Cuba, the United States, and Cultures of the Transnational Left, 1930–1975

Abstract

Scholars in American studies now routinely utilize the apparatus of history, including intensive archival research in topics once the province of political and diplomatic historians. True to their interdisciplinary mandate, however, they operate more like literary scholars than historians. The resulting studies do not construct narratives of change over time, interrogating causation and contingency; rather, they practice history by allusion, ranging and choosing from whatever mix of subjects, events, or trends seem useful. The paradigm for such monographs is Michael Denning's provocative, deservedly influential The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (1996), which offers a powerful narrative of the 1930s Popular Front. Unfortunately, some more recent works simply frustrate in their refusal to take history seriously as history, rather than a vehicle from which to elaborate hypotheses about culture. Cuba, the United States, and the Cultures of the Transnational Left is a prime example of the new American cultural studies. It begins with a clear periodization and a historical subject: “US-Cuban political and cultural exchange around the Cuban revolutions of 1933 and 1959” (p. 3). The book's stated goal, however, is quite different. It seeks to examine the “transition from modernism to postmodernism, a critical juncture in late capitalism” using “diverse cultural studies methods” as a way “to rethink poetry and policy decisions in the same breath and to probe a range of representational sites mined from transnational tributaries” (pp. 3, 11, 13). In practice this leads to a pastiche mixing up cultural diplomacy, transnational politics of all sorts, and literary analysis. Actors include the Foreign Policy Association, the communist movements in both countries, the State Department's Division of Cultural Relations, the Black Panthers and other African American revolutionaries, the poets Nicolas Guillen and Langston Hughes, and, as a parting note, the Haitian rapper Wyclef Jean's 1997 mix-up of “Guantanamera.”