CRÉOLITÉ AND CULTURAL CANNIBALISM: RECONSTRUCTING
CUBAN IDENTITY IN THE WORK OF MARTA MARÍA PÉREZ
BRAVO AND MARÍA MAGDALENA CAMPOS-PONS
by
Rebecca Maksym
A thesis submitted to the faculty of the University of Utah
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts
in
Art History
Department of Art and Art History
The University of Utah
December 2012
Copyright © Rebecca Maksym 2012
All Rights Reserved
T h e U n i v e r s i t y o f U t a h G r a d u a t e S c h o o l
STATEMENT OF THESIS APPROVAL
The thesis of Rebecca Maksym
has been approved by the following supervisory committee members:
Elena Shtromberg , Chair 9/20/12
Date Approved
Winston Kyan , Member 9/20/12
Date Approved
Paul (Monty) Paret , Member 9/20/12
Date Approved
and by Brian Snapp , Chair of
the Department of Art and Art History
and by Charles A. Wight, Dean of The Graduate School.
ABSTRACT
No matar ni ver matar animales (1985) created by Marta María Pérez Bravo and
When I Am Not Here/Estoy Allá (1994) by María Magdalena Campos-Pons are two
photographs inspired by Afro-Cuban mythology, particularly the beliefs and symbolism
of Santería, a syncretic religious tradition stemming from the history of slavery and
colonialism in Latin America. Most scholarship on the syncretic religions in Cuba is
informed by Fernando Ortiz’s theory of transculturation, which contextualizes cultural
mixing through the lens of European dominance. This tendency often ignores the
reciprocity of cultural exchange between Africa, the Americas and Europe that has
shaped creole identity, especially female creole identity. The main goal of this study is to
reposition Pérez Bravo and Campos-Pons’s works within the context of creolization as a
means to better understand the role of gender and Afro-Cuban tradition in different
constructions of creole identity. This thesis proposes an interpretation of No matar ni ver
matar animales and When I Am Not Here/Estoy Allá through the postcolonial trope of
cultural cannibalism (first elaborated by Brazilian poet and playwright Oswald de
Andrade in 1928), as a means of providing an alternative analysis of how the legacies of
colonialism drive contemporary artistic production in Cuba. This study positions Pérez
Bravo and Campos-Pons’s artworks as engaging the concept of cultural cannibalism, and
thereby challenging the dominant interpretations of Afro-Cuban traditions through
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notions of transculturation. At stake is a more complex recognition of how colonial
histories influence expressions of female Cuban identity.
TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………..iii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS……………………………………………………………….vi
Chapters
I INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………..1
Creoleness………………………………………………………….......................1 II SITUATING CONTEMPORARY CUBAN ART……………………………...10
Challenges and Changes: Cuba in the 1980s and 90s…………………………...10 Maternal Creoles: Constructions of Cuban Female Identity…………………….16
III AFRICA IN CUBA....…………………………………………………………...25
Santería and African Cultural Continuities……………………………………...25 Cuban Political History, Slavery, and Early Religious Practice………………...32 Recognizing African Agency through Santería....................................................35
IV CONCLUSION.....................................................................................................39
Cannibal Aesthetics...............................................................................................39
BIBLIOGRAPHY.............................................................................................................42
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to express my overwhelming gratitude to all those who gave me the
opportunity to complete this thesis. First to the University of Utah’s Department of
Campus Recreation Services, especially Mary Bohlig, Brian Wilkinson, and Rob Jones
whose utter generosity, support, and encouragement helped pave the way for my studies
in graduate school.
My gratitude also goes to the Department of Art and Art History at the University
of Utah for providing opportunities through teaching positions that supplemented my
education. To my committee chair, Professor Elena Shtromberg, who has had a
monumental impact on my life—words cannot express how thankful I am for your
wisdom, dedication and inspiration. I would also like to thank my committee members,
Professor Winston Kyan and Professor Monty Paret, whose advice, and at times
skepticism, has helped foster my passion for and appreciation of Art History. Other
major influences on my work have been Professor Alessandra Santos, Professor Dave
Hawkins, and Professor Doug Jones. You all have truly influenced my research,
creativity and academic success.
My family and friends have also been tremendously supportive and patient
throughout the process of writing my thesis. I am particularly thankful for my parents
who continually encourage me to take on new challenges and never to be complacent. I
also would like to extend a special thanks to my amazing friends Amanda Beardsley,
Scotti Hill, Dana Hernandez, Jodie Johnson, and Darrell Henderson who have all read
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through multiple papers of mine and provided invaluable suggestions and criticism. My
adoration and gratitude goes to the D-Man especially. Thank you for your continual
patience, loyalty and companionship.
INTRODUCTION Creoleness
Créolité started in 1989 as a literary movement from the French Caribbean island
of Martinique as an alternative to the Négritude movement.1 Unlike Négritude’s
rejection of European colonial influences, Créolité was a movement that regarded
Caribbean identity as plural and hybrid, bringing together indigenous, diasporic, and
colonial histories, which included the region’s European heritage.2 In this sense,
Créolité, or creoleness, transcends the myth of a single collective tradition linking all
aspects of the African diaspora in Latin America, as Négritude (and other previous
movements) had posited.3 It is this notion of plurality and hybridity that is useful in
analyzing contemporary visual art from different parts of the Caribbean.
1 Tanya Barson and Peter Gorschlüter, eds. Afro Modern: Journeys Through the Black Atlantic, (London: Tate Liverpool, 2010): 182. Poets Aimé Césaire and Léon Damas were two founding members of the Négritude movement starting in the 1930s. Négritude was influenced by Surrealism and the Harlem Renaissance, and became a movement emphasizing consciousness of the importance of “blackness” and black identity through the collective celebration of African heritage. Négritude denounced European influences on Afro-American identity in order to challenge racism and bigotry stemming from colonialism. 2 Ibid.,180. Patrick Chamoiseau, Jean Bernabé and Raphaël Confiant started Créolité; this movement followed in the footsteps of Antillanté, another Caribbean cultural and political movement advocating ideas of hybridity and plurality started by Édouard Glissant in the 1960s. Créolité became an important alternative to Négritude in the early 1990s because it provided a more inclusive framework for discussing and expressing the effects of postcolonialism. Many of the Caribbean islands became independent around the 1950s and 60s, which led to a number of national and cultural identity “crises” in the subsequent decades, as these diverse populations suddenly needed to reexamine what it meant to be “Caribbean” without the strings of European colonialism. Chamoiseau, Bernabé, and Confiant developed Créolité as a way to address this exact conundrum by emphasizing the complex cultural and ethnic mixing that is crucial to Caribbean identity. 3 Here I am referring to Toussaint Louverture who led the Haitian Revolution (1791-1803) and helped transform a society of slaves into a self-governing nation who fully embraced their African heritage. The success of this revolution had a monumental impact on later Afro-American political and cultural movements in the early twentieth century. For example, Marcus Garvey’s establishment of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and the Back-to-Africa movement, which later influenced the Rastafari movement of the 1930s. In addition, W.E.B. Du Bois and his initiation of Pan-Africanism and to
2
Through an in-depth examination of Cuban artists Marta María Pérez Bravo’s (b. 1959) No matar ni ver matar animales (Neither to Kill nor to Watch Animals Being
Killed) (1985-86), and María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s (b. 1959) When I Am Not
Here/Estoy Allá (1994), this study investigates modes of representing creoleness by
female artists. Creoleness offers an unconventional way of understanding the history and
impact of European colonialism in the New World. Similar to other cultural movements
like Négritude, Créolité, which can also be understood as a concept of creoleness, is a
method of critiquing colonialization. However, Créolité departs from strictly black
nationalistic mentalities by acknowledging the mixing and blending of diverse heritages
that are integral to the histories and identities of the New World. Moreover, because men
and a masculine voice largely dominate the study of creoleness, the place of women in
this discussion is minimal leaving a substantial gap for further scholarship on the
feminine experience and its expression. Marta María Pérez Bravo and María Magdalena
Campos-Pons are two Cuban artists whose work reflects issues of creole identity and
history. Both artists’ work offers an alternative way of representing creole identity by
using their physical bodies as the main prop in their photographic performances of Afro-
Cuban mythology.
Pérez Bravo and Campos-Pons appropriate symbols associated with Santería, or
Afro-Cuban Orisha worship, and construct their identities as Cuban women while
simultaneously deconstructing patriarchal beliefs associated with motherhood and
a lesser extent the Harlem Renaissance were other cultural movements that advocated a singular or collective notion of African-ness and black identity. For further reading on black nationalist movements see Abiola Irele’s “Negritude or Black Cultural Nationalism” in The Journal of Modern African Studies 3, no. 3 (1965).
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femininity.4 This double act of construction and deconstruction is staged on the artists’ bodies as a type of private performance that is made public through photography. By
combining the performative with the photographic, Pérez Bravo and Campos-Pons
present an alternative understanding of creolization as not only a system of cultural
identity, but also an aesthetic best adapted to cultural appropriation. Through their
inclusion of artistic elements that allude to motherhood and femininity within the context
of Afro-Cuban mythologies, Pérez Bravo and Campos-Pons’s references to creolization
and Santería prioritize the female body.
Focusing on Pérez Bravo and Campos-Pons’s photographs as case studies, this
investigation is framed by two questions: How do these two Cuban female artists engage
with ideas of creolization central to Cuban identity? And how does their focus on
maternity reframe the role of gender and tradition in different constructions of
creoleness? This study seeks to answer why female creoleness is a significant paradigm
for understanding how the legacies of colonialism, and consequently slavery, help shape
not only a collective Cuban identity, but also an unconventional form of artistic and
cultural production.
In exploring these questions, I position these two works in the framework of
antropofagia or “cultural cannibalism.” Drawing on Brazilian author, Oswald de
Andrade’s Manifesto Antropófago (Cannibal Manifesto) (1928), this study weaves the
postcolonial trope of cultural cannibalism into the analysis of Pérez Bravo and Campos- 4 I employ these two labels of “Santería” and “Afro-Cuban Orisha worship” and will do so throughout this study because they demonstrate how deep notions of plurality goes, particularly in the discussion of syncretic Latin American religions. The term Santería is important because it immediately links to Spanish and Catholic influences, which is why it is also critiqued, as it implies European dominance (for further reading see Miguel Ramos’ essay “Afro-Cuban Orisha worship” in Santería Aesthetics in Contemporary Latin American Art). Whereas Afro-Cuban Orisha worship gives agency (some might say “accuracy”) to the larger influences of African beliefs practiced in numerous Latin American religions, including Santería.
4
Pons’s photographic performances. Andrade’s theoretical method of antropofagia is
based on the notion that the so-called “primitive” human historically deemed “cannibal,”
has the faculty to eat and absorb dominant influences and to produce alternative
constructions of culture. His advocation of metaphorical cannibalism was an attempt to
provoke Brazilians to devour European styles in order to rid themselves of direct Western
influences, and to produce their own concepts of culture and identity. This idea of
appropriation and transformation resonated in other parts of the globe and became a
relevant model for many twentieth century cultural movements in the Americas and
Europe.5
My central intention in using antropofagia as a theoretical framework is to
provide an analysis of Cuban cultural production that deviates from Fernando Ortiz’s
notion of transculturation. Ortiz (1881-1969) was one of the first scholars of Afro-Cuban
culture and popularized the term “transculturation” as a way of discussing how European
colonization of indigenous land and people through slave labor created the foundation for
Cuban identity. He was interested in how the stages of syncretism between two or more
cultures are bound to fuse and emerge as a whole new system of practices, beliefs, and
traditions that ultimately result in a collective cultural identity.6 Although
5 Beth Joan Vinkler, “The Anthropophagic Mother/Other: Appropriated Identities in Oswald de Andrade’s ‘Manifesto Antropófago,’” Luso-Brazilian Review 34, no. 1 (1997): 107. In this essay, Vinkler discusses Andrade’s manifesto as a declaration of a “utopian matriarchy” that is “free from symbolic language.” This notion of a utopian matriarchy stems from Andrade’s opposition to Freud’s theory of the castration complex, which highly influenced European and American avant-garde writers and artists. Vinkler explains that the role of symbolic language in the manifesto is characteristic of other cultural movements that attempted to reinvent and restructure language in order to subvert traditional and hegemonic canons accepted by early twentieth-century academies. 6 Fernando Ortiz, “The Relations between Blacks and Whites in Cuba,” Phylon 5, no. 1 (1944): 22. In this essay, Ortiz maps out the process of transculturation into five crucial stages of interracial relations, which he emphasizes is not specific to Cuba, but stems from sociological research conducted on every continent. He posited that the fifth stage of syncretism ultimately results in a period when cultures fuse and give way to a tertium quid, a third entity in which a new society is culturally integrated and racial factors inevitably
5
transculturation is an effective argument in opening up a discussion about cultural
amalgamation, Ortiz’s theory is problematic. His five stages of interracial and
intercultural relations assumed that cultural syncretism produces a collective identity
once indigenous and African peoples have adapted and assimilated to European social
structures, and not the other way around. This way of thinking inadvertently perpetuates
colonial dichotomies, such as dominance versus subordination, master versus subaltern,
and center versus periphery, binaries that today are still accepted as logical ways of
interpreting New World identities. This type of binary reasoning often ignores the
reciprocity of cultural exchanges that produce alternative channels for artistic and social
production. The influences of both indigenous and African cultures have not only
questioned European power structures over time, but they have also altered social
constructs that deem the nonwhite, non-European, and nonmale as less intellectual, and
thereby less valid. Because of these gaps in Ortiz’s reasoning, antropofagia departs
from transculturation and demonstrates why Andrade’s notion of symbolic consumption
of colonial assumptions might provide a more applicable framework for discussing racial
and cultural mixture in the New World.
The following chapters stem from my interpretation of antropofagia and its
connection to creoleness and creolization as a means to rethink processes of cultural
mixing. I focus on Pérez Bravo’s No matar ni ver matar animales and Campos-Pons’s
When I Am Not Here/Estoy Allá as case studies, and discuss how these two specific
cease their destructive powers. Ortiz’s theory of transculturation has been the dominant lens for discourses on Cuban identity and culture, yet this idea is still rooted in colonial mentalities that uphold Eurocentric structures of power and influence. In this sense, Andrade’s idea of antropofagia offers another lens for studying Cuban identity, as it is a theory focused on the impact and influence of subaltern cultures, rather than centered on how European dominance has ultimately converted and altered indigenous, African, and other marginalized heritages across the Americas.
6
artworks reveal alternative representations of Cuban cultural production. The first
chapter provides a visual analysis of these two works beginning with Pérez Bravo’s No
matar ni ver matar animales from her series titled “Para Concebir” (To Conceive). In
this photograph the artist uses her body to locate her identity at the interstices of two
worlds: the sacred and the profane. This contentious duality is also articulated through
the tensions between private and public performance, publicized through the medium of
photography.7 For Pérez Bravo, the use of symbolism from Santería relates to beliefs about conception that are thoughtfully interwoven into the performative and self-
referential nature of her work. Yet, she uses a documentary-style of photographic
construction that presents her body as a peculiar object of study. Unlike Campos-Pons’s
colorful Polaroids, Pérez Bravo uses black and white photography to separate herself
from the loaded meanings of colors in Afro-Cuban Orisha worship.8 Rather, she uses a
colorless composition of violence and maternity in order to allow the imagery to speak
for itself without further embellishment.
Campos-Pons’s photograph demonstrates how her symbolic use of objects is
meant to represent her identity through allusion to Afro-Cuban spirituality. The work
visually articulates how the mythologies dating back to colonial history, specifically in
Santería, have played a role in constructing the artist’s own identity. These elements,
including those that directly reference motherhood and femininity, operate within the
7 In both Pérez Bravo and Campos-Pons’s compositions, the camera is an important tool because of its implication of objectivity and documentation. As is discussed later in this study, I point to the use of the camera in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a way to survey land and territory, and consequently people. I posit that both artists recall this history of geographical study in unusual ways that not only hearkens back to European colonization of the physical land, but also the colonization of both the female and indigenous body. 8 Each orisha is associated with certain colors and objects, such as the river goddess Oshun who is often depicted in yellow and with honey. Pérez Bravo refrains from using colors in order to not invoke just one orisha, but rather to invoke a broader understanding of Santería through her personal experience.
7
context of Afro-Cuban traditions, and demonstrate how Campos-Pons’s creole heritage
creates a symbolic aesthetic that revolves around divinity and femininity.
The second chapter of this study provides a broader context for discussing African
diaspora by looking to earlier debates and theories regarding cultural exchange in the
New World. Focusing on Santería and African cultural continuities, this chapter suggests
that the processes of de-Eurocentralization in Cuba have opened new forms of
subjectivity by repositioning and restructuring Western ideas surrounding dominance.9
Pérez Bravo and Campos-Pons’s works exemplify how new modes of subjectivity rooted
in spiritual and artistic practices destabilize the present conditions of culture
commodification. I posit that these two artists actively consume, that is rework, coded
language and symbolic imagery in order to challenge the hold that the West has
historically held over its colonies.10
Pérez Bravo and Campos-Pons’s photographs convey a type of metaphorical consumption, resulting in a distinctive aesthetic. In No matar ni ver matar animales and
When I Am Not Here/Estoy Allá, the artists appropriate Afro-Cuban mythologies to
provide a model for understanding creole aesthetics. Based on Okwui Enwezor’s notion
of Créolité, creole aesthetics can be understood as a “modality of migration and
translation in which the convergence of multiple ethnic and cultural antecedents create a
9 Gerardo Mosquera, “Elegguá at the (Post?)Modern Crossroads: The Presence of Africa in the Visual Art of Cuba” in Santería Aesthetics in Contemporary Latin American Art, ed. Arturo Lindsay (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996): 232. Mosquera discusses the work of Wifredo Lam and uses the term “de-Eurocentralization” to highlight postcolonial processes that decenter western culture from the pinnacle of modernity. This can be viewed as another form of cultural cannibalism in which western assumptions of “exoticism” and “primitivism” are re-appropriated to invert and empower marginalized people and cultures. 10 New Art of Cuba (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003): 139.
8
syncretic Caribbean identity.”11 The term “creole” immediately locates this aesthetic in a geographic context often deemed as an aggregate of African, European, Native
(indigenous) American, East Asian, and other cultural elements that are united “on the
same soil by the yoke of history.”12
Campos-Pons explores this history not by focusing on the physical territory of Cuba, but rather on the waters that surround the land. This visual allusion to water is
important because it acts as a metaphor reflecting the polyphonous nature of creoleness
that is integral to Caribbean identity. Both water and creoleness are fluid and
simultaneously combine individual elements that can stand on their own, or be mixed into
a harmonizing whole. In this sense, Campos-Pons’s critical appropriation of symbols
associated with Santería uncover why créolité is not a synthesis that can be fixed, but
rather is a cultural phenomenon that is always in flux.
Pérez Bravo’s expression of creoleness, on the other hand, is centered on
violence, as her work features her holding a blade in a threatening way above her
pregnant belly. This image sharply contrasts with the most familiar depictions of
maternity and pregnancy from the Western canon. However, in the context of Caribbean
traditions rooted in Afro-American beliefs of animism, that is the attribution of a soul to
all animate and inanimate objects, the photograph takes on a different meaning, one that
can only be understood after further investigation into orisha worship. Pérez Bravo
specifically engages and adapts beliefs from Santería, thus invoking the history that
produced this belief system in the first place.
11 “Platform 3: Créolité and Creolization,” 51. 12 Ibid.
9
This study concludes by discussing how Pérez Bravo and Campos-Pons’s
photographs link to the postcolonial trope of cultural cannibalism. I argue that Andrade’s
theory of antropofagia relates to these two artworks through ideas of matriarchal values,
such as maternal generosity and protection. Pérez Bravo and Campos-Pons
metaphorically consume Santería mythologies revolving maternity, creating disjointed
representations of female creoleness. Both artists focus on personal identity and
experience in order to achieve an alternative mode of expression, one where their
fragmented bodies are not required to cohere in any straightforward way. Rather, the
layers of meaning in each photograph points to the complexity of contemporary female
Cuban identity.
Similar to Andrade’s cannibalism, a symbolic method of critiquing colonial
legacies, Pérez Bravo and Campos-Pons’s photographs conceptually reverse the roles of
colonizer versus colonized, especially with regard to the colonization of the female body.
This reversal acknowledges the contribution and importance of indigenous and African
heritages in the overall construction of Cuban identity while simultaneously emphasizing
the place of women in its history as well. Pérez Bravo and Campos-Pons rely on visual
language that re-purposes the polarities between Europe, Africa, and the Americas,
restructuring patriarchal principles in favor of matriarchal values. By metaphorically
consuming cultural and social divisions, such as notions of civilized versus primitive and
mastery versus protection, No matar ni ver matar animales and When I Am Not
Here/Estoy Allá exemplify an aesthetic that acknowledges female creole identity.
CHAPTER 1
SITUATING CONTEMPORARY CUBAN ART Challenges and Changes: Cuba in the 1980s and 90s
Marta María Pérez Bravo and María Magdalena Campos-Pons are part of the
second generation of artists who fully experienced the changes brought about by the
Cuban Revolution. Both artists were born in 1959, the same year that Fidel Castro and
his guerrilla army successfully ousted Fulgencio Batista (1940-44, 1952-59) and his U.S.-
backed dictatorial regime. Castro assumed power as president and initiated widespread
socialist reforms, including the nationalization of farmland and the oil industry, universal
healthcare, and the institutionalization of literacy programs. The United States reacted to
Castro’s revolutionary government by dissolving all diplomatic ties with Cuba and
establishing an embargo against the island, which has been in place since 1962.
Despite the U.S. blockade, Castro and his administration moved forward with
their socialist agenda, making education the primary focus for Cuba’s economic,
political, social, and cultural programs. Advanced and comprehensive education was
provided for all students, including artists, making Cuba’s education system one of the
best in Latin America.13 The development of public schools in the late 70s was fueled by the establishment of the Ministry of Culture in 1976, which brought forth a generation of
13 David C. Hart, Memory and the Installation Art of María Magdalena Campos-Pons, PhD diss., University of North Carolina (Ann Arbor: ProQuest/UMI 3170446, 2005): 19.
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artists in the early 1980s who initiated what is called the “Cuban Renaissance” or new
Cuban art. The postmodern focus on challenging hegemonic notions of a fixed national
identity became the unifying element in Cuban art from the 1980s and 90s, and
consequently affected both Pérez Bravo and Campos-Pons’s artistic vocabulary.14
Pérez Bravo and Campos-Pons benefited greatly from the reformed education system. Both artists were able to study at the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) founded in
1976 in Havana, pursuing their artistic careers while fully supported by national funding.
They are part of what is called the “second generation,” a group of artists who followed
in the footsteps of the first generation, which included such artists as José Bedia, Ricardo
Brey, and Flavio Garciandía.15 Unlike the first generation’s concern with rejecting the
orthodoxies of Cuban nationalism, the second generation of artists challenged the
institutionalization of the arts by focusing on individualism, and deploying their art to
criticize political and social organizations through more personal over collective
expressions. This type of criticism was fueled by a need to question Castro’s regime,
especially because the country was experiencing a devastating downturn in their
economy in the 1980s and early 90s. Cuba was severely affected by the dissolution of the
14 Rachel Weiss, To and From Utopia in the New Cuban Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011): 5. Weiss explains that in the 1980s, new Cuban art was promoted as an “aesthetic update” by what is known as the “first generation,” a group of artists focused on avant-garde approaches; however, rather than propose a modernization of their expressive means, the first generation, including such artists as José Bedia, Flavio Garciandía (Pérez Bravo’s husband) and Consuelo Castañeda, were concerned with amalgamating a variety of styles and expressions borrowed from numerous cultural sources in order to produce a Cuban aesthetic that emphasized experimentation, conceptualism, and the dismantling of divisions between fine and folk art, as well as high and low culture. 15 Camnitzer, New Art of Cuba, 201. The first generation of new Cuban artists are known for their famous exhibition “Volumen Uno” or “Volume I.” The show opened on January 14, 1981 in Havana, and was highly criticized because of the overwhelming inclusion of conceptual, minimal, performance, and graffiti art that demonstrated a deliberate break from more traditional styles, such as classicism and realism. The works in “Volumen Uno” were an eclectic mixture of popular religions and kitsch aesthetics that challenged the revolutionary modernism established by the Castro administration. In effect, the first generations’ “Volumen Uno” exhibition became the precedent for contemporary Cuban art.
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Soviet Union. The consequences of this economic catastrophe resulted in Castro’s
implementation of controversial provisions that restricted the country from gaining access
to foreign aid for fear of Western ideology infiltrating his socialist programs. In effect,
the Castro administration used utopian ideas of reformation in order to encourage and
reassure the people of Cuba, but coincidently these provisions ultimately homogenized
Cuban culture and society.16
Rather than embracing a strictly Cuban identity and communist ideology, as Castro had hoped, the second generation of new Cuban artists embraced the multi-faceted
and international aspects of Cuban identity by drawing from various cultural sources and
socio-political ideas. For example, the influence of syncretic religions, the contention
between capitalism and communism, and the legacies of European colonization, affected
the way that artists in the 80s and 90s articulated their relationship to Cuba. The
instability of the USSR, in addition to the mass exodus of Cubans to the United States in
the 1980s and early 90s, further influenced this second generation of artists.
Such narratives of economic and social hardships became subject matter in much
of their work, as their country’s sense of nationalism was challenged by financial loss and
political pessimism. Artists were encouraged by Castro and his administration to use art
as a way of rehabilitating the country’s image and cultural standing despite the economic
16 Ana M. Fernández, Parallels and Tensions Present in Marta María Pérez Bravo’s Work, MA thesis, Georgia State University (Ann Arbor: ProQuest/UMI 1432284, 2006): 2. Fernández asserts that while Castro’s attempt to reform Cuban society and culture was somewhat noble, his programming often dismissed individual thought and expression. The administration did not favor avant-garde methods that challenged the status quo, which prompted many Cuban artists in the 1980s and 90s to critique the very institutions that were established to go against hegemonic structures that had been used by previous dictatorships, such as what happened under Fulgencio Batista.
13
woes the country was facing.17 Yet, artists such as Pérez Bravo and Campos-Pons were not concerned with upholding Castro’s propaganda of a social and political paradise,
rather they wanted to explore more personal expressions regarding cultural identity. In
particular, as women, Pérez Bravo and Campos-Pons used their art to critically examine
their connections to Cuba by focusing on ideas related to femininity, maternity, and
mythology.
Pérez Bravo and Campos-Pons were highly influenced by the first generation of
new Cuban art, especially in terms of experimentation with untraditional media, such
their bodies, and ideas of cultural appropriation. This new generation of artists
effectively cannibalized ideas from previous generations, and appropriated elements of
Afro-Cuban religions that established a new voice for Cuban art in the 1980s. Many
artists employed mythological concepts as a curative against forms of realism, which they
felt did not convey the true complexity of Cuban reality, but rather emphasized utopian
ideas of nationalism. Afro-Cuban ritual, Native American spirituality, and
Mesoamerican cultural traditions were all part of the first generation’s attempt to rethink
ideas of Cuban nationality and identity.18 The focus on non-European influences was a
way for artists to express the blending and mixing of diverse cultural sources that allowed
them to acknowledge their indigenous and Western roots. This new framework also gave
17 Weiss, To and From Utopia in the New Cuban Art, 9. Because Cuba had economic ties to the USSR during the 1980s, the beginning of the fall of the Eastern Bloc in 1989 initiated the “Special Period,” in which Castro implemented wartime provisions, such as new foreign investments, a revamped tourist industry, and severe rationing throughout the country. These provisions contradicted the socialist ideology that had maintained a collective Cuban identity, leaving the island nation in a precarious and dire situation both economically and socially. 18 Ibid., 13.
14
artists license to communicate more global ideas about the human condition, as well as
reflect on elements that spoke directly to cubanía or Cubaness.19
Photography became a crucial method for many artists working in the direction of
new Cuban art. The medium was relied on by the Castro administration for propaganda,
and as a means to project a more heroic image of the struggling nation. However, many
Cubans felt that the use of photography in this way obscured or misrepresented the
economic and social hardship of the period. Edmundo Desnöes’s was one such critic,
and his essay “Photographic Image of Underdevelopment” (1967) had a lasting impact on
artistic practices during the 1980s and 90s.20 Desnöes, a renowned Cuban author,
criticized the Castro regime’s reliance on photography as a mechanical mirror that
reflects reality, and instead he claimed that “everything is a hoax,” and that “photography
is a lie.”21 Desnöes professed that photography and reality are rarely separated as two
different experiences, which negatively affects people’s perception of themselves and
their nation. He was especially critical of photojournalism and fashion advertisements in
Cuba that falsely portrayed ideas of prosperity, when in fact the country was, and still is,
struggling with ideas of underdevelopment. Rather, Desnöes advocated for his people to
19 Ibid., 6. Weiss uses the term cubanía and explains that for the second generation, in articulating their identity they included elements of artistic experimentation and critical assimilation of both national and international currents. Armando Hart was the first director of the Ministry of Culture (1976-1997); he adamantly encouraged the second generation of artists to use outside cultural sources in addition to Cuban culture and society in order contribute to a broader discourse on political and social change. Despite the stigma about borrowing from foreign influences that might infringe on the Communist Party’s idea of suppressing and restricting western ideology, Hart understood that by not taking an international stance, Cuba risked being an isolated and hegemonic nation, similar to what he thought was happening in the United States. Ideas of appropriation and adaptation became paramount in the second generations’ production of art, as it was Hart’s international ideology that fueled the first and second generation’s sense of Cuban mestizaje—a blend of ethnicities, histories, and philosophies. Hart’s liberalism caused much controversy from many of his more orthodox constituents, but during the early to mid 1980s his views were a relief for artists who wanted to move beyond strictly Cuban nationalist themes. 20 Ibid., 27. 21 Edmundo Desnöes, “The Photographic Image of Underdevelopment,” trans. Julia Lesage, Jump Cut, no. 33 (1988): 78.
15
understand photography as a medium that uses illusory tactics of light, exposure, angle,
etc., and partakes in the imaginary function of art as a way of communicating individual
expression. This stance later encouraged artists to strip photography of its seemingly
neutral and romanticized role, and create new “realities” that were personal, inventive,
and on the brink of taboo.
Pérez Bravo and Campos-Pons employed photography not as a means of
depicting truth or Castro’s dream of a social utopia, but rather as a means of recording a
private world that is subjective, incorporating ideas of both fantasy and anxiety. This
idea of illusion and anxiety underscores the general atmosphere of Cuba in the 1980s and 90s, as many Cubans’ disenchantment with their nation during this time resulted in mixed
emotions of pride and fear. The media only intensified feelings of nationalistic sentiment
versus social and political cynicism, especially because news broadcasts,
photojournalism, and political posters were used to portray an image of economic
prosperity and social harmony.22 However, in reality Cuba was experiencing immense
poverty and deprivation, desperately holding onto its socialist programs while the United
States intensified its blockade of foreign goods and services.23
22 Ibid. 23 Weiss, To and From Utopia in the New Cuban Art, 153. After Gorbachev announced the end of Soviet economic assistance to Cuba in 1991, the U.S. promptly passed the Cuban Democracy Act in the following year in order to curtail shipments of food and medical supplies by subsidiaries of U.S. companies. The strain of this legislation ultimately forced Castro to allow the U.S. dollar to circulate legally, and thus private entrepreneurship became more public. The circulation of the dollar also fueled the tourist industry with the establishment of the Ministry of Tourism in 1994, and ironically hundreds of thousands of visitors enjoyed the newly restored colonial buildings in Havana, while Cuban citizens were prohibited from these areas and instead had to deal with the crumbling buildings that were outside of the picturesque and “updated” Old City.
16
Maternal Creoles: Constructions of Cuban Female Identity
Marta María Pérez Bravo’s work did not concentrate on the political climate of
Cuba in the 1980s, but rather on her personal exploration of female Cuban identity. She
encountered Afro-Cuban religions during her time at ISA (1979-1984), and they became
a common theme throughout her work, even after she left her homeland and moved to
Mexico in 1995.24 She created Para concebir (To Conceive, 1985-86) after becoming
pregnant with twins. In this series of black and white silver gelatin photographs, Pérez
Bravo had her husband (Garciandía) take pictures of her nude body while she posed in
different scenes, many of which are unnerving and often address taboos surrounding
femininity. This is most evident in her image No matar ni ver matar animales (Neither to
Kill or Watch Animals Being Killed) in which the artist’s body is shown in profile as she
wields a butcher knife above her bulging abdomen. This gesture of clutching a weapon
recalls images of cinematic suspense and savagery, an effect heightened by the black and
white value of the photograph, reminiscent of an Alfred Hitchcock thriller. The cropping
of her head and lower body from the picture frame fragments the artist, leaving the
viewer with a disembodied pregnant abdomen, devoid of a recognizable identity.
By juxtaposing her naked and pregnant body with a kitchen knife, Pérez Bravo
presents her female identity as a duality between sacredness and profanity. She combines
concepts of violence and love in a way that reveals the complexity of Santería myths
regarding conception and femininity. When understood through the lens of Afro-Cuban
religiosity, the kitchen knife signifies love, but in an unconventional way as it is a
motherly love that literally and metaphorically wards off danger. Afro-Cuban Orisha
24 Fernández, Parallels and Tensions Present in Marta María Pérez Bravo’s Work, 1.
17
worship includes a blending of Amerindian and Yoruban (West African) beliefs in
animism that contrast with Euro-Christian notions of good versus evil. In animism, an
object or subject innately possesses a spirit that may shift between positive or negative
energies, but does not necessarily represent a concrete binary between right and wrong or
good and evil. Rather, evil and sin are thought of as bad energy, so to speak, that need to
be warded off through different rituals.
In Santería, the Indian stands for the land inherited by the slaves and the
relationship that was forged by the oppression imposed on both the indigenous people
and those of African descent, for whom the Western notions of evil or sin was not the
same as those of Euro-Christian heritage.25 Many indigenous and African customs of
curing and healing were combined to fight off the destructive spirit world and infections
brought on by the white masters. In other words, rituals intended to ward off bad or
unhealthy spirits (often in ceremonies where celebrants used knives or other implements
to scare off these spirits) grew in importance because these tribes came in contact with
colonists. These rituals later became common practices in Santería. Pérez Bravo alludes
to these customs by literally holding a knife to defend her unborn children, as if warding
off bad spirits that might otherwise harm her babies. In this sense, the violence in her
photograph no longer suggests an alarming moment of mutilation, but rather appears as a
defensive act countering Western assumptions.
The phrase written along the bottom of the photograph also suggests notions of
aggression and death, as the words “neither to kill nor watch animals being killed” issues
a warning against death in a way that is both repulsive and comforting. On one level, the
25 Camnitzer, New Art from Cuba, 13.
18
image along with the phrase represents common fears of violence and aggression, as the
butcher knife in conjunction with a reference to animal sacrifice enforces notions of
brutality and force. Yet, the words also function in a manner that is more reassuring and
compassionate when interpreted through the lens of Santería mythology. Pérez Bravo
uses her body to communicate an unconventional message about maternity and
femininity, as the image suggests aggression while simultaneously signifying maternal
protection and feminine strength. By inverting traditional ideas of violence inherent in
the image of a knife alongside the symbol of life that is the artist’s pregnant belly, Pérez
Bravo invokes an Afro-Cuban notion of sacrifice that is important to her individual
female identity.
Pérez Bravo’s photograph alludes to Santería mythology and ritual, such as the
pinaldo (receiving the knife), which references important ceremonies for followers who
have completed their Ocha or initiation.26 This ritual is also called cuchillo (knife) and is
associated with the orisha Ogún (also spelled Oggún), god of iron, violence, sacrifice,
and defense who is often depicted with a machete. The pinaldo grants the right to
perform sacrifices of animals, but it also serves to confirm one’s initiation and may have
started as a confirmatory rite to validate the credentials of a priest or priestess who moved
from one place to another.27
Pérez Bravo appropriates symbols of power that are related to sacrifice and violence by invoking the orisha Ogún. Ogún has been syncretized with the Catholic
26 For further reading see David Brown’s Santería Enthroned (2003) and Christine Ayorinde’s Afro-Cuban Religiosity, Revolution, and National Identity (2004). In my research I have not come across scholarship explicitly stating that Pérez Bravo’s No matar ni ver mater animales directly references the pinaldo ritual. Rather, this connection between the knife ceremony and Pérez Bravo’s work is based purely on my own interpretation of the photograph in conjunction with my research on Santería. 27 David Brown, Santería Enthroned (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003): 370
19
Saint Peter, most likely because Ogún has a vessel containing iron tools and a rock, the
latter of which is also associated with Saint Peter in the Catholic faith.28 In No matar ni
ver matar animales, Pérez Bravo appropriates similar attributes of Ogún, such as strength
and aggression, to suggest a maternal power that is at once threatening, but when put in
the context of Santería mythology, takes on another meaning. Her clutched hand holds
the knife in a manner that recalls images of violence, yet this violence also signifies a
form of female power that is not traditionally associated with femininity. In addition,
because she photographs her pregnant body alongside a violent weapon, Pérez Bravo
further disrupts the serenity and bliss commonly associated with motherhood represented
in Western depictions by female painters such as Mary Cassatt.29 Instead, Pérez Bravo
displays a spiritual scene that is suggestive of African beliefs revolving around death and
sacrifice.
Pérez Bravo uses the knife to present maternity as beautiful and brutal occurrence.
In this way, she does not separate motherhood from the reality of violence and hardship
that affects the material world, but instead uses her body to express the paradoxes of good
and evil, and life and death that afflict even pregnant women. These dualities between
violence and love are also presented through the achromatic photograph, as the seemingly
opposing values of black and white are another element of the image that suggests sin
versus virtue. Pérez Bravo challenges traditional attributes of black as connoting evil and
white as signifying purity in order to reveal a more profound understanding of death and
violence outside of the Western canon. By using Santería mythology, Pérez Bravo
28 Ibid. The syncretism of Ogún and Saint Peter also may have happened because both figures represent ideas of foundation in their respective religions, hence the symbolism of a rock or stone. 29 Here I am referring to such paintings as Mother and Child (1890), The Bath (1891), and Mother Berthe Holding her Baby (1900), all of which depict motherhood as a solemn and serene experience.
20
provides an alternative notion of female power that is centered on violence. Yet this
representation of violence signifies female strength and authority in a way that departs
from Western expectations of the demure and complacent mother.
In contrast to Pérez Bravo, María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s inclusion of Afro-
Cuban mythologies is not only a result of her experience at ISA (1980-85), but also of her
racial identity. Born in 1959 in La Vega, a former sugar plantation in the province of
Matanzas, Campos-Pons grew up in the exact building where her great-great-grandfather
had lived when he was taken as a slave to Cuba from Nigeria.30 After studying and
teaching at the ISA, Campos-Pons was awarded a fellowship and moved to the United
States in 1991. This break from her homeland carries throughout her work; however, the
sense of exile furthered her exploration of a fragmented history, which has become
foundational for her art. In many of Campos-Pons’s series, she displays her disjointed
body, painted and adorned with Santería symbols to represent her connection to the
African diaspora. Campos-Pons works between geopolitical and multi-cultural contexts
to challenge accepted notions of tradition, history, and gender. Through photography, she
exposes the multiple layers of her identity as not only a descendent of Yoruba ethnicity,
but also as a female artist working within the constraints of Cuban national identity.
In the first large-format Polaroid from her series, When I Am Not Here/Estoy Allá
(1994-97), Campos-Pons’s painted torso exists in a space of monochrome blue.
Undulating lines of white and blue are painted across the artist’s body, and in her slightly
outstretched hands she holds a small wooden vessel, its bow pointing to the right. A
white cord slung around her neck suspends two plastic baby bottles positioned upside 30 Lynn Bell, “History of People Who Were Not Heroes: A Conversation with Maria Magdalena Campos- Pons,” Third Text 12, no. 43 (1998): 34.
21
down over the top of her breasts. Both bottles are full of milk, which drips from the
plastic nipples down into the wooden boat. Yet, the milk is not only emanating from the
bottles, but also from the Campos-Pons’s actual breasts. This aspect of the photograph is
significant because it reinforces traditional concepts of maternity that are disrupted by the
fragmenting of the artist’s body.
Like Pérez Bravo’s image, Campos-Pons’s head and lower body are also cropped
from the frame. Through this technique of concealment (paint and bottles covering her
bare body), Campos-Pons crops and covers her body to reveal a different way of
representing maternity by invoking mythologies rooted in African heritage. In this way,
Campos-Pons appropriates traditional ideas associated with maternity and inverts the
Western notion of the female body as a receptacle to highlight an alternative way of
representing femininity through Afro-Cuban symbolism.
Campos-Pons’s photograph alludes to the legacies of slavery and colonialism by
directly representing an African goddess that has impacted Christian traditions in Cuba.
Picturing her bare torso painted in wavy blue and white lines, she invokes the sea goddess
Yemayá who is associated with Our Lady of Regla, the Roman Catholic saint of charity
who is also the patroness of Cuba.31 Both the Yoruban orisha and Catholic saint
represent ideas of giving, nurturing, and maternal generosity, making it understandable
why Campos-Pons’s Yoruban ancestors appropriated the attributes of Regla and
combined them with the sea goddess. Doing so allowed them to continue praising their
motherly Yemayá goddess without the intervention of Christian missionaries and
European authorities. 31 Christine Ayorinde, Afro-Cuban Religiosity, Revolution, and National Identity (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004): 17.
22
In addition to representing Afro-Cuban mythology, Campos-Pons uses the
combination of commercial products along with her physical body to highlight the
conflation of breasts as sexualized and functional objects. The duality between
motherhood and motherland, both of which are represented by Campos-Pons’s physical
body further complicates this contention. Her lactating breasts, baby bottles, and wooden
vessel certainly symbolize motherhood, yet Campos-Pons’s body and the floating boat
also symbolize a motherland (Cuba) surrounded by an ocean that gently cradles the
vessel needed for trade and development. In this context, When I Am Not Here/Estoy Allá
exemplifies Cuba’s current state in which the process of decolonization has left the nation
in a peculiar phase of development, especially because the island depends on tourism as a
main source of capital. Hence, the boat represents not only a womb, but also a method of
cultural exchange, or a catalyst for monetary gain. Campos-Pons disrupts
the typical objectification of the female body by obscuring the nurturing quality of the
breasts with the mechanical utility of the bottles.
The juxtaposition of the mechanical with the physical, or more precisely, the
commercial product contrasted with the artist’s body suggests cultural cannibalism by
referencing a basic form of consumption: breastfeeding. The bottles and breasts certainly
symbolize maternity, but Campos-Pons emphasizes the idea of feeding by positioning the
plastic apparatuses over her actual flesh. In this sense, she appropriates not only symbols
associated with the ocean and mother goddess Yemayá, but also a commercial product
that immediately signifies consumption.
Campos-Pons’s image links to Western notions of progress and modernization in
terms of industry and commercial products, and inadvertently evokes the Nature versus
23
Culture dichotomy. In his Cannibal Manifesto, Andrade parodies German philosopher
Hermann Keyserling’s notion that the “technicized barbarian” is the “sign of the modern
world,” meaning that so-called barbarians are able to leave Nature once they have
industry to enter the world of Culture.32 The binary Nature versus Culture is still relevant today, especially within the context of Caribbean nations often considered Third World or
underdeveloped. Campos-Pons’s juxtaposition of her bare breasts with the plastic bottles
is similar to Andrade’s parody of the Nature versus Culture dichotomy, as the image
suggests that the “primitive” mother enjoys the fruits of modernity for she now has
commercial products to feed her offspring. When I Am Not Here/Estoy Allá reveals a
complex layer of Cuban identity, a nation that is often portrayed as underdeveloped and
in need of industry. In this perspective, her photograph critiques Western biases by
positioning her body as a metaphor for a colonized motherland that now has industry (and
culture) to raise her people.
Beyond traditional ideas of motherland and abundance, When I Am Not
Here/Estoy Allá demonstrates how the female body is a site of power and love. Campos-
Pons relies on traditional ideas of maternity and nurturing symbolized by the small boat
she holds filled with milk, a powerful reference to the period of gestation when the
mother serves as a vessel for her child. Yet, she also uses this staged scene to express the
importance of African-derived beliefs that empower women. In this sense, Campos-
Pons’s image of Yemayá still invokes Euro-Christian ideals of the nurturing mother.
However, her photograph challenges the complacency often seen in Western depictions
of maternity, most predominantly in images of the Virgin and Christ child, by using a
32 Andrade, “Cannibalist Manifesto,” 45.
24
goddess that is not only protector of motherhood, but also of the sea. This notion of a sea
goddess is important because it equates women with a force that can be alternately
nurturing and tempestuous. Oceans are expansive and powerful bodies, an idea that is
appropriated and re-purposed to comment on femininity, and thus the reference to the sea
in this work is not only representative of the transatlantic slave trade, but also of female
strength and authority.
Both Pérez Bravo and Campos-Pons perform a type of cultural cannibalism by
appropriating religious and national sources, presenting a form of creolization that
transcends Western perceptions of motherhood. By staging their physical bodies with
symbols that complicate the role of the female body, Pérez Bravo and Campos-Pons’s
fragmented torsos silently protest patriarchal structures of oppression. In this way, both
artists provide a different approach to understanding how the Other is not only the
marginalized or forgotten cultures often associated with the New World. Rather, Pérez
Bravo and Campos-Pons’s photographs reveal how the Other becomes a complex
representation of the female body as a symbol of motherlands, which are continually
colonized by imperial struggles for power and dominance.
CHAPTER 2
AFRICA IN CUBA Santería and African Cultural Continuities
Santería, also known as la Regla de Ocha or la Regla Lucumí, a form of Afro-
Cuban Orisha worship, is a Cuban syncretic religious tradition. This belief system has
two origins; it stems from West Africa (present-day Nigeria), but also derives from the
history of slavery and colonialism in the New World. A considerable number of slaves
that came to the Americas during the period of European colonial expansion arrived from
an area known as Yorubaland in southwestern Nigeria. In particular, the Yoruba people
made up a large portion of the slaves brought to Cuba, especially to the western side of
the island where Havana and Matanzas were settled. In their own country, the Yoruba
people worshipped divinities known as orishas (African deities called orichas in Cuba),
but in New World colonies they sought to reconstitute their religious beliefs in order to
covertly comply with Euro-Christian colonial dominance.
One significant way the Yoruba people, and slaves in general, maintained a
portion of their cultural traditions was to assimilate and adapt their orishas to Catholic
saints by assigning them with similar attributes. This tactic worked well because the
orisha tradition is based on the existence of a supreme god and a pantheon of subordinate
deities, similar to the structure of Catholicism where one central deity is surrounded by
26
various intercessors.33 From this assimilation and appropriation, the practice of Santería developed in Cuba as mixture of African, Amerindian, and European beliefs and
practices.
As a common spiritual practice and religious fixture, the presence of Santería in
the Caribbean attests to the dynamic and reciprocal cultural exchange that happened
between Africa, Europe, and indigenous populations of the Americas. The merging of
Yoruban and Christian beliefs has coalesced into a practice that transcends mere religious
order—Santería has instead become a cultural amalgam. Elizabeth Hanly is a journalist
and educator who discusses the influence of Santería, a tradition that she labels “worldly
Creole” practice. Hanly contends that the “Catholic Church never had the hold in Cuba
that it did in most other Latin American countries,” suggesting, “Perhaps the influence of
Africa was just too strong.”34 Hanly discusses the structure and importance of Santería in Cuba, explaining that even before Yoruban slaves reached the tropical island, their
spiritual practices were already a mixture of Egyptian, Greek, Jewish, and African
cultural influences. Thus, the Yoruban belief system was primed for the introduction of
Spain’s Catholicism, which only furthered this complex mix of history, beliefs, and, of
course culture.35
Despite its significance, Hanly explains that the early twentieth century did not receive African-derived religions and practices with open arms, and that it was not until
after the social revolutions that followed the second World War that Santería became
more widely acknowledged. Hanly writes:
33 Johan Wedel, Santería Healing (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2004): 29. 34 “Santería: An Alternative Pulse,” Aperture, no. 141 (Fall 1995): 30. 35 Ibid., 31.
27
Before the revolution […] Santería was kept in the shadows—at least among the oligarchy [which included Bolivar’s family]. Many of Cuba’s rich and powerful may have had their Santería priests, a whole island may have been dancing to Santería’s rhythms, yet according to Bolivar prerevolutionary Cuba insisted on seeing itself as white, Catholic, and Spanish.36
So even though Santería was practiced across the island, the institution of patriarchal and
dictatorial rule suppressed its public practice, and communities were forced to
surreptitiously observe Santería rituals. This clever strategy of blending Yoruban orishas
with Catholic saints demonstrates the agency and resilience of African cultural
continuities to resist extinction through appropriation. Up until the 1930s and 40s, people
practicing Santería had followed a long history of syncretic beliefs structures that were
concealed and silenced. From the time of slavery, African descendents covertly melded
their Yoruban gods and goddesses with important Christian figures and reinterpreted the
Catholic faith in order to retain a level of cultural continuity.37
Ideas of African cultural continuities, or Africanisms, were at the center of Cuban
anthropologist Fernando Ortiz’s research on how African diaspora influenced the creation
of cultural and national identities in Latin America. Focusing on Afro-Cuban culture and
practices, Ortiz examined the ways in which African, European, and Native American
customs were drawn together in the development of a new Cuban nationality. Ortiz
coined the term transculturation to highlight the ways in which the collision of different
cultures necessarily results in a new configuration for civilization.38 According to Ortiz,
this new civilization stems from the process of cultural transformation, in which the
36 “An Alternative Pulse,” 35. 37 Cros Sandoval, Worldview, the Orishas, and Santería: Africa to Cuba and Beyond, 21. 38 Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947): 5. Although ironically his theory of transculturation still relied on ideas of Eurocentrism, as his writings often allude to the success of European dominance versus African subordination even through the process of cultural mixing.
28
whole structure of social order, for better or worse, is cut, sculpted, and reformed in order
to meet the emerging needs of groups facing new circumstances. The idea of
transculturation and the role it plays in producing new identities, customs, and overall
social movements parallels the infamous Herskovits and Frazier debate regarding the
processes of acculturation.39
Herskovits and Frazier used the term “acculturation” in order to sum up the ways they thought that European colonialization ultimately conquered and later converted
indigenous and African populations in the Americas. The anthropologist Melville
Herskovits, whose ideas closely align with Oritz’s theory of transculturation, maintained
that European acculturation (or dominance) shaped the societies of the New World;
however he also affirmed that African culture is integral to Afro-American identity, and
that the civilizations of Africa “have contributed to American culture as we know it
today.”40 Herskovits asserted that the denial of an African past suppressed Black
American identity, and that only through the resuscitation of this past could the Afro-
American be “free” from racial prejudice.41
39 Since the early twentieth century, notions of African cultural continuities have been the source of scholarly debate, particularly within Latin and North American academic circles. Anthropologist, Melville Herskovits and sociologist, E. Franklin Frazier were two leading scholars in the 1930s and 40s who held different beliefs about the prevalence of African traditions in the New World, and in effect initiated what is known as the Herskovits and Frazier debate. Although from two different backgrounds and two different schools of thought, the one idea that connected Herskovits and Frazier was the idea of acculturation as a catalyst for Afro-American identity. However, Frazier held the belief that the black man in American society did not retain culture, custom, or consciousness from Africa; rather he affirmed that it is only through the memory of this lost heritage that Africa is preserved. Herskovits’s research, on the other hand, differed greatly from this notion. His extensive scholarship and personal ideology framed Africa and African heritage as crucial aspects in shaping the mentality and habits of American Blacks. For further reading see E. Franklin Frazier’s The Negro Family in the United States (1939), and Melville Herskovits’ The Myth of the Negro Past (1941). 40 The Myth of the Negro Past (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1941): 30. 41 Ibid., 32. An idea that mirrors Ortiz’s theory on the five stages of interracial and intercultural; the fifth stage is the final point when racial discrimination no longer exists.
29
The sociologist Edward Franklin Frazier, on the other hand, contested this idea.
Frazier’s study of the African American family concluded that Africanisms (meaning
African cultural continuities) were stripped away from the very beginning of the
transatlantic slave trade, and that the only retention of Africa occurred through the
collective memory of slavery.42 Frazier argued that the process of assimilation was
limited by the extent to which the Afro-American was permitted to integrate into the
economic organization of the New World, and that the result of black participation in this
organization is that of a “civilized” presence within the white dominated world.43 In
other words, the only manner in which the Black American survived social death, or political and cultural extinction in society, was through the assimilation and acculturation
of white European social structures. It was this intellectual difference between a lost
African heritage versus the revival of inheritance that resulted in an ambiguous and
contentious debate, which even today cannot be charted along simple racial lines.
Scholars today, influenced by postmodern ideas surrounding culture and identity,
have sought out ways in which African influences have directly shaped the Caribbean
and its peoples. In a number of cases, these scholars, critics, and artists, such as Okwui
Enwezor and Luis Camnitzer, have identified areas in the arts, religion, language, and
politics where African influence has left its imprint on contemporary culture, one
scholars refer to as Africanisms. An elusive, fluid, and complex phenomenon,
Africanism cannot be reduced to a simple definition. Nevertheless, what is important is
that more recently, scholars have started to move beyond the Herskovits and Frazier
42 E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1939): 15. 43 Ibid., 368.
30
debate about cultural creation versus cultural continuity by looking to the mechanisms of
culture and society by which Africanisms have been produced.44 In postcolonial
discourse, the dichotomy between Africanisms and Europeanisms is no longer accepted
as valid sources of distinction between “blackness” or “whiteness;” rather a scholar of
diaspora is faced with the processes of creolization, hybridity, and syncretism that
necessarily opens new ways of studying mechanisms of identity and cultural exchange.
These mechanisms operate in the manner similar to Bakhtin’s dialogic, a concept
that does not presuppose an equality among participants in the production of culture, but
instead focuses on the processes of exchange.45 Anthropologist Kevin Yelvington asserts
that this process of cultural production involves “multiparty interactions of material,
ideational, and discursive phenomena” that intermingle in a matrix of mutual influence
and conditioning, which is already part of an ongoing dialogic process of cultural
exchange.46 One example Yelvington points to is the work of Lorand Matory, whose
dialogic approach seeks to explain the emergence of Oyo Yoruba-derived religion and
identity in Latin America, specifically in Brazil and Cuba.47 Matory suggests that
identity in Brazil and Cuba is based on the notion that Africa is “historically ‘coeval’ with the cultures of the Americas, rather than representative of some past or base line.”48
44 S.R.G., “An American Dilemma Revisited,” Daedalus 124, no. 1 (Winter 1995): v-xxxiv. 45. Michael Holquist, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981): 426-427. Mikhail Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher whose scholarship on literary theory led to the concept of dialogism. In The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin explains that language does not exist in “monologic” form, but rather language is continually appropriated and re-appropriated in ways that produce constant dialogue between meanings. This concept translates to cultural exchange, as both language and culture are not definite phenomena that have concrete meanings (or forms)—they are interchanging experiences, ideas, practices, etc., that are always in flux. 46 “Anthropology of Afro-Latin America and the Caribbean,” 240. 47 Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005): 62. 48 Yelvington, “Anthropology of Afro-Latin America and the Caribbean,” 241.
31
This means that discussions revolving around African or European influences in the New
World cannot be based on simple equations that attempt to measure to what degree Africa
or Europe affected Latin American identities. Rather Matory and Yelvington’s point is
that the production of culture and identity is formed from dialogue, a process of give and
take that occurs when distinctive cultures meet and interact. This contact and exchange
of different customs, ideologies, and ethnicities is ultimately what forms cultural and
national identities, which is why both scholars refer to this exchange as a form of
dialogue. It is this idea of dialogue and historical coevality that points to the crucial role
for African agency and influence in the contemporary cultural landscape of the Americas.
This dialogic concept demonstrates how the processes of creolization and
syncretism establish a broader discourse on the production of culture. African cultural
continuities are the result of a process of transformation and assimilation, which resist the
concept that African identity, whether in the United States, Latin America, or the
Caribbean, is a fixed or static consequence of conversion. Rather, African cultural
continuities in the Americas function as reciprocal modes of cultural production because
they link New World identities to Africa in ways that go beyond skin color—African
cultural continuities are manifest through music, religion, art, and national identities.
Indirectly, the debate between Herskovits and Frazier is one that I locate in Pérez Bravo and Campos-Pons’s photographs comprising this study, both of which I argue attest
to colonial legacies affecting Cuban cultural identity. The fact that Santería is a
significant part of the subject matter in both photographs connects these works to larger
ideas of how African diaspora has shaped traditions, practices, and overall cultural
production in the Americas, but more specifically in the Cuba. Pérez Bravo and Campos-
32
Pons’s photographs hearken back to Cuba’s colonial history through their use of Santería
mythology. Because this religious tradition was created from the collision of African,
Native American, and European cultures, it is important to analyze the meaning of their
compositions by considering Cuba’s history of slavery and colonization. Santería
mythologies are woven from African and indigenous beliefs that were either banned or
highly discouraged throughout Latin America. Despite this fact, widespread
acknowledgment and celebration of African and indigenous heritage in Latin America
did not truly happen until the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Cuban Political History, Slavery, and Early Religious Practice
In Cuba, during and after the time of slavery, beliefs and practices deriving from
African and indigenous traditions were suppressed and discouraged under the auspices of
nationalism. When universal male suffrage was instilled in the first Cuban Constitution
(1901), discrimination was channeled into more discursive modes through myths of
African inferiority and underdevelopment that affected Black males and their political
involvement. Myths of racial equality also served the interests of emerging powers in the
island colony. For example, the white, Cuban-born farmers who sought their
independence from Spain still wanted to uphold a form of slavery in order to maintain the
colonial order that had long functioned in plantation societies. Others with more
progressive mentalities felt that African slaves should be freed in order to defeat Spain;
but many of them also wanted to rework colonial structures in order to sustain the white
Cuban power and prevent Blacks from uniting and becoming a social or political
33
majority.49 The white supremacists, who paradoxically enjoyed a large mulatto following, believed that Blacks needed to become “civilized” before they could enter the
social realm of equality and absolute freedom, and thus perpetuated Cuba’s racial and
social segregation.50
The 1950s saw a revitalization of Santería in the public sphere with the toppling of the Batista regime, and it is now estimated that over eighty percent of the Cuban
population practices this religion.51 From this supposition it is unreasonable to posit that
African assimilation and reinterpretation of European structures in the era of slavery was
simply a forceful conversion. Africans were forced to migrate, forced into slavery, and
forced to succumb to their white captors—but they also chose to invert this traumatic
experience and turn it into reconciliatory practices in order to survive. Pérez Bravo and
Campos-Pons’s photographs reveal how Cuban identity and Santería beliefs reflect the
agency of Africa and African cultural continuities within the New World. By directly
49 The success of the Haitian Revolution (1781-1804) was one major contributing factor to the Cuban white supremacists’ fear of a Black nationalist movement. Because the Haitian Revolution was actually a massive slave rebellion, other European colonies, particularly in the Caribbean, were extremely paranoid about the threat of other slave uprisings that would threaten and undermine the economic and social stronghold that European countries tried to maintain through sugar, tobacco, and, coffee plantations. 50 As one example, Black nationalist movements or a Black collective consciousness were viewed as a significant threat to white authority and supremacy in the twentieth century. At the end of the nineteenth century, political parties in Cuba, such as the Partido Independiente de Color (PIC), were initiated by Afro- Cubans as a way to revolt against discrimination and prejudice brought on by the revolutionary government. For example, Antonio Maceo, Lt. General for the Cuban Army (1868-1896), appointed more whites to positions of command and tried to limit the number of all-black units within the Liberation Army, furthering racial inequality on both fronts of the independence movement. Despite these strategies to deter Afro-Cuban organizations, the PIC achieved nationwide membership, bringing day laborers, peasants, artisans, and some middle-class individuals together in a program focused on equality, both racially and economically. This party somewhat succeeded because of Cuba’s early adoption of universal male suffrage in the early 1900s, but also because the PIC made demands that were in line with the demands of the followers, such as state employment for Blacks and the end of racial discrimination. However, the PIC was annihilated in 1912, as the Cuban army massacred the leaders and supporters. Cuba’s congress had defied the constitutional right to freedom of thought and association by banning the PIC in the name of equality, maintaining that the all-black party was innately racist toward white people and thus was “unequal.” Aline Helg, “Race and Black Mobilization in Colonial and Early Independent Cuba: A Comparative Perspective.” Ethnohistory 44, no. 1 (Winter 1997). 51 Ibid.
34
referencing Afro-Cuban Orisha worship, both artists demonstrate how the process of
transculturation in which European systems that maintain a dominant hand, are
counterbalanced by those of Africans and their descendants. Such subversive practices
(which can be traced back to the early presence of Santería in Cuba starting around the
1760s) have been an important element used by colonized peoples, and have ultimately
helped to sustain and proliferate cultural and national identity across the Americas.
The struggle for racial equality is of course an enormous part of the twentieth
century narrative, and consequently was at the heart of the Herskovits and Frazier debate.
The dispute reflects two dominant opinions in the early twentieth century: one opinion
assumed that African cultural continuities disappeared after the colonial era, while the
other advocated for a type of Black power that ignored the hybridity and syncretism that
is integral to identity formation throughout the Americas. Pérez Bravo and Campos-
Pons’s photographs engage this arduous debate through their ability to consider a third
position—the creolization that has shaped many of the cultures in the Americas,
especially in the Caribbean. What makes these two artists unique is that they employ a
familiar European trope (the woman as vessel), but invert this notion, using Santería to
demonstrate a third way of understanding creolization through the lens of female identity.
In this way, not only do Pérez Bravo and Campos-Pons reveal the complex and syncretic
nature of Cuban creoleness, but they do so by employing notions of maternity,
femininity, and female power to convey the importance of women in the discussion of African cultural continuities.
These photographs exemplify a shift in postcolonial discourse that started to
emerge in the late twentieth and early twentieth-first century, providing an alternative
35
way of interpreting the legacies of colonialism. When I Am Not Here/Estoy Allá and No
matar ni ver matar animales encourage viewers to acknowledge the blending of diverse
cultures that actually produced New World identities. Pérez Bravo and Campos-Pons
appropriate essentialist ideas of heritage, inverting the Western notion of female body as
a receptacle to engage in a larger discussion of syncretism and adaptation. This process
of appropriation follows in the legacy of Yoruban slaves who used and manipulated
European traditions as a way of maintaining their own cultural and spiritual practices. In
other words, Campos-Pons and Pérez Bravo do not merely use Santería symbols as
subject material in their photographs, but they employ the very process of subversive re-
appropriation crucial to the religion’s early growth—taking European ideals and
repurposing them for their own ends.
Recognizing African Agency through Santería
Cuban history, and in particular the emergence of Santería, demonstrates how the
infiltration of European ideals, African heritages, and modern social and political
influences has ultimately shaped Cuban national identity. In addition, the notion of
African cultural resistance—a key to understanding the reasons why early slaves began
the process of mixing their Yoruban belief structures and Christian theology—points to a
level of African agency within the production of culture that traditionally has been
critically ignored or undervalued.
For many years, in the context of Latin American history, historians and
anthropologists have regularly supported a dichotomy that claims “African-derived
religions [such as orisha worship] represent the occurrence of greater African assertion,
36
while African-influenced Christianity represents the occurrence of lesser [or less
authentic religious forms, i.e., Santería].”52 Many scholars have maintained that
the conversion of African peoples to Christian doctrine is yet further proof of a greater
European “victory” over African culture in the “admittedly two-way acculturation
process.”53 That is to say, rather than acknowledging how African cultures have
influenced European practices and beliefs just as European traditions have affected
African cultures, many scholars fail to recognize the reciprocity of cultural exchange by
giving more credence to European authority. This logic of so-called “conversion”
presupposes knowledge and power on the part of the converter (Europe) and ignorance
and subordination on the part of the converted (Africa), and reveals how little space for
African agency these notions leave in the historical narrative of colonization. In addition,
ideas of European dominance fail to acknowledge the important ways that Africans (and,
much more pointedly, their descendants) reconstituted myths of inferiority as a way to
accumulate a type of power that resisted exclusion and extinction from social and
political life. By not acknowledging the ways in which Afro-Cubans intentionally
manipulated both European ideology and myths of inferiority, scholars have failed to
fully appreciate the power, creativity, and social and cultural savvy of these New World
peoples.
It should again be noted that this power is part of a much larger dialogue regarding
the reciprocity of cultural exchange. Unlike cultural oppression and colonization, the
process of creolization operates through a more subtle appropriation and
52 Rosanne Marion Adderley, “Orisha Worship and ‘Jesus Time’: Rethinking African Religious Conversion
in the Nineteenth Century-Caribbean,” Pennsylvania History, vol. 64 (Summer 1997): 188. 53 Ibid.
37
assimilation of myths, practices, institutions, and politics, which is necessary to sustain a
level of cultural cohesion in any given society. It is also important to understand that the
Europeans arrived in the New World with their own cultural and linguistic inheritances.
Mercedes Cros Sandoval, an anthropologist who specializes in Cuban culture, discusses
the complexity of Santería by comparing it to the amalgamation of Spanish heritage.54
For centuries, Spain was a meeting grounds of diverse cultures where merging occurred through processes of borrowing and adaptation. From the time of the Roman Empire, the
Iberian Peninsula experienced major transitions as the land was divided and influenced
by numerous cultures, including Germanic tribes, Islamic rule, Jewish pilgrims, and
Catholic monarchs. Even before Europe’s discovery of the New World, both Spanish
and Yoruban cultures were mixtures of varying ethnicities, traditions, and beliefs. The
collision of two complex heritages created a new reality of cultural continuities that did
not stem merely from Africa or Europe, but arguably from all parts of the globe. From
this history, it is clear that the processes of cultural appropriation had already started long
before the first African stepped foot in the New World.
In this context, Pérez Bravo’s photograph is analogous to Campos-Pons’s image
of a Yoruban deity, as both artists use Afro-Cuban Orisha worship to express alternative
ways of understanding Cuban identity while simultaneously representing their own
identities as Cuban women. No matar ni ver matar animales and When I Am Not
Here/Estoy Allá reflect the significant influence of Africa and African diaspora in the
Caribbean, and reveal that Africa has shaped cubanidad or “Cubaness” beyond mere
questions pertaining solely to race. Campos-Pons’s photograph attests to the ancestral 54 Worldview, the Orishas, and Santería: Africa to Cuba and Beyond (Gainesville: University Press of
Florida, 2006): 38.
38
linkage of Africa while Pérez Bravo’s image demonstrates the cultural influence of
African traditions, yet both artworks portray the mythology of African descendants in
Cuba, a phenomenon that has ultimately been a critical element in consolidating Cuban
nationality.
Further, both artists use Santería mythology in a way that directly alludes to
motherhood and femininity, but rupture traditional Western notions by referencing a
religious practice that has historically been associated with witchcraft and black magic.55
In this way, these artists demonstrate a type of resistance to and transgression of European colonial mindsets that are still present today by appropriating pejorative and
essentialist notions that are still used to oppress African heritage and practices in the
Americas. No matar ni ver matar animales and When I Am Not Here/Estoy Allá
demonstrate an alternative mode of representing Cuban identity, as these photographs
connect to more dynamic notions of identity that includes femininity, creoleness, and
syncretism. By appropriating Santería mythology and repurposing it in the context of
maternity, both Pérez Bravo and Campos-Pons visually convey how African cultural
continuities have amalgamated with European traditions, creating complex and hybrid
cultures throughout the Caribbean.
55 Ibid., 58. Brown explains that at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, practitioners of Afro-Cuban Orisha worship experienced extreme police brutality as government officials tried to stop what they feared was brujería (witchcraft). Brujería was considered a type of social “delinquency” because it was thought that followers murdered and sacrificed white children for their blood in order to carry out certain rituals. State witch-hunts targeted Afro-Cubans in general, regardless of their beliefs, and turned Black people into “icons of fear.” Brown notes that not coincidentally, Afro-Cubans’ persecution historically paralleled the repression of the Partido Independiente de Color, as politically and socially the suppression of Afro-Cuban Orisha worship as a form of witchcraft justified the state’s discrediting of Black people in the overall fight for independence from Spain. Equating Santería with witchcraft was just one more tactic used by the white Cuban supremacists to disenfranchise Afro-Cubans in the new Republic.
CONCLUSION Cannibal Aesthetics
Oswald de Andrade in one of his best-known texts, the Cannibal Manifesto
(1928), proposed a deliberate rupture to patriarchal structures through the consumption
and re-appropriation of values based on matriarchal principles. Through this symbolic
consumption, Andrade advocated for an alternative way to critique European colonialism
that included ideas of conquest, by turning instead to concepts of motherly protection of
indigenous lands, cultures and traditions. Specifically, his manifesto alludes to a
metaphorical return to the “motherland” through the absorption of European concepts
rooted in patriarchy and dominance.56 In the case of Brazil, Andrade means a satirical
homesickness for Portugal as the colonial mother of the Brazilian landscape, but on a
more sincere note this homesickness is meant for the original native people of Pindorama
(the native name for Brazil in Tupí meaning Land of the Palms).
This metaphorical yearning evokes cultural cannibalism through notions of
maternal protection. For example, Andrade’s text proposes that Brazil’s indigenous
cannibals can consume patriarchal (colonial) systems as a way to expose and subvert
preordained bourgeois rule. Yet, this concept of returning to the motherland is also
relevant to Pérez Bravo and Campos-Pons’s photographs, as both artists rely on concepts
of maternal protection that connect to broader themes of constructing and maintaining
56 Oswald de Andrade, “Cannibal Manifesto,” trans. Leslie Bary, Latin American Literary Review 19, no. 38 (1991): 38.
40
different cultural identities, especially identities derived from oppressed histories. In this
way, the idea of saudade (añoranza in Spanish) suggests the artists’ yearning for their
Cuban motherland through their use of symbols associated with the indigenous people of
both Africa and the Caribbean.
Andrade writes in the manifesto, “I am only concerned with what is not mine.
Law of Man. Law of the cannibal,” using irony to express the devouring nature of
Western society and the patriarchal belief that nature is something to be mastered.57 To
combat these intentions, Andrade appropriates destructive colonial mentalities, cuts them
to pieces and absorbs them to produce a new set of values based on more critical forms of
cultural production. No matar ni ver matar animales and When I Am Not Here/Estoy Allá
reveal a similar form of cultural production. Pérez Bravo and Campos-Pons’s
photographs represent creole identity as a fluid and inventive system of self-knowledge.
These artists consume fragments of mythologies revolving around maternity and create
unconventional models of creoleness that includes notions of modernity, nationality and
femininity.
In addition, the privileging of matriarchal values is also exemplified in Pérez
Bravo and Campos-Pons’s photographs. Their compositions allude to motherhood in
explicit ways, as both display their naked torsos adorned with objects that relate to
motherhood literally and their motherland metaphorically. Pérez Bravo photographs her
naked torso in profile so as to foreground her pregnancy; and Campos-Pons’s artwork
posits her bare breasts as related to maternity by including baby bottles and a vessel
suggestive of a womb. The artists’ reference to Afro-Cuban Orisha worship invokes not
57 Andrade, “Cannibal Manifesto,” 38.
41
only their Cuban motherland, but also more specifically its indigenous, African and Euro-
Christian roots, thus reflecting on the polyphonous nature of Cuban identity.
Much like Andrade who posits cannibalism as a symbolic celebration of
indigenous heritage and critique of European dominance, Pérez Bravo and Campos-
Pons’s images also prioritize the cultural appropriation of Afro-Cuban symbolism as a
critique of patriarchal concepts of motherhood. Their photographs construct Cuban
identity as contingent on syncretism, all the while questioning traditional notions
surrounding maternity and femininity. In contemporary art from Cuba, an important
aspect of representing identity is to acknowledge the vast cultural mixing and spiritual
syncretism that defines creoleness. One method used to convey the polyphonous nature
of Cuban identity involves fragmentation, because this common collage-like strategy
reflects the changing cultural and social perspectives affecting creolization and creole
identity. Pérez Bravo and Campos-Pons self-consciously build their identities from
fragments stemming from diverse cultural sources, especially Yoruban spiritualism and
European colonialism. Using this method of cultural cannibalism, Pérez Bravo and
Campos-Pons stage their nude bodies with mythological attributes in strange and
unpredictable ways that encourage the viewer to question traditional assumptions about
the representation of identity, whether racial or gender. From this act of cultural
cannibalism, Pérez Bravo and Campos-Pons construct a new form of creole aesthetics—
an aesthetic that builds on appropriation and turns it into a constructive method of artistic and cultural production.
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