Between 2002-2004 I did my Master’s degree with Dr. José Buscaglia and Dr. Ileana Sanz in Estudios Culturales de América Latina y el Caribe at Universidad de la Habana (Cuba) and the State Univ. of New York-Buffalo.
It was the first dual-enrolled, fully reciprocal graduate studies program between a U.S. and Cuban institution and it focused on comparative approaches that could unlock aspects of the shared aesthetic and cultural traditions across the Americas. A fully-bilingual program, Cuban nationals and professors even went to Buffalo to study and Artes y Letras at La Universidad de la Habana received those of us based out of the U.S. with open arms for 2-3 semesters of study.
My work followed the literary and visual arts of the African diaspora, particularly Cuba and Brazil, into the thriving Yoruba religious systems of Regla de Ocha, Candomblé, and Voudún. It was essentially an alternative cultural anthropology through the literary imagination across languages.
Dr. Ileana Sanz’s work on oral traditions and the presence of orality in written Caribbean texts in multiple languages (her work follows Kamau Brathwaite’s “Nation Languages,” and includes texts of all types in English, Krèyol, French, Spanish, Papiamentu, Portuguese), her dedication to studying the Caribbean and African diaspora comparatively and not bound to the European metropoles was at the core of many of our projects.
Continue reading “Afro-Cuban Oral Traditions & Comparative Literary Mapping: Lecture Series by Dr. Ileana Sanz” →
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