Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg

by Vanessa K. Valdés

A Black Puerto Rican–born scholar, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (1874–1938) was a well-known collector and archivist whose personal library was the basis of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. He was an autodidact who matched wits with university-educated men and women, as well as a prominent Freemason, a writer, and an institution-builder.

While he spent much of his life in New York City, Schomburg was intimately involved in the cause of Cuban and Puerto Rican independence. In the aftermath of the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898, he would go on to cofound the Negro Society for Historical Research and lead the American Negro Academy, all the while collecting and assembling books, prints, pamphlets, articles, and other ephemera produced by Black men and women from across the Americas and Europe. His curated library collection at the New York Public Library emphasized the presence of African peoples and their descendants throughout the Americas and would serve as an indispensable resource for the luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance, including Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. By offering a sustained look at the life of one of the most important figures of early twentieth-century New York City, this first book-length examination of Schomburg's life as an Afro-Latino suggests new ways of understanding the intersections of both Blackness and latinidad .

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Biography, Race

204 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2017

Reviews

[Alba · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everything I wanted to learn about Arturo Alfonso Schomburg and more. Despite its size, this slender volume is backed with a substantial bibliography and footnotes.

Not a biography in the usual sense - childhood, youth, etc. - Diasporic Blackness focuses on those areas that were important to and about Schomburg. As such, the book is organized to emphasize the roles that Schomburg assumed to achieve his goals. The author did justice to this Black Puerto Rican autodidactic scholar who collected everything he could find - written, created, drawn, etc. - by and about Black men and women wherever he could find them. He did this decades before universities (besides Fisk) instituted African-American studies with a clear purpose to make the collection accessible to the community. I learned so much.

This was a truly inspirational book.

[Frank Vasquez · Rating 4 out of 5]

there’s a lot to learn in here, to invest in intellectually and artistically and socially. often challenged by my own lack of knowledge of Puerto Rican/Cuban/African diaspora as well as personal history of it with regards to my own heritage and discourse, this slim book packed a lot of information and excellently sourced material. if a history, let alone a biography, is measured by how much it makes the reader want to go learn more, this book is a marvelous success. (of course, there’s the ones that make the reader wish they had learned anything beyond the immediate gaze of subjective and prejudice, but we can then argue the place of photography and poetry in the conversation of archive and memory, and wish we had more years and more primary sources than we’ve got left.)

[Mills College Library]

Biog S369v 2017