Black Legend: The Many Lives of Raśl Grigera and the Power of Racial Storytelling in Argentina (Afro-Latin America) - Hardcover

Alberto, Paulina L.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 110884555X ISBN 13: 9781108845557

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2022

Synopsis

Celebrities live their lives in constant dialogue with stories about them. But when these stories are shaped by durable racist myths, they wield undue power to ruin lives and obliterate communities. Black Legend is the haunting story of an Afro-Argentine, Raśl Grigera ('el negro Raśl'), who in the early 1900s audaciously fashioned himself into an alluring Black icon of Buenos Aires' bohemian nightlife, only to have defamatory storytellers unmake him. In this gripping history, Paulina Alberto exposes the destructive power of racial storytelling and narrates a new history of Black Argentina and Argentine Blackness across two centuries. With the extraordinary Raśl Grigera at its center, Black Legend opens new windows into lived experiences of Blackness in a 'white' nation, and illuminates how Raśl's experience of celebrity was not far removed from more ordinary experiences of racial stories in the flesh.

About this title

About the Author

Paulina L. Alberto is an Argentine-born historian of Afro-Latin America, currently Professor of History, Spanish, and Portuguese at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Terms of Inclusion: Black Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century Brazil and co-editor of Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina. She won the Roberto Reis Prize for Best Book in Brazilian Studies, the Warren Dean Prize for Best Book in Brazilian History, and the James Alexander Robertson Prize for best article in the Hispanic American Historical Review.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 110884555X
• ISBN 13: 9781108845557
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 410