El Monte's New Itineraries - (Critical Caribbean Studies) by Alberto Sosa-Cabanas (Paperback)

About the Book

El Monte's New Itineraries provides for the first time a book-length opportunity to reflect on the relationships between El Monte (1954), Lydia Cabrera´s magnum opus, and the complexities and potent dynamics of Afro-Caribbean agency. From a multidisciplinary lens, chapters from leading scholars in the academic field aim to elucidate the nuanced ways in which Cabrera's text is perceived today while carefully analyzing the varied voices and significant silences found within its pages.

Book Synopsis

El Monte's New Itineraries is the first book fully devoted to the study of Cuban author and ethnographer Lydia Cabrera's El Monte (1954), one of the most influential books in Caribbean cultural history. Highly referenced, if understudied, El Monte is a comprehensive work that intertwines ethnobotany, popular orality, and Afro-Cuban traditions. Its pages have enjoyed a transnational influence, enriching domains such as ethnography, politics, theater, and even science fiction literature in the Caribbean, and the knowledge contained in it lies at the heart of Afrodiasporic spirituality and ethnomedicinal practices across Hispanic Caribbean cultures and beyond.

Review Quotes

"Guide, manual, labyrinth, intricate thicket of reality and fantasy, a work of high literary modernism, scholarly treatise, or an example of the 'marvelous real'? Lydia Cabrera's El Monte is a magical, poetic, and idiosyncratic rendering of Afro-Cuban religious beliefs and practices. We are fortunate to have a collection of essays that approach this baffling and charming book from different perspectives and disciplines: anthropology, ethnobotany, the visual arts, literature, history, queerness, and ecology. These essays reveal that El Monte is more than a text, it is a journey filled with new beginnings."

"Vibrant, daring, and deeply grounded, this book reimagines Lydia Cabrera's work for our time. Moving across literature, ethnography, and visual culture, the essays uncover how Cabrera's El Monte continues to breathe through the Caribbean's art, spirituality, and politics. This collection proves that Cabrera's forest of symbols is still very much alive and more relevant than ever."

About the Author

ALBERTO SOSA-CABANAS is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Modern Languages at Hampton University. His academic work on the intersections between racism and cultural production has received numerous awards and recognitions, including fellowship support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice (ISGRJ), the Tinker Foundation, and the Cuban Research Institute (FIU). His essays can be found in the journals Revista Iberoamericana, Cuban Studies, and Decimonónica. He is the editor of the volume Reading Cuba, Discurso Literario y Geografía Transcultural (Valencia, Aduana Vieja, 2018).