Latin American Literature Commons^™

Teaching Cuba In Georgia Today, Eric Kartchner

The Coastal Review

This essay details a college professor's approach to teaching a course on Cuban history and culture. The professor's pedagogical choices were influenced by Ada Ferrer's book, Cuba: An American History, and José Antonio Bowen's work on fostering independent thinking. The syllabus covered pre-Columbian Cuba, Spanish rule, the wars of independence, the Castro era, and significant cultural aspects like music and religion. The course emphasized multiple perspectives and encouraged student-led research, challenging preconceived notions about Cuba's complex relationship with the United States. The professor aimed to promote critical thinking and understanding through student-driven inquiry.

Las Ciudades Del Deseo: Las Políticas De Género, Sexualidad Y Espacio Urbano En El Caribe Hispano, Elena Valdez

Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures

Las ciudades del deseo explores the representations of gender, sexuality, and urban space in contemporary narratives from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. By examining a corpus of novels published since 2000, this book shows how the changes in urban landscape create a new image of the city that destroys traditional gender roles and produces different discourses on sexuality. At moments of crisis in political agendas that took place between 1990 and 2000, queer subjects became spokespeople outlining new national projects on each island, while claiming space in the national imaginary. The nation is no longer built on blood …

Ephemeral Elsewheres: Locating Narratives Of Resignation, Resistance, And Refusal In The Poetry Of Black Cuban And Black Brazilian Women, Aidan Keys

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

This essay dissects the language of Latin American revolution and nationalism to locate the body of the black woman and the appropriation of her image. In two seemingly incommensurable radical movements—the Cuban Revolution (1952-1959) and the Brazilian Unified Black Movement (1978-)—the contributions of Black women are unevenly recognized. Reading the poetry of cubanas Nancy Morejón and Georgina Herrera and brasileiras Sônia Fátima and Esmeralda Ribeiro, this essay claims that in both contexts, the Black woman is marginalized to a geographic “elsewhere.” Expanding on this term, coined by scholar Carol Boyce Davies, this essay further identifies temporal and ephemeral “elsewheres.” The …

Pensar El Límite: El Símbolo Indígena En Los Proyectos Políticos Cubanos De Principios Del Siglo Xix, Jorge L. Camacho

The Coastal Review

This article investigates the way in which Cuban literature reflected on indigenous people during the early half of the nineteenth century and uses the symbol of the Amerindians to demonstrate a moral disjuncture between them and the colonizer. In this article, I call attention to the way Cuban independentists and Spanish nationalists used this figure to support their views and thus created a split in the Cuban creole imagination. I start by pointing out that these appropriations started at the end of the 18th century when historian José Martín Félix de Arrate, and poets such as Miguel González and Manuel …

Cantidades Hechizadas Y Silogísticas Del Sobresalto: La Secreta Ciencia De José Lezama Lima, Ómar Vargas

Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures

Arguably the most important Cuban writer of the twentieth century, José Lezama Lima (1910–1976) is well-known as a poet, essayist, cultural promoter, and novelist, but not as a scientist. In fact, there is no evidence of any concrete relationship between him and any pure science discipline. How then it is possible to establish connections between Lezama’s literary works and the disciplines of science? How are certain scientific discoveries and developments, such as the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, modern logic, thermodynamics, or the big bang theory, embraced in the cultural imaginary of Cuba during the first half of the twentieth …

Seropositivo: Queer Solidarity & Survival In Severo Sarduy’S Fiction, Huber Jaramillo Gil

Publications and Research

With the onset of the HIV epidemic, to prevent transmission, the Cuban government aggressively tested its sexually active population, sending infected people to live in quarantined sanitariums. It is in these establishments, in which an HIV-ridden Sarduy sets his last novel, entitled Pájaros de la playa (1993). Even as the reader witnesses the degradation and disintegration of sickened bodies, which the Nation rejected and discarded, Sarduy provides gender and sexual dissidents with a vision of themselves that does not compromise their queerness when confronting institutions of power. Instead, through subversion, appropriation and solidarity, he enacts a creative exploration of existence …

Postcolonial Pandemics And Undead Revolutions: Contagion As Resistance In Con Z De Zombie And Juan De Los Muertos, Sara A. Potter

Alambique. Revista académica de ciencia ficción y fantasía / Jornal acadêmico de ficção científica e fantasía

Argentinian director Alejandro Brugués’s 2011 Cuban-Spanish film Juan de los muertos and Mexican playwright Pedro Valencia’s 2013 play Con Z de zombie spring from similar roots: both initially place the blame for each country’s zombie apocalypse at the feet of the United States. In Brugués’s film, the accusation is clear but never proven: news reports interspersed through the film state that the country is being invaded by “dissidents” paid by the U.S. government, though there is no political or military U.S. presence in the film beyond the symbolic presence of the country’s flag. In Valencia’s Mexico, the cause is entirely …

From Borderlands To Border Islands: Intersections Between Anzaldúa's Chicana Feminist Theory And U.S. Latina Literature From The Hispanic Caribbean, Cristina Gonzalez Martin

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis studies three texts by three U.S. Latina authors from the Hispanic Caribbean through the lens of Chicana feminist border theory. The works analyzed are How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) by Dominican author Julia Alvarez, Dreaming in Cuban (1992) by Cuban-American novelist Cristina García, and the memoir Almost a Woman (1998) by Puerto Rican author Esmeralda Santiago. The theoretical framework used is Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. The objective is to show how these texts manifest the formation of a hybrid, diasporic, in-between identity that corresponds with Anzaldúa’s definition of mestiza consciousness or la …

Choteo Cubano: Humor As A Critical Tool In Twentieth-Century Cuban Theater, Rebecca L. Salois

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project analyzes the incorporation of choteo in specific Cuban theater texts written during three distinct periods in twentieth-century Cuban history, all of which coincide with specific moments of social, political, and/or economic unrest or transition. Choteo in the theater has served as a tool to demonstrate discontent and frustration with authority figures in various contexts. As that need has altered over time, so too has the approach that playwrights have taken to speak out about these issues. I suggest that by responding to changing circumstances with choteo, confronting a difficult situation is more palatable to audiences or readers than …

Heroísmo Y Conciencia Racial En La Obra De La Poeta Afro-Cubana Cristina Ayala, Maria A. Aguilar

Languages, Literatures and Cultures Faculty Scholarship

This article examines the poetry of Cuban writer Cristina Ayala emphasizing the political value of her use of a rhetoric of heroism, a discursive device that masks her demands for recognition of women’s rights and those of Afro-Cubans. The analysis of her poetry suggests that the symbolic manipulation of the “hero” and the representation of “colored” women as intellectuals and “heroes” expressed her desire to intervene in the public arena. By positioning herself within a political discourse that reconstructed slavery’s past, she narrated the revolutionary vicissitudes and created a utopian vision of the future for the Afro-Cuban community. Ayala expresses …

Poetic Illiteracy And Cultural Insularity: The Crisis Of Cultural Nationalism In Virgilio Piñera's La Isla En Peso, Stephen A. Cruikshank

The Quiet Corner Interdisciplinary Journal

The twentieth-century Cuban poet Virgilio Piñera was both a radical and rebellious writer who wrote against the national discourses of his time. In his acclaimed poem La isla en peso Piñera challenges the Neobaroque discourse of Cuban identity by describing Cuba as 'insular' rather than innovative. The following article argues that La isla en peso, like a prophetic letter, seems to have foreseen seventy years earlier what the modern literary critic Abraham Acosta has recently described as a "threshold of illiteracy," that is, a disruption or illiterate interference of one's critical reading by exposing the contradictions of cultural nationalism. …

Toma Y Daca: Transculturación Y Presencia De Escritores Chino-Latinoamericanos, Huei Lan Yen

Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures

En la segunda mitad del siglo XIX, decenas de miles de trabajadores chinos emigraron a Cuba, Perú, México y Panamá en busca de una vida mejor. En los países donde residieron, los chinos y sus descendientes optaron por asimilarse contribuyendo de manera significativa al desarrollo económico de la sociedad de acogida mediante su participación laboral en la agricultura, el transporte y otras industrias. Asimismo, en el ámbito literario, artístico, religioso y político también aportaron al devenir cultural de estos países.

En Toma y daca: Transculturación y presencia de escritores chino-latinoamericanos, uno de los primeros estudios de la tradición literaria …

Fragmentation And Multiplicity In Cuban-American Identity: In Cuba I Was A German Shepherd By Ana Menéndez And Memory Mambo By Achy Obejas, Daimys E. Garcia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Maria Lugones offers a new way of perceiving the world, which makes visible that fragmentation is not a valuable and transgressive understanding of identity, as Western philosophy and some political theory suggests. What Lugones believes in, as a strategy of resistance to the dominant gaze, is multiplicity – mestizaje. Using Lugones’s framework, this thesis will look at the different aspects of Cuban-American characters in In Cuba I was a German Shepherd by Ana Menéndez and Memory Mambo by Achy Obejas. Each novel offers insight into how characters develop and understand themselves (and others) when they use language that shows that …

Brújula Quebrada, Julio Antonio Molinete

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Brújula quebrada o la reinvención del dolor, es un cuaderno de poesía en el cual se aborda el fenómeno del exilio, de la diáspora. Verso a verso es la historia de un diasporante signado por la angustia, el rechazo y el desprecio. Pero más que un poemario personal, deviene en un pedazo de la historia contemporánea cubana. Esa en donde los hijos de la Isla se ven obligados a escapar en pos de la libertad, un derecho que se hace esquivo aun en la tierra de la libertad.

Otra Vez El Mar Y La Psicología De Carl Gustav Jung, Ángela Martín Pérez

The Quiet Corner Interdisciplinary Journal

Poco antes de su muerte, el profesor Carl Gustav Jung aceptó realizar un trabajo de divulgación de sus ideas que se publicó bajo el nombre de El hombre y sus símbolos. En esta obra, el psicólogo suizo recupera su estudio de la estructura de la personalidad, que él entendía compuesta por cinco elementos conceptualizados por el Ego, la Persona, la Sombra, el Anima o Animus y el Sí Mismo. En el proceso de desarrollo del sí mismo, el sujeto se rodea de ciertas circunstancias en las que descubre su Persona, se enfrenta con la Sombra y se encuentra con …

La Revolución Zombificada. La Alegoría Del Trauma Cubano En Juan De Los Muertos, De Alejandro Brugués, Antonio Cardentey Levin

Alambique. Revista académica de ciencia ficción y fantasía / Jornal acadêmico de ficção científica e fantasía

A partir del concepto “momento alegórico”, de Adam Lowenstein, me he planteado analizar críticamente la alegoría sociopolítica latente en la comedia Juan de los Muertos(2010), del cubano Alejandro Brugués, en relación dialógica con la zombificación y sus implicaciones argumentales. Siguiendo algunas de las ideas del Manifiesto Zombi, de Sarah Juliet Lauro y Karen Embry, advierto una construcción psicoanalítica del inmovilismo nacional en el contexto de la llamada Primavera Árabe, en el cual se rodó la película. A mi modo de ver, la figura del zombi constituye aquí una variante del tema del doble, en la medida en que alude …

El Choteo En Cien Botellas En Una Pared Y Raining Backwards: El Gracioso Disfraz De Las Circunstancias Trágicas Durante La Revolución Cubana Y El Período Especial, Kristin Nicole Lisenby

World Languages and Cultures

This project attempts to explore the idea that the combination of tragedy and humor in Cuban and Cuban-American literature is a form of “choteo” or “no tomar nada en serio,” which demonstrates a coping strategy used by Cubans during hard times. In the case of Ena Lucía Portela's Cien botellas en una pared, and Roberto Fernandez's Raining Backwards, I believe that the two authors use his and her own personal insight into a Cuban's life during the Cuban Revolution of the 60's and the Special Period of the 90's, and that those personal experiences are reflected throughout the novels …

Deconstructing An Icon: Fidel Castro And Revolutionary Masculinity, Krissie Butler

Theses and Dissertations--Hispanic Studies

The goal of this project is to investigate the way in which various representations of Fidel Castro, between the years 1957-1965, have left an indelible mark on Cuba, transforming its landscape, I argue, through gendered means and conscious strategies. Thus it is less concerned with Fidel as an historical person than with examining with a gendered lens the ways in which he has been represented in foundational photographs, interviews, songs, and texts (both narrative and poetry as well as blogs). Drawing from theories of masculinity, which conceive masculinity as both a social construction and material body, my dissertation explores the …

Lo Barroco Lezamesco En Paradiso, Leonardo Venta

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis I argue that José Lezama Lima's Paradiso is unique among Latin-American novels of the 1960s because it is a hybrid of literary genres - narrative and essay, as well as a "poetic system." Through an open literary framework, the author explores the essence of "cubanía" though language that is both colloquial and elaborate, both devoted to traditions and aiming for transgressions: a novel that reaches for the pinnacle of neobaroque prose. To sustain my argument, I have performed an exhaustive exegesis of my primary text, as well as extensive external research in secondary texts of the highest …

The Living World, Politics, And Nation: Nature And Discourse In The Poetry Of Nicolás Guillén, Mark J. Mascia

Languages Faculty Publications

Through an analysis of key examples of Guillén's use of nature throughout his poetry, this article presents the argument that they all are fundamentally rooted in a configuration of nature as a living being and in an understanding of humanity's place as part of nature. For Guillén, nature is not simply something that he merely appreciates as a theme; rather, it is a vital element central to his view of the worid and to his development as a writer. The collections examined here are West Indies, Ltd., El son entero, and La paloma de vuelo popula.