Re-presenting the body: Eusebia Cosme’s performative revisions of modernist aesthetics in Negrista poetry

This article examines the career and critical reception of the Afro Cuban declamadora (poetry reciter) Eusebia Cosme during the 1930s–1940s, focusing on her stage performances of poesía negrista (negrista poetry), also known as poesía afroantillana (Afro Antillean poetry). This literary tradition from the hispanophone Caribbean took up Blackness as its main theme and often portrayed the Black female body as an aesthetic symbol of the Caribbean. Through close readings of reviews and ephemera from Cosme’s live shows, this article demonstrates that contemporaries interpreted her performances through modernist aesthetics that fetishized Black women’s bodies. The article argues that Cosme’s performances, however, disrupted the racial and cultural paradigms that framed her reception, not by rejecting the body as central to her art but by highlighting it as a source of meaning and authority. Consequently, Cosme’s stage career also asserts the intellectual value of performance amid a textual literary landscape.