Trent Masiki spent this past summer diving headfirst into studying the influence of African American culture in writings from Afro-Latino and Afro-Latina authors spanning the last century. With support from the National Endowment for the Humanities summer stipend program, Masiki has been able to spend time researching memoirs produced by first-and second-generation Afro-Latino immigrants, whose memories and recollections often go unseen in the classic canon of African American literature. Black identity in the United States, Masiki's work suggests, is more transcultural, transnational, and Latino than typically remembered historically.
"Scholars in African American literary studies tend not to read into the Latino literary canons, so they miss these relationships," says Masiki, an affiliate faculty member at Boston University's Center for Antiracist Research and a fellow at Amherst College. He recently completed a three-year postdoctoral fellowship in BU's Kilachand Honors College.
His upcoming book, Afroethnic Renewal, is the culmination of a research project that Masiki has had in the works since 2011. Once complete, he hopes his book will bring the two fields of African American and Latino literature together, breaking down the silos that have kept the two separate in academic settings. Even though these artists are siloed by today's standards, the Afro Latino writers he is focusing on were influenced by African American writers, thinkers, and artists-and vice versa.
"A lot of the writers I'm studying had very close personal relations with civil rights leaders and Black activists," Masiki says. He views the memoirs as vehicles for understanding and unraveling the transcultural collaboration that was a huge part of the Black Arts Movement, which formed in the 1960s in response to the tumultuous political landscape, racial inequality, and the assassinations of Black leaders like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. (GRS'55, Hon.'59).
"Cultural identity as it is today is a powerful force and the Black Arts Movement comes out of building community and solidarity," Masiki says. "The artists and writers of that time were influenced by the Black aesthetic; the Black Arts Movement was an act of cultural agency and self-determination. There is something unique and special about Black expressive culture that should be celebrated as part of the American experience."
Cultural identity as it is today is a powerful force and the Black Arts Movement comes out of building community and solidarity
For example, Masiki says just look to Piri Thomas, a writer born in 1928 to Puerto Rican and Cuban parents. During his life in Harlem, Thomas was a member of Harlem Writers Guild, and his memoir, Down These Mean Streets, focused heavily on his exploration and expression of his racial identity.
"You see him struggling with Black identity in his writing," Masiki says.
In addition to Thomas' works, Masiki's book will look at the memoirs of five other influential authors who came of age before, during, and after the Civil Rights Movement.
Carlos Moore emigrated from Cuba to New York in the late 1950s and befriended late author Maya Angelou, as well as many other African American intellectuals of the mid-20th century. Moore wrote about the challenges of navigating racial discrimination and segregation in the United States in his book, Pichón: Race and Revolution in Castro's Cuba: A Memoir. Another memoirist-and the oldest of the writers Masiki focuses on-is Evelio Grillo, whose book, Black Cuban, Black American: A Memoir, published in 2000, recounts his experiences growing up among African Americans in Tampa and D.C. during the 1930s and being drafted into a segregated unit of the US Army during World War II.
Marta Moreno Vega, an Afro-Latina activist and writer who founded the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute in the 1970s, is also featured in Masiki's book, as is Veronica Chambers, a writer and editor born in Panama who writes about growing up in Brooklyn in her 1997 memoir, Mama's Girl. For a more contemporary perspective, Masiki examines the writing and experiences of Raquel Cepeda, a New York-based journalist and filmmaker who published her autobiography, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina, in 2013.
All of the works by these writers are essential reads for students of American literature, Masiki says.
His postdoctoral fellowship and the vast BU library collections, Masiki says, provided him the time and resources needed to solely focus on researching these six writers.
"I'm grateful for Assistant Provost Sarah Chobot Hokanson, who was instrumental in providing grant writing workshops for postdocs. She put me in touch with Sanjay Krishnan and Joseph Rezek, two English department professors who gave me substantive feedback," Masiki says. "Both were invaluable," as were the opportunities provided by Carrie Preston, director of Kilachand Honors College, and Louis Chude-Sokei, director of the African American Studies Program. He expects to finish his book by 2023, and will continue to teach Afro-Latino and African American literature and culture for the foreseeable future.
