Acceso usuarios
Ana Zapata-Calle
Tropicalization has been used in America to show how a dominant culture, whether American or European, creates manipulated and stereotyped images of its subaltern groups in relation to their ideology in terms of race, ethnicity, class or sexuality. One of these groups is the Afro-Hispanic people. In this sense, it is very common in popular culture to hear ideas such as that the mulatto woman is very sensual and provocative. It is also common to hear lewd comments about the bodies of mulatto or black people in a derisive way, while people laugh without questioning the violence behind such images and stereotypes. But how does a black or mulatto woman react when she hears these comments? In this essay different poetic strategies assumed by the Afro-Cuban writer Excilia Saldaña in her two autobiographical poems "Monologue of the wife" 1 (1985) and "My name (family antielegy)" (1991) are exposed to face the stereotypes that have been created about Cuban black women, especially around their sexuality. These stereotypes have been assumed not only by people of European origin, but also by Afro-Cubans themselves, many of whom have absorbed a racist and sexist ideology that they apply with normality to women of their own race, disregarding, in doing so, their compañeras, their mothers and daughters and themselves. Therefore, in the first part of this essay an introduction to the phenomenon of endorsement and sexism in Cuban society will be made, to then expose the resources that Excilia Saldada uses to counteract them: the parody of Catholic morality and its iconography , the questioning of black aesthetics in literature, the tropicalization of Western canonical literature and the autotropicalization of black women.
