The history of Latin America and the Caribbean was irreversibly altered by the arrival of the conquistadors, destruction of native civilizations and implementation of colonialism for hundreds of years. However, Spain also introduced the high culture of the baroque to Latin America and the Caribbean, which mixed with the cultures of native and African peoples, creating new, distinct forms of literary expression. Subsequent post-colonial cultural movements attempted to explore and reaffirm the variety of cultures that shaped both regions, including the movement of Afrocubanismo in Cuba, which occurred from 1910-1940. Afrocubanismo was a movement intended to incorporate African folklore and music into traditional modes of art. While many authors and artists were instrumental to Afrocubanismo, Nicolás Guillén is considered to be the most influential author of the movement, due to his new and inventive style of poetry that incorporated both Spanish and African influences. This study will demonstrate how Guillén’s use of traditional poetic forms, the son and portrayal of everyday Afro-Cuban life reveal his vision for a post-colonial, transcultured Cuban society, rather than a Cuba subject to colonialism and acculturation.

As Paul Gilroy has argued, the Black Atlantic is a cultural and literary network that has emerged in the aftermath of the Atlantic slave trade. The concerns of the Black Atlantic are made visible in the poetry of African American Langston Hughes and Cuban Nicolás Guillén. Gilroy’s theorization of the Black Atlantic draws on W.E.B. Du Bois’s idea of ‘double consciousness’ which describes the “doubleness” that blacks can experience when belonging to two groups at the same time which have been constructed as oppositional and exclusive in a society. One of Du Bois’s main concerns is to highlight the troublesome situation of the African Americans in the time after the emancipation, and to advocate for the inclusion of black people’s culture and identity into the U.S. national identity. Gilroy develops the idea of double consciousness to question national identities, notions of ethnicity, and the assumption that cultures always flow into congruent patterns with national borders; he further suggests that the Atlantic should be taken as a single, complex formation of black cultural expression. The analysis in this essay of the poems by Hughes and Guillén show that even though the poetry of these writers emerges in different contexts their poetry share essential similarities in their expressions of the Black Atlantic: the expression of a collective subject’s experience of slavery and displacement, the experience of double consciousness, and the aspiration for a whole identity, which can either, or simultaneously, be a desire of belonging to a national identity or to a cosmopolitan identity. Furthermore the analysis displays that the poems express a belonging to a certain kind of ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’ in which the subject’s experience of not belonging and the unification in the dispersion is fundamental; this rootless world identity is in itself a manifestation of the Black Atlantic culture which Gilroy describes.

Esta tesis explora las configuraciones animales en tres obras literarias publicadas en el contexto del desarrollismo latinoamericano entre fines de los 50 y comienzos de los 70 en las cuales el animal se presenta como protagonista, a saber, las prosas breves en "Bestiario" (1972) de Juan José Arreola, el cuento "Alta cocina" (1959) de Amparo Dávila y el poemario El gran zoo (1967) de Nicolás Guillén. Estudios previos han analizado la presencia del animal en la literatura latinoamericana del período identificado tanto desde la perspectiva biopolítica (Giorgi, 2014) como desde una perspectiva preponderantemente filosófica centrada en la relación humano-animal (Yelin, 2010). Sin embargo, en la presente perspectiva crítica de las zoografías que se analizan en esta tesis se apunta a que estas obras no solo resaltan aspectos salientes de la configuración de lo animal en la literatura de esa época, sino que también permiten arrojar miradas críticas con respecto a las narrativas de progreso y desarrollo dominantes en los años 50 y 60. Combinando las teorizaciones que abordan lo animal y la animalidad desde las propuestas filosóficas sobre lo animal (Deleuze y Guattari, 2002; Derrida, 2008; Berger, 2009), la biopolítica (Giorgi, 2014; Yelin, 2017) y las propuestas centradas en la idea de extinción animal (Wolfe, 2003; Heise, 2003, 2009, 2016), a través del método de la literatura comparada, en esta tesis se explora cómo se presenta y emerge lo animal y la animalidad en las obras mencionadas, cómo se relacionan las configuraciones animales con cuestiones socioambientales y cómo responden a la narrativa y las dinámicas del desarrollismo. A base de los resultados encontrados en el análisis se concluye que, a través del uso de un bestiario popular en las prosas breves de Arreola, la articulación de una extrañeza en torno al animal comestible en el cuento de Dávila y de la escenificación de un zoológico sarcástico en el poemario de Guillén, colectivamente, las configuraciones animales en las obras del corpus erigen miradas críticas hacia la industrialización, la comodificación y la desaparición del animal así como hacia la explotación del medioambiente, todas estas problemáticas socioambientales que remiten a las narrativas de progreso del desarrollismo latinoamericano.