Concrete Currents: The Poetic and Political Projects of Nicolás Guillén in Cuba and Brazil

My research challenges rigid classifications of concrete art to identify more nuanced negotiations of race, identity, and nation in the visual and literary production of Afro-Cuban and Afro-Brazilian artists. Although these inquiries have been forming since my initial interest in studying Cuba and Brazil, archival visits to these countries in the summer of 2024 revealed formative connections in their mid-twentieth-century junctures. From extensive to intimate gatherings of intellectuals across Cuba, Brazil, and the Transatlantic, Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén is a recurring protagonist in cultural, literary, and political exchanges throughout this time period. Thus, tracing Guillén’s transnational collaborations became the focus of my research this summer in Havana, Cuba at the Instituto de Literatura y Lingüística and the Fundación Nicolás Guillén and in his birthplace, Camagüey, Cuba at the Casa Natal de Nicolas Guillén. In Brazil, I worked with the Fundação Bienal and the library of Pinacoteca in São Paulo, confirmed his interactions in Salvador, Bahia in the photo-libraries of Fundação Pierre Verger, and studied his time in Rio de Janeiro through the archives of Academia Brasileira das Letras. While these findings require more in-depth analysis, they affirm Afro-diasporic networks and underexplored linkages of identity, race, and concretude that reframe the artistic and intellectual movements of Brazil and Cuba in the 20th Century.