ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the heretofore unrecognized pioneering gestures of US Cuban theater in American and Cuban Studies. It analyzes theater’s response to the racial silences in constructs of national identity and its inscription of Blackness into Cubanity. Informed by LatCrit Theory, spectrality studies, Afro-Latino Studies, and Black Feminist Theory, it demonstrates how theater’s validation of the African legacy in Cuban culture is performed through the deployment of elements historically coded as Black in music, dance, and religion. It begins with a reading of Manuel Martín Jr.’s Rita and Bessie in New York. Focusing on the intersections of gender and Blackness and everyday racism in Cuba and in the United States, it explores how configurations of identity as “identity-in-difference” are performed. It ends with Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas’ Maleta Mulata in San Francisco. Focusing on the characters’ affective relationships and on the networks of Latine artists within which this play was developed, it argues that this play constructs a politics of memory based on a contrapuntal articulation of affect, race, and desire that allow us to imagine very different Cuban and American futures. Ultimately, this chapter contends that these plays attuned their audiences to the intellectual racial conversation that comes in the field of Afro-Latino Studies two decades later.
