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The Cuban revolution of 1959 initiated a significant exodus, with more than 700,000 Cubans eventually settling in the United States. This community creates a major part of what is now known as the Cuban diaspora. In Cuban-American Literature of Exile, Isabel Alvarez Borland forces the dialogue between literature and history into the open by focusing on narratives that tell the story of the 1959 exodus and its aftermath. Alvarez Borland pulls together a diverse array of Cuban-American voices writing in both English and Spanish--often from contrasting perspectives and approaches--over several generations and waves of immigration. Writers discussed include Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Reinaldo Ar...
This groundbreaking collection offers an understanding of why Cuban-American literature and visual art have emerged in the United States and how they are so essentially linked to both Cuban and American cultures. The contributors explore crucial issues pertinent not only to Cuban-American cultural production but also to other immigrant groups—hybrid identities, biculturation, bilingualism, immigration, adaptation, and exile. The complex ways in which Cuban Americans have been able to keep a living memory of Cuba while developing and thriving in America are both intriguing and instructive. These essays, written from a variety of perspectives, range from useful overviews of fictional and visual works of art to close readings of individual texts.
A necessary reconceptualization of Latinx identity, literature, and politics In Latinx Revolutionary Horizons, Renee Hudson theorizes a liberatory latinidad that is not yet here and conceptualizes a hemispheric project in which contemporary Latinx authors return to earlier moments of revolution. Rather than viewing Latinx as solely a category of identification, she argues for an expansive, historicized sense of the term that illuminates its political potential. Claiming the “x” in Latinx as marking the suspension and tension between how Latin American descended people identify and the future politics the “x” points us toward, Hudson contends that latinidad can signal a politics groun...
Employing a comparative and cross-ethnic approach, this book provides a sophisticated literary and cultural analysis of texts by Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Cuban American, and Dominican American women writers. As she engages contemporary feminist, political, postcolonial, and psychoanalytic theory, Fatima Mujčinović investigates how selected U.S. Latina narratives have proposed a rethinking of minority subject positioning under the postmodern conditions of cultural hybridization, gender objectification, political oppression, and geographic displacement. In its emphasis on gendered, diasporic, exilic, and geopolitical identities, this book specifically examines works by Ana Castillo, Cristina García, Graciela Limón, Demetria Martínez, Rosario Morales, Aurora Levins Morales, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Helena María Viramontes, and Julia Alvarez.
Cuban and Cuban-American scholars, writers, and artists celebrate the possibility of overcoming divisions of politics and hate
In this one-of-a-kind volume, Iraida López explores various narratives of return by those who left Cuba as children or adolescents. Including memoirs, semi-autobiographical fiction, and visual arts, many of these accounts feature a physical arrival on the island while others depict a metaphorical or vicarious experience by means of fictional characters or childhood reminiscences. As two-way migration increases in the post-Cold War period, many of these narratives put to the test the boundaries of national identity. Through a critical reading of works by Cuban American artists and writers like María Brito, Ruth Behar, Carlos Eire, Cristina García, Ana Mendieta, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Ernes...
How contemporary Cuban writers build transnational communities In Writing Islands, Elena Lahr-Vivaz employs methods from archipelagic studies to analyze works of contemporary Cuban writers on the island alongside those in exile. Offering a new lens to explore the multiplicity of Cuban space and identity, she argues that these writers approach their nation as part of a larger, transnational network of islands. Introducing the term “arcubiélago” to describe the spaces created by Cuban writers, both on the ground and in print, Lahr-Vivaz illuminates how transnational communities are forged and how they function across space and time. Lahr-Vivaz considers how poets, novelists, and essayists...
The intertwined stories of two archipelagos and their diasporas This volume is the first systematic comparative study of Cuba and Puerto Rico from both a historical and contemporary perspective. In these essays, contributors highlight the interconnectedness of the two archipelagos in social categories such as nation, race, class, and gender to encourage a more nuanced and multifaceted study of the relationships between the islands and their diasporas. Topics range from historical and anthropological perspectives on Cuba and Puerto Rico before and during the Cold War to cultural and sociological studies of diasporic communities in the United States. The volume features analyses of political c...
Following the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the globalization of Cuban culture, along with the bankruptcy of the state, partly modified the terms of intellectual engagement. However, no significant change took place at the political level. In Community and Culture in Post-Soviet Cuba, De Ferrari looks into the extraordinary survival of the Revolution by focusing on the personal, political and aesthetic social pacts that determined the configuration of the socialist state. Through close critical readings of a representative set of contemporary Cuban novels and works of visual art, this book argues that ethics and gender, rather than ideology, account for the intellectuals’ fidelity to the Revolution. Community and Culture does three things: it demonstrates that masculine sociality is the key to understanding the longevity of Cuba’s socialist regime; it examines the sociology of cultural administration of intellectual labor in Cuba; and it maps the emergent ethical and aesthetic paradigms that allow Cuban intellectuals to envision alternative forms of community and civil society.
This work demonstrates how Latina/os have been integral to US and Latin American literature and history since the nineteenth century.