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Viruses, Specters, and the Making of Afrocubanidad
Viruses and specters are liminal entities, somewhere between life and nonlife. As such, they have been targets of border-making practices that aim at regulating their elusive agency. This talk calls attention to the role of viruses and specters in the unfolding of racial governance in Cuba. In its first part, I will focus on historian José Antonio Saco’s polemic that advocated the abolition of slavery based on securitarian claims, emphasizing the hygienic and biopolitical necessity to control disease by incorporating enslaved peoples into civil society. Secondly, I will read how Fernando Oritz’s afrocubanista essay Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar resorts to the critique of commodity fetishism in order to address the specter of slavery in 20th century Cuba as a threat to national sovereignty and antiracist agendas.
JUAN ESTEBAN PLAZA received his PhD in Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford University and is currently the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan University. His work stands at the intersection of Latin American Studies, Caribbean Studies, Black Studies, and Queer Studies. His book project, The Accursed Shore: Racial Capitalism and the Cuban Gothic, examines monstrosity, horror and haunting in Cuban literature as heuristic keys to understanding the cultural legacy of slavery and the formation of Afrocubanness. His scholarly writings have been published in journals and university presses from the U.S., Mexico, Colombia, Chile, and Puerto Rico. Additionally, he is a translator focused on transnational film theory.
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