Black USA and Spain

Shared Memories in the 20th Century

Rosalía Cornejo-Parriego, Rosalía Cornejo-Parriego

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429594229
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

During the 20th-century, Spaniards and African-Americans shared significant cultural memories forged by the profound impact that various artistic and historical events had on each other. Addressing three crucial periods (the Harlem Renaissance and Jazz Age, the Spanish Civil War, and Franco's dictatorship), this collection of essays explores the transnational bond and the intercultural exchanges between these two communities, using race as a fundamental critical category. The study of travelogues, memoirs, documentaries, interviews, press coverage, comics, literary works, music, and performances by iconic figures such as Josephine Baker, Langston Hughes, and Ramón Gómez de la Serna, as well as the experiences of ordinary individuals such as African American nurse Salaria Kea, invite an examination of the ambiguities and paradoxes that underlie this relationship: among them, the questionable and, at times, surprising racial representations of blacks in Spanish avant-garde texts and in the press during the years of Franco's dictatorship; African Americans very unique view of the Spanish Civil War in light of their racial identity; and the oscillation between fascination and anxiety when these two communities look at each other.

Part I
All that Jazz

Translation, Fascination, and Anxiety

1 Reading the Harlem Renaissance in Spanish

Translation, African American Culture, and the Spanish Avant-Garde

Evelyn Scaramella

In New York, the 1920s marked the rise of Alain Locke’s New Negro Movement and the Harlem Renaissance. Harlem’s artistic production was soon popular globally with white as well as black writers (Lewis xv). This cultural interest in Harlem deeply influenced Négritude, the literary movement spearheaded by Francophone writers that sought to combat racism and unite the black diaspora across national and linguistic boundaries. Although the Harlem Renaissance was in vogue in Paris at that time, the influence of black Harlem on the Spanish avant-garde movement is considerably less studied than are its effects on the French and Francophone milieu.

This chapter traces the literary history of several Spanish representations of African American performers, artists, and writers from the Harlem Renaissance in literary magazines circulating during the avant-garde period, prior to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. How did Spanish avant-garde intellectuals interpret and appropriate African American racial identity in the 1920s and 1930s? I examine whether their representations moved beyond restrictive stereotypes to fully acknowledge the complexities of African American culture as expressed in the literature of the Harlem Renaissance. The first section of this chapter briefly surveys the presence of African American literature and art in print circulation in Spain, and how it fueled Spanish avant-garde aesthetic experimentation, generating complex literary representations. While many Spanish directors, filmmakers, and writers explored African American music and entertainment during this period, there was surprisingly little translation of the literature and testimonies of African American authors and entertainers into Spanish, or mention of the Harlem Renaissance writers whose work lay at the heart of literary experimentation with jazz, blues, and black culture.

In the early 1930s, deeply interested in the political and artistic interconnections between jazz, Spanish cante jondo, and the Cuban son, Langston Hughes (1902–1967) began translating Spanish, Caribbean, and Spanish American writers whose work showed a cultural kinship with African American music, literature, and performance. Hughes’s budding friendship with Spanish avant-garde intellectual couple Rafael Alberti and María Teresa León, whom he met in Mexico City in 1935, set into motion a transnational readership of African American literature, including efforts to translate the works of black American authors into Spanish, and, in turn, the works of Spanish authors like Federico García Lorca into English. For such writers, how did translation address questions of racial and national identity, and how did Spanish authors connect with Harlem as a transnational site?

In the second section, this chapter surveys how some of these early attempts at translating African American literature reduced black culture to stereotypes. However, I also trace how, during the years of the Spanish Republic and increasing politicization of the literary left, some avant-garde writers of the Generation of 27 did move beyond superficial readings toward a more nuanced understanding of racial politics in the US through translation. I explore the radical political and cultural ramifications of their translations for a society on the verge of Civil War.¹ I trace the literary history of translations of works by Hughes, the most well-known Harlem Renaissance writer in Spain during this time, as a means of determining how Spanish authors connected with African American writing as a politicized site of leftist internationalism. Prior to the Civil War, these rare attempts at developing a better understanding of African American culture through translations of Hughes’s poetry, while important to the avant-garde literary and political project, are still somewhat fraught in their representations.

Spanish Harlem: Transatlantic Modernism and the Performance of African American Culture

With Alan Crosland’s The Jazz Singer (1927), the first film with sound, jazz was further incorporated into European experimental avant-garde art and poetry. In Spain, Ernesto Giménez Caballero’s vanguard magazine La Gaceta Literaria captured the influence of Harlem’s stage shows on the most renowned Spanish writers. It published a photograph of the intellectual Ramón Gómez de la Serna in blackface at a meeting of Giménez Caballero’s Cine-club. This image highlights the problematic nature of avant-garde experimentation with jazz, and the way in which, for many writers, an interest in black culture soon bordered on racist appropriations. Although Gómez de la Serna and Giménez Caballero never traveled to Harlem, they imagined black life and interpreted it symbolically in their work, often perpetuating dangerous cultural stereotypes. In contrast, their colleague Lorca did travel to Harlem in the summer of 1929. There, Lorca met the esteemed African American writer Nella Larsen and her friend, the Spanish teacher Dorothy Peterson, who guided him around the neighborhood’s social scene (Scaramella, “Liaisons”).

A preeminent and eccentric novelist and critic, Gómez de la Serna invigorated Madrid’s literary tertulia scene at the Café Pombo.² When he appeared in blackface at the Cine-club to discuss The Jazz Singer, he mimed Jolson’s blackface and launched a discussion of black music full of stereotypical assumptions about race. His speech, later published as an essay titled “Jazbandismo” in La Gaceta Literaria, thrust jazz and black music into the vanguard of Spanish literary trends. In “Jazbandismo,” Gómez de la Serna outlined his theory about the creative importance of jazz to the vitality of modern life. He traced the history of jazz splashing onto European shores from Harlem, citing this music as a powerful admixture of different styles of dance. He characterized the dance as a rebellious mix of the primitive and the modern that seduces and even chases listeners with its nostalgia for the primitive world (6). Gómez de la Serna attributes the appeal of jazz to its ability to offer elite white consumers an entertaining escape from a fragmented and increasingly unstable modern world (6). The writer thus participated in what critics term the first wave of white “negrophilia” which ignored the history of colonized peoples of color in Harlem and beyond, in order to exploit the “otherness” or uniqueness of black life for aesthetic purposes (Straw). Many white European avant-garde writers and artists explored primitivism in their work and fetishized African artifacts, art, and music, which deliberately disassociated black art from the painful history of enslavement and prejudice that marked its creators (Sweeney).

After the “Jazbandismo” article appeared, Giménez Caballero wrote an editorial examining why the film caused such a scandal, and asked Gómez de la Serna to reflect on the “emotional experience” of his time in blackface. In “Negras confesiones” [Black Confessions], Gómez de la Serna explained his use of blackface as a modernist experiment that would open “new boxes of surprises” for modern audiences (1).³ For him, the mask and the spectacle of blackface engendered new and surprising pathways to free artistic expression. Gómez de la Serna upheld his eccentric exploitation of blackface using his classic satirical tone. His humor provided the best defense of his racist cultural analogies:

I already knew that being black meant running the risk of being lynched, but being an intellectual the danger is the same as being black…. Perhaps I went a little overboard with the blackness, but it’s that I wanted to be from the central regions of “black-land,” the blackest of black places…. That afternoon I further endangered my acceptance into the Academy and my potential visit to North America, since when I arrive at customs in New York, they won’t be able to forget that “I was black once,” just as for my friend, they didn’t forget that in his case he had been breastfed by a black wet nurse. (1)⁴

Like other white avant-garde European artists who reinforced problematic class and race differences, Gómez de la Serna’s foray into the cult of black art reified essentialized stereotypes of African American culture. David Miranda-Barreiro claims that his “assessment of primitive art encapsulates the inherent contradiction of ‘primitivist modernism’: whereas black art is praised for its naturalness and raw expressivity, these qualities are explained by its ignorance and lack of civilization” (113).

Goméz de la Serna’s racist impersonations of black culture contributed to the wide-ranging consumption of black bodies and art for avant-garde inspiration. For him and other European writers, African American culture was only a tourist stop in his literary imaginary. But what then can be said of the awareness and exploration of the Harlem Renaissance for those Spanish writers who actually visited New York in the 1920s and 1930s? Scholars have studied extensively several key Spanish modernist and avant-garde intellectuals who traveled to Harlem and wrote about black life, most notably Juan Ramón Jiménez in Diario de un poeta recién casado [Diary of a Newlywed Poet] (1916), José Moreno Villa in Pruebas de Nueva York [Snapshots of New York] (1927), and the best known example, Lorca in his Poeta en Nueva York [Poet in New York] (composed in 1929, published posthumously in 1940).

Lorca felt a thrill akin to experiencing cante jondo when he experienced jazz and blues in Harlem. A letter home to his parents revealed his fascination with the chaos and wonder that he feels when listening to a black singer at Peterson’s New York apartment. The unnamed jazz singer’s ability to let go echoes Lorca’s vision of duende as an ecstatic release into the spiritual and natural world. As he reflected on the nature of jazz and its cultural connection to the Spanish cante jondo, Lorca identified its power as stemming from intercultural and transnational movement. In America, he witnessed the artistic and spiritual complexity of jazz as part of New York City’s “multitude of different races ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• African Americans and Spaniards: “Caught in an Inescapable Network of Mutuality”
• Part I All that Jazz
• Part II Transnational Readings of the Spanish Civil War
• Part III Gazing at Each Other in Franco’s Spain
• Conclusion: Looking Ahead to the Next Chapters
• Index