ABSTRACT
In a chapter, “Cultural Transnationalism and Contemporary Afro-Hispanic Poetry: The Case of Blas Jiménez and Nancy Morejón” (Tillis, 2011). I placed into poetic conversation the creative production of two SpanishCaribbean writers/scholars of African ancestry. The argument centered the discourse on cultural transnationalism begging the notion of culture as a transmutable and transferable commodity in the global Black cultural economy. Borrowing from this previously published work, in this chapter, I want to revisit the scope of the critical focus and concentrate principally on the poetic creation of Nancy Morejón, adding a judicious observation to the interpretation of the selected poems for analysis. Upon refl ecting the idea of global citizenship and pondering the critical assertions of such presented by Walter Mignolo, the interpretive postulation on cosmopolitanism in terms of its applicability to the experience of transnational African descendants is of particular interest. In as much, this investigation purposes to expand the previously presented thoughts on cultural transnationalism by placing them in dialogue with existing notions of cosmopolitanism. First, I will explore issues of transnationality embedded within Morejón’s work. Postulations on transnationalism as presented by Peter Hitchcock and others will set the paradigmatic parameters for this undertaking. Additionally, Walter Mignolo’s idea of global citizenship will be examined in terms of the view of Black globalization. The use of “black globalization” instead of the essentialized thought “globalization” is to problematize the construct. Often when pondering issues of globalization, the discourse of race is absent from the deconstructed understanding rendering an unconscious “racing” that almost exclusively implies “Western,” or white. Subsequent to revisiting the notion of transnationalism in Morejón’s “Mujer negra” and “Negro,” I will engage in a discussion of cosmopolitanism begging the notion of a cosmopolitanist discourse in two selected works by Morejón: “En el País de Vietnam” (In the Country of Vietnam) and “Nana Silente para Niños Surafricanos” (Silent Lullaby for South African Children).
