to create a postwar nation organized around racial equality and justice.

This chapter examines the pioneering role of Getrudis Gómez de Avellaneda as a transatlantic intellectual; as the initiator of what became the long-lasting trope among Cuban writers of lejanía [distance] or imagining Cuba from afar; and as a precursor of modern feminism whose persistent interweaving of race and gender, the chapter argues, constitutes the writer’s signature contribution to Cuban literature. Devoting much of the essay to Gómez de Avellaneda’s fiction, including Sab, Dos mujeres, Guatimozín, and El artista barquero o los cuatro cinco de junio, the chapter teases out this body of work’s exemplification of both early abolitionism and a feminist consciousness, tracing the latter to Gómez de Avellaneda’s essay on Mercedes Merlin, which established the first female genealogy of Cuban literature.

This chapter analyzes the work of Havana-born José Martín Félix de Arrate, often regarded as Cuba’s first historian and deemed the most representative Enlightenment writer of the island’s emergent criollo elite. The chapter focuses particularly on Arrate’s Llave del Nuevo Mundo, antemural de las Indias Occidentales: La Habana descripta (1761), a detailed historical account of Havana as the “key” to the entire New World and its antemural, or rampart. Grounded in in an emergent Cuban consciousness nurtured in exceptionalism, the chapter argues, Arrate showcased the island’s military value; the commercial and economic potential of its environmental and geographical attributes, natural resources, and excellent ports; and the emergent cultural prestige of Havana as a site of reason, while also connoting a race-based hierarchy, typical of the Enlightenment era, of the island’s human potential for labor and defense.

This chapter examines the configurations of Latin Americanism enacted by the renowned and enduring cultural organism Casa de las Américas, established shortly after the Cuban Revolution’s triumph in 1959. The chapter provides a detailed overview of the diverse thematics and functions in the purview of Casa, which positioned itself as a beacon for José Martí’s hemispheric vision of the Americas, encompassing the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America, and South America. The chapter examines Casa’s relationship to emancipatory thought in opposition to capitalist and imperialist visions, exploring its role as cultural producer and disseminator, with an emphasis on particular genres such as the testimonio and theater and through the prestigious Casa de las Américas awards for Latin American writers (1960–); a publishing house; theater festivals; the journals Casa de las Américas (1960–) and Conjunto (1964–); the organization of multiple international events focusing on literature, music, theater, and visual arts; and, toward the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, in new research centers related to cultural studies.