Translating Cuba: Diasporic writing between moving cultures and moving media

Abstract

This article discusses the interrelation between transculturality and transmediality with an emphasis on processes of translation. It focuses on two examples of transcultural and transmedial writing taken from contemporary Cuban literature in Paris: Miguel Sales's recontextualization of Cuban popular music in Paris and William Navarrete's ekphrastic reinscription of his island into the realm of French romantic painting. The case studies are significant in this context because they show how cultural borders are simultaneously set and transgressed at medial crossings—between music and poetry, text, and image. Thus, cultural translations go hand in hand with medial transpositions that include forms of rewriting, recomposition, and revisualization. The connection between moving cultures and moving media also points to the question of “travelling memory” in diaspora.Andrea Gremels studied Romance languages, sociology, and American studies at Goethe University, Frankfurt, where she has been working as a research associate and lecturer at the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures since 2008. In the area of Latin American and francophone literature and culture, her main research interests are transcultural studies, inter- and transmedial approaches, and the Carribean. In 2013 she finished her dissertation on exile and transculturality in contemporary Cuban literature in Paris (“Kubanische Gegenwartsliteratur in Paris zwischen Exil und Transkulturalität.” Tübingen, Germany: Narr, 2014). She also published the volume Cuba: La revolución revis(it)ada (ed. with Roland Spiller, Tübingen, Germany: Narr, 2010).