Frank Andre Guridy

In Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow, Frank Guridy portrays a world with malleable borders, much like Edward Bartlett Rugemer, in The Problem of Emancipation. His extensive examples of Garveyism and Langston Hughes’ writing demonstrate that ideas, as well as people, could and did easily traverse borders between the U.S., Cuba, and the Caribbean.
Relating Guridy's work to Rebecca Scott, the two authors speak to a larger historiography. As Guirdy was Scott’s student, there are certain shared research interests that cannot go unmentioned, but Guirdy approaches the topic of a shared U.S./Cuba Gulf World from a different perspective. Scott worked mainly in the nineteenth century (with minor exceptions toward the end of her books) while Guirdy works primarily in the twentieth century.
Empire undercut diaspora by creating boundaries that privileged black Americans and cast African-descended peoples in the Gulf and Caribbean as “others” meant to be experienced rather than treated as equals. Guirdy writes, “Unlike white tourists who went to Cuba to experience a culture that they perceived to be fundamentally different than their own, African Americans traveled to the island to see their ‘own people’ even as their understanding of Afro-Cubans was sometimes shaped by touristic gazes.”
I found Guridy’s discussion of gender in diaspora interesting. While various groups and individuals were reaching across national borders to establish enriching connections, the roles of men and women were closely circumscribed. Guridy writes, “Diasporization was predicated on an economy of desire that was based on the objectification of women.” Langston Hughes’s memoir, in particular, demonstrates a world in which “Afro-diasporic bonding was predicated on the transaction of women as objects of male desire.” Guridy does find one key role in which women could reach across boundaries: education. He writes that Afro-Cuban feminists “had always placed a premium on education, which they viewed as the key to the ‘progress’ and ‘improvement’ of a population recently removed from slavery. They project of education was highly gendered and largely placed upon the shoulders of women” whose communities celebrated them. The limitations and the ways women worked within them, particularly struck me.… (plus d'informations)