Enabling Anger: Affective Strategies in Contemporary Afro-Latino Writers

“No te enojes.” “Don’t get angry.” Those who enter a state of anger are often regarded as unstable, unhealthy, and, when the subject experiencing anger is a woman of African descent, also irrational. In my dissertation, I examine how anger is manifested in the cultural production of contemporary female Afro-descendant writers from Cuba, Colombia, and Brazil. Similar to the trope of the “Angry Black Woman” in the United States, the anger experienced by women of African descent in Latin America has been historically devalued and pathologized, a dismissal that can be analyzed from two perspectives: the processes of gendering and the racialization of emotions. Regarding gender, Afro-descendant women are stereotypically conceived as unable to control their emotions, ruled by instinct; regarding race, as nonwhites, they are culturally constructed as incapable of creative affective power and emotion. I contend that this double denial, which dismisses and undervalues the anger of black women, derives from the fact that it represents a deep threat to the hegemonic power of the dominant groups in the region. In my dissertation I examine a set of late 20th and early 21st century women writers from Cuba, Colombia, and Brazil whose work addresses this double denial by means of what I call enabling anger, a particular type of anger which stems from the long history of repression and inequalities that affect a large sector of the African diasporic community, and which carries a communal and political potential that ultimately seeks to vindicate the humanity and subjectivity of the Afro-descendant woman.