Elsa Goveia Book Prize Recipient announced for 2010-2011

The Elsa Goveia Prize, previously awarded every three years, has been awarded every two years since 1995, and recognizes excellence in the field of Caribbean history.  There were 25 submissions for 2009-2010 prize, and it was a difficult decision to make due to the quality of the pool.  The criteria taken into consideration were: contribution to the field, (which includes a criterion of originality--of scholarly vision; quality and caliber of the research, and quality of the writing. The Elsa Goveia Book Prize Committee is proud to announce the recipient for 2009-2010 is: Frank Guridy’s Forging Diaspora: Afro Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

In Forging Diaspora, Frank Guridy “documents the institutional relationships and cultural interactions between Afro-Cubans and African Americans from the U.S. intervention of 1898 until the eve of the outbreak of the Cuban Revolution.” He contends that “…Afro-descended peoples in Cuba and the United States came to identify themselves as being part of a transcultural African diaspora, an identification that did not contradict black aspirations for national citizenship.” This study examines four examples: Booker T. Washington and his endeavor to enlist Afro-Cubans in the Tuskegee Institute; the important part that Garveyism played in Cuba; the intersection between the Harlem Renaissance and Afrocubanismo; and the development of Afrocentric tourism in Cuba and the U.S. before the Cuban Revolution. These issues speak to the complexity of these connections and to the building of Afro-diasporic relationships.  Guridy is able to underline the important linkages of these institutional and cultural connections and has uncovered contacts not widely known by other historian.

This book is the work of a well-rounded scholar with an in-depth knowledge of African American history, U.S. imperialism, the complex reality of Cuban race relations in the period of the republic, and he possesses an understanding of the meaningful cultural context of negritude.  He provides significant evidence for and sound interpretation of how African-Americans and Afro-Cubans were able to develop throughout their contact an awareness of national difference and trans-national similarities and linkages: namely, their shared experiences as Afro-descended, oppressed, racialized subjects.

His book reflects professor Guridy’s intensive and expansive research work as a social historian, an intellectual, and a thinker, and his extensive footnotes and references are an example of intellectual integrity and generosity. All of these express his signature quality of paying specific attention to historiographical detail and sophisticated theoretical engagement.  His capacity to write to an interdisciplinary audience—one of the tasks of those working in the field of  Cultural Studies, Cuban history, African American studies, Caribbean History, and  U.S.  History—is another of the distinguishing aspects of Professor Guridy’s scholarship. While he takes on difficult concepts, his writing style encourages readers to think well. The quality of his work is sound. His discussions reveal his sensitivity to the academic nuances and audiences he is reaching as he deploys the sharp theoretical underpinnings which guide his work. He is clearly innovative and creative. He does not let theory master him—rather he allows it to inform his analyses and is therefore able to do his subject matter the kind of justice it deserves.