Paper short abstract:

This paper explores Eusebia Cosme's life and career as a reciter of Afro-Antillean style poetry and arts activism in Black feminist performance in New York City.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will explore the sonic life of Eusebia Cosme’s career as a performer being born and raised in Santiago de Cuba and then living in New York City during the 1940s. Cosme’s career reciting Afro Antillean poetry led her to create various multidisciplinary performances that emphasized spirituality and spiritual kinship in African diasporic communities. Thus this proposal grapples with both concepts of diaspora and performance as sonic memory practice by immigrants from the Antilles to Florida and New York City. I will argue that sonic memory is a crucial component to the ways that Black Cubans conceived the mutual aid networks that they built, which actively maintained personal and political connections with various regions of Cuba, Florida and New York City in the early 20th century. Undoubtedly the connection between memory and performance has continuously developed through sonic landscapes that Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Central American immigrants have reconstructed in the South Bronx; these musical and theatrical bodies of work are also predecessors to musical genres such as hip hop and salsa which have become mainstream multi-billion dollar industries today. In her extraordinary stage career, Cosme's affective and professional collaborations with women like the worldwide renown singer Celia Cruz and anthropologist Katherine Dunham, reveal a history of arts activism that has also been understudied in existing historiography. Therefore recognizing Cosme as part of a continuum of Black feminist artists and intellectuals in New York City sheds light on the archival tensions around documenting Black women’s performance work.