When Cuban Political Deportees Turned African Ethnographers

This presentation will address an array of links — trajectories, journeys and passages — between the islands of Cuba and Fernando Poo (between the West-central African Atlantic and the Caribbean), during the second half of the nineteenth century. These islands are neither points of ending nor points of origin; they circumscribe the Atlantic, an ocean which touches upon multiple insular and coastal experiences, narratives, histories and, in this case, ethnographies. By the 1850s, a number of West African localities had already begun to transcend their original function as a point of departure for the slave trade, becoming instead a site of exchange in the reverse direction. The island of Fernando Poo was integrated into the Spanish empire at the end of the eighteenth century. It began to serve in the second half of the nineteenth century as a destination for eastward movement, first for the emancipados and soon after (as a prison colony) for Cuban political deportees allegedly taking part in pro-independence insurrection movements. This presentation will focus on processes of deportation, which affected thousands of Cubans of all social classes between the 1860s and the Spanish American War. Some deportees left detailed accounts of their experience In their African exile, turning into impromptu ethnographers of the African continent; in those accounts, Fernando Poo is always described in necrological tones, with a litany of metaphors of morbidity and mortality. Negatively compared with Havana, Fernando Poo evoked ideas of a return to the primitive and backwardness. Their colonial gaze on the local inhabitants Is at least as intense as that of the Spanish colonial agents themselves.https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/cri_events/1389/thumbnail.jp

Lawo-Sukam, Alain. La poesía guineoecuatoriana en español en su contexto colonial y (trans) nacional. Santiago de Chile: Cuarto Propio, 2019. 246 pp.

Lawo-Sukam, Alain. La poesía guineoecuatoriana en español en su contexto colonial y (trans) nacional. Santiago de Chile: Cuarto Propio, 2019. 246 pp

La economía política de la sanidad colonial en Guinea Ecuatorial

Medical interventions played a pivotal role in the European colonizationof Africa. Morbidity and disease were a constant preoccupation for colonial medical officers, the military, scientists, politicians, settlers, and members of the religious orders alike. The role of medicine and science in the architecture of the colonial administration is, therefore, inextricably intertwined with the legitimization of occupation, and the projects of the ‘civilizing mission’. The development of a biomedical discourse as part of the Spanish colonial enterprise in Equatorial Guinea contributed, from a very early stage, to the construction of what we understand by “Africa”, and of the African body asa site of disease, requiring social repair, and as a subject of knowledge and observation in a repressive colonial state. Biomedical technologies served as powerful instruments of consolidation of colonial structures, particularly during the first half of the twentieth century. The present essay addresses the following questions: How was this biomedical knowledge produced and implemented, and what specificities characterized it? How was it brought into circulation both in colonial Guinea and in metropolitan Spain?To what extent these biomedical technologies contributed to the solidification of the architecture of colonial power? Finally, often in postcolonial regimes health and fear are conflated under one same category, and act as stratagems of socio-political repression. The systemic pathology of dictatorships incorporates, as part of its etiology, clinical manifestations that include the obstruction of democratic values, and the fostering of socio-economic inequalities. The re-appropriation of concrete aspects of the colonialbiomedical apparatus is therefore useful to problematize questions of duration, reproduction and repetition under the current regimes.Las intervenciones médicas desempeñaron un papel importante enla colonización de África. La morbilidad y la enfermedad fueron una preocupación constante de los médicos, militares, científicos, políticos, colonos y miembros de las órdenes religiosas. El papel de la medicina y la ciencia en la arquitectura de la administración colonial está ligado, por lo tanto, de manera inextricable, a la legitimización de la ocupación y a los proyectos de ‘misión civilizadora’. El desarrollo de un discurso biomédico como parte del proceso colonizador de España en los Territorios españoles del Golfo de Guinea contribuyó desde el primer momento a la construcción de lo que entendemos por “África”, y del cuerpo africano como locus de la enfermedad, necesitado de reparación social y sujeto de conocimiento y observación por parte delestado colonial represor. Las tecnologías biomédicas sirvieron como instrumentos de consolidación de las estructuras coloniales, en particular durante la primera mitad del siglo XX. El presente ensayo responde a las siguientes preguntas: ¿cómo se gestó y se aplicó, y qué especificidades caracterizó, el conocimiento biomédico español? ¿Cómo se puso en circulación en la Guinea colonial y en la España metropolitana? ¿Hasta qué punto contribuyó a solidificar la arquitectura del poder colonial? En los regímenes dictatoriales postcoloniales, la salud y el miedo se fusionan con frecuencia bajo una mismacategoría, para actuar como estratagemas de represión socio-política. La patología sistémica de las dictaduras incorpora, como parte de su etiología, manifestaciones clínicas que incluyen la obstrucción de valores democráticos y el fomento de las desigualdades socio-económicas. La reapropiación de determinados aspectos del aparato biomédico colonial es, por consiguiente, instrumental para problematizar cuestiones de duración, de reproducción y de repetición en los regímenes actuales