Cuban Artists across the Diaspora: Setting the Tent against the House by Andrea O’Reilly Herrera (review)

Abstract

Andrea O'Reilly Herrera. Cuban Artists across the Diaspora: Setting the Tent against the House. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011. 272 pp.Critical texts on the subject of Cuban art from the diaspora have been scant. With few exceptions, the existing literature, frequently the province of exhibition catalogs and artists' monographs, has mainly offered traditional arthistorical analyses or curatorial perspectives on the subject. Most studies about contemporary Cuban diasporic art have understood this artistic production through the limited pathos of exile, construed as one of two opposites in fixed binary: displacement versus rootedness, here versus there. Cuban Artists across the Diaspora: Setting the Tent against the House is muchwelcome departure from these dominant narratives. O'Reilly Herrera sets out to intentionally move away from essentialist, and territorially and linguistically based, concepts of racial, national or cultural identification, embracing instead relational, multi-axis analysis in order to capture the movement of culture across borders (9). To that end, the author draws from range of theoretical frameworks that include cultural and literary studies, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism, citing the likes of Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabha, Hamid Naficy, and the oft-quoted Nicolas Bourriaud from more obscure work titled The Radicant, to locate the (contemporary) narrative of Cuban migration as constitutive of the island's historical identity since its inception. More important, the groundwork she lays serves to problematize the discourse of Cuban displacement outwardly toward more transnational way of thinking about issues of migration, beyond ruptures and continuities, locating notions of exile and diaspora as multidimensional and contemporary processes of identity formations always in flux. Without eschewing the political and affective realities that result from Cuban emigres' loss of the homeland, the author reminds us that cultural identity can be best understood as what Stuart Hall succinctly describes as a state of becoming.O'Reilly Herrera first introduced these identitarian preoccupations in artistic practices in ReMembering Cuba: Legacy of Diaspora (2001). However, in Cuban Artists across the Diaspora, her scholarly propositions enter in conversation with other scholars, such as art historians Kobena Mercer and Margo Machida, whose studies on the intersection between identity construction and visual art practices have been pioneering, principally in looking at the work of African American and Asian American artists, respectively. Thus, situating and contextualizing Cuban artistic production from the diaspora within this growing discursive field is one of the author's most valuable contributions.However, there is an unfortunate disconnect between the fertile critical ground O'Reilly Herrera lays out and her curatorial methodology, which drove the selection of artists and artworks highlighted in the book. The author hung her theoretical propositions on the armature of one single project, the artists who participated in CAFE (Cuban American Foremost Exhibits): The Journeys of Cuban Artists, an itinerant group exhibition initiative conceived by painter and performance artist Leandro Soto. …