Corporeal Readings of Cuban Literature and Art: The Body, the Inhuman, and Ecological Thinking, written by Cristina M. García

The essay is dedicated to the 120th birthday of the classic of Cuban literature Alejo Carpentier and the 110th birthday of the prominent Argentine writer Julio Cortázar. Despite the fact that they belonged to different generations, these like-minded writers, creators of the new Latin American novel, had much in common. Their interest in the fantastic serves as their shared artistic orientation in the essay, although the very nature of the fantastic in these writers’ works is completely different: in case of Carpentier, the founder of magical realism, we are talking about his formula of lo real maravilloso, rooted in the reality of the continent; as for Cortázar, one is faced here with his individual intellectual mythologizing. However, despite the differences in their poetics, both writers were united by the polemical intensity of their manifestos and interviews, both fought for the marvelous and the fantastic in literature as opposed to all sorts of cliches, banalities, snobbish prejudices, and literary fashion. For example, both received a creative impulse — each in his own way — by recoding and rearranging reminiscences and quotations from André Breton's Surrealist Manifesto. Defending their artistic principles and political convictions, both writers “played seriously”, as Cortázar said, and it is as evidenced by the examples of what they created “on a bet”.

With the cultural turn in Translation Studies, it has been accepted that translation is not just a linguistic but also a cultural activity. This cultural activity can appear in various forms such as a positive and constructive interaction or an asymmetrical power relation including assimilation, conquest and/or colonial activities between cultures. Literature, translation and translated literature can be used as a tool or strategy in this spectrum of complicated relations. The agents/actors taking an active role in these relations have become an object of study in Translation Studies as well as in all other fields of Social Sciences. Using his agent role as an ambassador, Ernesto Gomez Abascal wrote a fictional novel titled Havana’da Türk Tutkusu 1898 (Turkish Passion in Havana 1898) drawing inspiration from historical facts to construct a positive Turkish image in Spanish and Cuban literature and culture. Abascal was inspired by the future translator of the novel, Mehmet Necati Kutlu to write this book. Kutlu, who is an academician and an agent fostering the relations between Turkey and Latin American countries, reported his findings to Abascal about the Ottoman Empire and Cuban relations. Inspired by this information, Abascal wrote a fiction based on these historical records. This article will try to analyze the role of literature, translation and agents in the process of constructing cultural images through this example.

With the cultural turn in Translation Studies, it has been accepted that translation is not just a linguistic but also a cultural activity. This cultural activity can appear in various forms such as a positive and constructive interaction or an asymmetrical power relation including assimilation, conquest and/or colonial activities between cultures. Literature, translation and translated literature can be used as a tool or strategy in this spectrum of complicated relations. The agents/actors taking an active role in these relations have become an object of study in Translation Studies as well as in all other fields of Social Sciences. Using his agent role as an ambassador, Ernesto Gomez Abascal wrote a fictional novel titled Havana’da Türk Tutkusu 1898 (Turkish Passion in Havana 1898) drawing inspiration from historical facts to construct a positive Turkish image in Spanish and Cuban literature and culture. Abascal was inspired by the future translator of the novel, Mehmet Necati Kutlu to write this book. Kutlu, who is an academician and an agent fostering the relations between Turkey and Latin American countries, reported his findings to Abascal about the Ottoman Empire and Cuban relations. Inspired by this information, Abascal wrote a fiction based on these historical records. This article will try to analyze the role of literature, translation and agents in the process of constructing cultural images through this example

Although History of Art studies within academia, began in the late thirties of the Twentieth Century, Arts’ Theory in Cuba has been an underdeveloped discipline. For this paper, we use the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge in its historical perspective, as a tool for analyzing Jorge Mañach’s cultural thought. This was one of the most important Cuban intellectuals of his time, who wrote some of the most notorious essays of Cuban Literature. We analyze his cultural essays, and also, the cultural institutions, intellectual initiatives and networks that supported his theoretical ideas. Essentially, the early Cuban 20th century reproduced some of the colonial matrix of power but, surprisingly, the Mañach’s theories featured relative epistemic autonomy and, therefore, decolonial thinking features yet to be studied. Therefore, we place the focus on the social conditions and cultural structures that might have enhanced the Cuban cultural thought in order to show its epistemic status.


 
 
 En la última década se ha producido una excelente historiografía sobre el impacto de la revolución haitiana en la política esclavista y antiesclavista de Cuba y el Caribe; la importancia militar, económica y cultural de los africanos para la construcción del Atlántico ibérico; y el uso por parte de los esclavizados de las leyes coloniales para procurar la libertad. Lo mismo, sin embargo, no se puede decir del campo de estudios literarios, que, en los quince años transcurridos desde el imponente libro Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution de Sibylle Fischer, no ha producido semejante innovación.
 
 

ABSTRACT Jesús Cos Causse (1945–2007) was a foundational voice within black Cuban literature of the Revolution. As a journalist, diplomat and cultural activist, he was also instrumental in creating institutions which used poetry as a means of instigating social justice and promoting regional cooperation among Caribbean and Latin American societies. Although Cos Causse was a prolific writer and a pivotal force in Cuba’s artistic industries for decades, his work has not enjoyed much critical reception in English. This is partly because he was based in Santiago de Cuba. This placed him beyond the focus of the enterprises of cultural criticism (national and international) which have tended to be obsessed with Havana and with the cultural prototypes generated in the nation’s capital. This paper offers a reading of Cos Causse’s poetry which pays attention to his exploration of ideas of the black family, of Santiago de Cuba and of the place of black Cubans within the Revolution. It highlights the powerful anti-colonialist stance of Cos Causse’s thinking and shows the vital role that the history of Santiago plays in the development of his radical poetic conscience. I argue that Jesús Cos Causse’s poetry demonstrates the indispensable significance of family, the city of Santiago and the Revolution as coordinates of belonging for black Cubans (renowned or anonymous).

Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection: Manzano, Plácido, and Afro-Latino Religion, by Matthew Pettway

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsMatthew Pettway, Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection: Manzano, Plácido, and Afro-Latino Religion. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020. Pp. 325. $30.00 (paper).Nathan H. DizeNathan H. DizeOberlin College (USA) Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 107, Number 2Spring 2022Reconsidering the Uses of Violence in African American History A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/718705 Views: 15Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

James, Conrad Michael (2019) Filial Crisis and Erotic Politics in Black Cuban Literature, Tamesis (Woodbridge, NJ), ix + 208 pp. £60.00 hbk.

The armed insurrection that brought Fidel Castro to power in 1959 was one of the most influential events of the 20th century. Like the Russian and Mexican revolutions before it, the Cuban revolution set out to bring social justice and prosperity to a country that had suffered the evils of corrupt regimes. A small country thus became the center of world debates about equality, culture, and class struggle, attracting the attention of political leaders not only from Latin America but also from Africa, Asia, and Europe. Its intent to forge a model society has often been described in utopian terms. Writers, artists, and filmmakers turned to utopia as a metaphor to trace the evolution of the arts in the island from the enthusiasm and optimism of the first moments to the dystopian hopelessness and despair of the last decades. Indeed, the Cuban revolution, like so many other social revolutions of the 20th century, became the victim of a whole series of internal and external forces that ended up turning the promised dream into a nightmare tainted by autocratic leadership, repression, and political and economic isolation. Although Cuban literature has extensively addressed these issues since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it is only recently that we can find similar trends in a cinematic output that portrays Cuba as a utopia gone sour. This article examines recent films such as Alejandro Brugués’ Juan de los Muertos (2011), Tomás Piard’s Los desastres de la Guerra (2012), Eduardo del Llano’s Omega 3 (2014), Rafael Ramírez’s Diario de la niebla (2016), Yimit Ramírez’s Gloria eterna (2017), Alejandro Alonso’s El Proyecto (2017), and Miguel Coyula’s Corazón Azul (2021). These films use futuristic imageries to offer a poignant (and often apocalyptic) depiction of the harsh paradoxes of contemporary life in Cuba while reflecting upon the downfall of utopia.

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Book Review: Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection: Manzano, Plácido, and Afro-Latino Religion

RESUMEN El artículo presenta la recepción húngara de la narrativa cubana contemporánea en diferentes tipos de publicaciones de la prensa escrita en húngaro entre 1959 y 1989. Después de presentar en breve el establecimiento y el desarrollo de las relaciones diplomáticas y bilaterales húngaro-cubanas, el artículo ofrece una sucinta descripción del paisaje cultural del período comunista en lo que respecta a la prensa y las editoriales, y, a partir de aquí, examina las similitudes y diferencias entre los principios de la política cultural de Hungría y Cuba. Para evidenciar el hecho aparentemente paradójico de que, a pesar de los estrechos lazos político-culturales entre los dos países, la recepción de la literatura cubana en Hungría fue bastante reservada, se comenta las reseñas y las críticas que salieron a la luz en la prensa húngara sobre las antologías, los volúmenes de cuentos y las novelas publicadas en las editoriales de Hungría. El artículo se detiene especialmente en las ediciones húngaras de las obras de Alejo Carpentier.

Reviewed by: Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection: Manzano, Plácido, and Afro-Latino Religion by Matthew Pettway Reggie Bess Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection: Manzano, Plácido, and Afro-Latino Religion. By Matthew Pettway. University of Mississippi Press, 2020, p. 325, $30.00. In six well-researched and well-crafted chapters, Matthew Pettway presents the life and times of two of Cuba’s most interesting and productive Afro-Cuban literarians. The book covers the years between Juan Francisco Manzano’s birth (1797–1854)) to Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés’s (also known and referred throughout the book as Plácido) death by firing squad (1809–1844). Both made very significant contributions to Cuban literature during the colonial period. Borrowing from the great Toni Morrison, Pettway “engage[s] this body of work as a sort of ‘literary archaeology’ to borrow a phrase from Toni Morrison. Jenny Sharpe explains that Morrison relied on historical knowledge and an ‘imaginative recreation of the past’ to write great works of fiction like her novel Beloved. But I perceive archaeology as apropos for the unearthing of black Cuban texts characterized by double-voicing, ostensible contradictions, silences, and the subservice use of Catholic, Romantic, and Neoclassical symbology. This book is literary analysis and part cultural history; so, I too am ‘piercing together a world that exists only in the archives.’” (37) In the Introduction, Pettway asks the following questions: “How could writers with no formal humanistic training, no military expertise to speak of, and no experience in the diplomatic corps pose a political threat to one of the greatest empires in the world? What subversive writing practices did Plácido and Manzano employ in their poetry and prose? What role did religious discourse play in the creation of anticolonial literature? And what did they hope to accomplish by writing against the Spanish empire?” (6) Pettway then tells the reader the significance of this book to the field: “Cuban Literature contributes to Latin American Studies in several ways. This is the first book-length study of Juan Francisco Manzano and Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés, perhaps the most important writers of African descent in colonial Spanish American history. Moreover, my emphasis on African-inspired spirituality as a source of knowledge and a means to sacred authority for black Cuban writers contributes to our understanding of Manzano and Plácido not as mere imitators but as aesthetic and Political innovators. Finally, by reworking theories of transculturation from the angle of African epistemology,” Pettway “seek[s] to demonstrate that some of the processes of social transformation that cultural anthropologists have examined were also at work in literature in ways heretofore unknown.” (43) [End Page 169] As important as these contributions are, equally significant is the way in which Pettway’s work “represents a paradigm shift in our thinking about black writers in colonial Latin America because it analyzes how they reconstructed Africa in America through an epistemological engagement with Bakongo- and Yoruba-inspired spiritualities.” Pettway argues that “it is an African Atlantic system of religious knowledge—not the strictures of Catholic doctrine—that provided Plácido and Manzano with the tools, both political and meta-physical, to conceive what African-descended liberation might look like.” (43) Finally, Pettway notes: “Cuban ‘Literature contributes to the fields of Latin American Studies, Hispanic Cultural Studies, religious studies, Cuban and Caribbean History, and Africana Studies by suggesting a paradigm shift for the way scholars analyze Afro-Latin American colonial literature.” (44) In the book Pettway lists the writers’ singular accomplishments. For example, Manzano’s Poesías líricas, published in 1821, marked “the first collection of Cuban verse published by anyone, black or white. (12) The reader also learns that in 1836, Juan Francisco Manzano was writing the only known autobiographical account (slave narrative) of slavery in Spanish America, his Autobiografía de un esclavo, originally titled La verdadera historia de mi vida. Pettway makes note of the fact that Manzano;s Cuban slave narrative preceded the work of black Abolitionists Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, published in 1845, and William Wells Brown’s Narrative of...

Notebook Legna Rodríguez Iglesias My Favorite Girlfriend Was a French Bulldog Trans. Megan McDowell McSweeney’s I WAS ENTHRALLED by Legna Rodríguez Iglesias’s approach to storytelling through verse before I encountered her fiction. Her short story “El punto cubano”—composed of eighty lines of two octosyllabic clauses each—is a mesmerizing master class in meter. A poet with an impeccable ear, an essayist with relentless curiosity , a fearless iconoclast, and a novelist who can weave into prose multiple voices—or one voice that channels them all in this novel—Rodríguez Iglesias paints a fresco of Cuba in which the discussion of political and sexual liberation reveals a suffocating reality that the narrator and her pet need to escape. Marcial Gala The Black Cathedral Trans. Anna Kushner Farrar, Straus and Giroux “WHAT KIND OF BLACK person thinks of naming their sons David King and Samuel Prince, that’s just setting them up to think they deserve the world.” What’s an unfinished cathedral if not the visible manifestation of a broken promise? What is Cuba if not a pigmentocracy? Or, in the words of Langston Hughes, “What happens to a dream deferred?” In a choral novel that portrays the underbelly of a failed utopian society, Marcial Gala answers these questions and poses more for the reader. Jennine Capó Crucet My Time Among the Whites: Notes from an Unfinished Education Picador AN EXPLORATION OF GENDER, race, ethnicity, whiteness and passing as white, identity, memory, belonging, exile, assimilation—this book is equal parts moving and hilarious. From the origin of her name to the author’s disparate trip to Disney World and the family’s journey through her college years that ultimately led to “Imagine Me Here, or How I Became a Professor ,” Capó Crucet more than justifies the subtitle of her collection of essays. These “Notes from an Unfinished Education” will inspire the readers to continue theirs. Alexis Romay is the author of two novels and two books of poetry. He has translated novels into Spanish by Ana Veciana-Suarez, Margarita Engle, and Stuart Gibbs and a novel into English by Miguel Correa Mujica. Photo by Valerie Block what to read now An Island in Dispute by Alexis Romay IN 2009, OUT OF THE BLUE or perhaps apropos of my essays, one of my relatives living in Cuba sent me an email scolding me for not keeping in touch while also telling me that I had no right to have an opinion— and much less write—about my homeland, because “I had left the island many years ago.” The message included a couple of ad hominem attacks that I didn’t reciprocate. The letter was as painful to read as it was liberating to let that relationship go. Fast-forward to the present: the person in question is now a US citizen. That experience came to mind when I was invited to write a page about Cuban literature . I accepted, knowing that this would be an impossible task. How to draw a literary map of an entelechy that transcends borders? How to convey the literature of a splintered nation in under 650 words? Who counts as Cuban these days? And who is doing the counting? Late in his life, Borges mentioned that the first thing that one notices in a list are the omissions. The Argentine was right. In spite of that warning, here we go. In a recent interview, Dainerys Machado Vento called Cuba “an island in dispute”—a nation that is being contested, from two ends of the ideological spectrum, across generations , from both sides of the Florida Straits, from inside and outside its physical territory (Las noventa Habanas). In 2000 Gustavo Pérez Firmat wondered if, after four decades of exile, he had the right to use a possessive adjective to refer to Cuba (50 lecciones de exilio y desexilio). He struggled every time he considered typing the words “my country .” Enrique Del Risco writes in his novel Turcos en la niebla that “there’s nothing more revealing than being rejected by something of which one wants to be a part.” Voilà. I just recommended three Cuban books written in Spanish that, for the moment...

Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection: Manzano, Plácido, and Afro-Latino Religion by Mathew Pettway

From Granma to Boston and Havana and Back: Cuban Literature Today

Mariel – Revista de Literatura y Arte foi fundada em 1983, em Miami, por escritores cubanos exilados nos Estados Unidos durante o exílio massivo de Mariel (1980), e circulou até 1985 nos Estados Unidos, América Latina e Europa. O projeto editorial coletivo era oposicionista ao regime revolucionário cubano e declarava-se anticomunista, antitotalitário, defensor da democracia e das liberdades individuais, possuindo pujante caráter de denúncia. Em nosso estudo, analisamos como os intelectuais que colaboraram com a revista debateram a literatura, a homossexualidade e a identidade nacional. Nossa proposta central é compreender como o projeto editorial constituiu uma oposição política ao governo revolucionário cubano durante o exílio nos Estados Unidos, por meio de disputas pelas memórias da Revolução e da intelectualidade cubana. Dessa forma, investigamos a seção Confluencias da revista, que estabelecia um “contra-cânone” combativo da literatura cubana, com foco no escritor Virgilio Piñera.

The expression literary tourism is an established term which rarely raises controversies. It fits well into a positivist way of thinking about tourism reality. An analysis of Cuban literature, as well as field study conducted in Havana, however have pointed to the need to reconstruct the definitions of literary tourism that are currently in use as there are many contexts and current definitions are insufficient. The article presents an aleatoric approach based on the phenomenon of chance while exploring the literary space of Havana.