Paulina L. Alberto - Black Legend: The Many Lives of Raúl Grigera and the Power of Racial Storytelling in Argentina

Black Legend

Celebrities live their lives in constant dialogue with stories about them. But when these stories are shaped by durable racist myths, they wield undue power to ruin lives and obliterate communities. Black Legend is the haunting story of an Afro-Argentine, Ral Grigera ( el negro Ral ), who in the early 1900s audaciously fashioned himself into an alluring Black icon of Buenos Aires bohemian nightlife, only to have defamatory storytellers unmake him. In this gripping history, Paulina Alberto exposes the destructive power of racial storytelling and narrates a new history of Black Argentina and Argentine Blackness across two centuries. With the extraordinary Ral Grigera at its center, Black Legend opens new windows into lived experiences of Blackness in a White nation and illuminates how Ral s experience of celebrity was not far removed from more ordinary experiences of racial stories in the flesh.

Paulina L. Alberto, an Argentine-born historian of Afro-Latin America, is Professor of History, Spanish, and Portuguese at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Terms of Inclusion: Black Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century Brazil and co-editor of Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina . She won the Roberto Reis Prize for Best Book in Brazilian Studies, the Warren Dean Prize for Best Book in Brazilian History, and the James Alexander Robertson Prize for best article in the Hispanic American Historical Review .

Black Legend

The Many Lives of Ral Grigera and the Power of Racial Storytelling in Argentina

Paulina L. Alberto

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom

One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA

477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia

314 321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi 110025, India

103 Penang Road, #05 06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org

Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108845557

DOI: 10.1017/9781108980111

Paulina L. Alberto 2022

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2022

Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Limited, Padstow Cornwall

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Alberto, Paulina L., author.

Title: Black legend : the many lives of Rau l Grigera and the power of racial storytelling in Argentina / Paulina L. Alberto.

Other Titles: Many lives of Rau l Grigera and the power of racial storytelling in Argentina

Description: New York : Cambridge University Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021023803 (print) | LCCN 2021023804 (ebook) | ISBN 9781108845557 (hardback) | ISBN 9781108970006 (paperback) | ISBN 9781108980111 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Grigera, Rau l, -1955. | Blacks Argentina Biography. | Blacks Argentina Ethnic identity. | Blacks Argentina Social conditions. | Africans Argentina