Mayaya Rising

DAWN DUKE is a professor of Spanish and Portuguese and chair of Portuguese at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is the author of Literary Passion, Ideological Commitment: Toward a Legacy of Afro-Cuban and Afro-Brazilian Women Writers (Bucknell), editor of A Escritora Afro-Brasileira: Ativismo e Arte LiterÁria, and coeditor of Celluloid Chains: Slavery in the Americas through Film. She has published more than twenty-two articles and chapters.

“[A] carefully detailed and focused discussion of Afro-Latina/Caribbean women writers from Cuba, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Colombia. Duke discusses strategies of resistance, recuperation of memory, and rewritings of history, centering her reading of Afro-diasporic women’s literature transversally within Hispanic Caribbean and Latin American Literature Studies. It is a much-needed repositioning . . . ‘Enhorabuena,’ Dawn Duke. As an Afro-Boricua writer, I celebrate Mayaya Rising. Latin American and Caribbean Literary Studies need more books like this.” - Mayra Santos-Febres (author of La amante de Gardel) “Mayaya Rising tells the stories, and the stories of telling the stories, of an incredible set of previously ignored Afro-Latin American and Afro-Caribbean women. It makes clear the iconic potential of these women, the work that icons do, and the work it takes to productively iconize Afro-Latin American and Afro-Caribbean women.” - Keja Valens (author of Desire between Women in Caribbean Literature) “Dawn Duke’s study of black women writers in the Hispanic Caribbean-its continental components included-breaks important new ground. Its intersectional stress on race and gender illuminates the path of authors who draw strength from feminist and anti-racist legacies owed to iconic ancestresses. The cultural and linguistic diversity of this literary corpus pulverizes homogenizing assumptions about ‘Spanish American’ literature.” - Silvio Torres-Saillant (co-author of The Once and Future Muse: The Poetry and Poetics of Rhina P. Espaillat) “Mayaya Rising is a nuanced continuation of Duke’s 2008 work, Literary Passions, Ideological Commitment, wherein the author critically examines the nationalist practices that impede self-actualization of Black female historical representation in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Colombia. . . . That which Duke accomplishes with this work is critically establishing a female-centric revisionist history located within the contributions of Afro-descendant cultural practitioners whose literary, artistic, and activist endeavors continue to shape and enrich national narratives in these countries.” - Antonio Tillis (editor of Critical Perspectives on Afro-Latin American Literature)

• Introduction: The Fundamentals of GloryPART IA Cuban/Dominican Case Study1 Teodora and Micaela GinÉs: Myth or History?2 The Invention of History through Poetry: A Dominican InitiativePART IIA Nicaraguan Case Study3 Tracing the Dance Steps of a “British” Subject: Miss Lizzie’s Palo de Mayo4 From “Mayaya las im key” to Creole Women’s WritingsPART IIIA Colombian Case Study5 Rituals of AlegrÍa and Ponchera: The Enterprising Palenqueras6 Palenquera Writings: A Twenty-First-Century MovementConclusionAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex