"Remembering the "Disremembered

The slave experience in Latin America and in the United States is being rediscovered with unprecedented frequency and artistry in and in criticism today. If we stretch the concept of black literature to include on themes by and nonblack writers alike, then the theme of slavery truly has become a constant, especially but not exclusively in Cuba, Brazil and the United States, the three countries where the institution had its longest run. Slavery is an enduring theme, and it is appropriate that writings and discussions of the topic in these countries are peaking at this time, since they coincide for the most part with the centenaries of the abolition of slavery in the United States in 1963, in Cuba in 1986, and in Brazil in 1988. It is appropriate that we talk about slavery also in the context of the upcoming commemoration in 1992 of the 500th anniversary of Columbus's first voyage to America, the fifth centenary of what has been called the meeting of two worlds. We should talk about it because slavery was a reality for most of those 500 years since Columbus, almost 400 years of it in some areas. Few topics during the life of this continent since the first arrival of Columbus have generated more interest among historians, creative writers and literary critics than blacks in bondage. Slavery informs, for example, some of the most popular and best-known novels in South America written in this century. Matalache (1926) by the Peruvian Enrique Lopez Albijar immediately comes to mind, as do the Venezuelan novels Las lanzas coloradas (1931), Pobre negro (1937), and Cumboto (1950) by Arturo Uslar Pietri, Romulo Gallegos, and Ramon Diaz Sanchez, respectively, as do other titles I will mention later. Frank Tannenbaum's famous little book Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas fueled interest in the comparative approach to slavery when it was published in 1946, the same year as the appearance in English translation of Gilberto Freyre's classic The

Art · Latin Americans · Political science · Cuban History and Society · History · Latin American Literature Studies · Law

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