This chapter examines the state-organized cultural literacy movements of postrevolutionary Cuba and the dynamics of the demands of the collective sphere, along with individuation and standing out. The chapter analyzes the model of the socialist worker-amateur citizen fostered by the revolutionary state, arguing that the figures of the amateur and the “art instructor,” as well as the creation of local casas de cultura [houses of culture], became antidotes to capitalist consumer culture. Along with their positive, diversifying effects, the chapter suggests, there came a deep suspicion toward practitioners of so-called elitist culture, demonstrating how, within this process, the state emerged as both benefactor and punisher.

This chapter examines the work of numerous creative artists in multiple media and genres, some of whom wrote works that formed part of the Cuban literary canon, but whose lives and identities were seen as problematic for the revolutionary state. Focusing particularly on figures whose intersectional identities somehow threatened hegemonic biases, the chapter elucidates the extent to which a preoccupation with sexual practices and gender identities was at the core of the Cuban revolutionary state and the homophobic legacies it inherited from the bourgeois past. The chapter teases this out by exploring critical and theoretical rereadings, in addition to numerous musical, literary, theatrical, and cinematographic works and productions from multiple postrevolutionary periods, wherein queerness emerges as central to the nation and its diaspora.

This chapter examines Cuban fiction about slavery emerging in the 1830s–1840s: Petrona y Rosalía (1838) by Félix Tanco y Bosmeniel; Francisco, el ingenio o las delicias del campo (1838–1839) by Anselmo Suárez y Romero; the short story “Cecilia Valdés” (1839) by Cirilo Villaverde (1812–1894), who later developed it into the novel Cecilia Valdés o La Loma del Ángel (1882); Autobiografía de un esclavo (1840) by Juan Francisco Manzano; and Sab (1841) by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda. The chapter contextualizes the analysis in tensions between the demands for labor and “ad hoc moral alibis” characterizing Plantation America, particularly the improvised concepts of racial differentiation – Blackness and Black-and-white miscegenation – typifying responses to these tensions. The analysis of this literature as speculative writing that looks simultaneously toward the past and future links it to the sometimes improvisational and speculative nature of the new plantation-based societies, which were themselves entangled between speculative finance capital and moral reflections on freedom, and to the intensified anxieties about Cuba’s racialized future generated by the 1841 demographic census.

Chapter 2 explores accounts by Civil War nurses and surgeons – first-person nonfiction, lightly fictionalized narrative, sensationalized memoir, and fiction. The central texts in this chapter are Walt Whitman’s Memoranda after the War, Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches, John Brinton’s Personal Memoirs, Susie King Taylor’s Reminiscences of My Life in Camp, and S. Weir Mitchell’s “The Case of George Dedlow.” These narrators represent amputation in different ways, especially the scene of amputation itself, the image of a basket or trough of dismembered limbs, and amputee reflections on the relationship between their remaining bodies and their absent limbs. However, for all the narrators in these texts, amputation is part of a meditation on the meanings of intact and amputated bodies, and their role in making sense of the Civil War. The chapter ends with a discussion of the Army Medical Museum, in which amputated limbs were catalogued, stored, and displayed as examples of the damage done by gunshots and shells. This dovetails with a reading of George Dedlow, in which the protagonist’s legs, stored in alcohol at the Museum, return to him briefly during a séance, absurdly marrying hopes for bodily resurrection with spiritualism’s belief in a humanized heaven.

This chapter addresses Cuban performance art of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In spite of the apparent ephemerality of performance, the body of work explored in this chapter is among the Cuban art most well known worldwide, sometimes for such unfortunate reasons as a controversial death (Ana Mendieta), detainment/house arrest (Tania Bruguera), or imprisonment (Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara). The chapter approaches performance art through four overlapping themes – play, betweenness, memory, and voice – to explore the ways in which individuals use an art form that unites physical body and message to intervene in varied sociopolitical and cultural fields. Other artists whose work the chapter considers include, among others, Alina Troyano (aka Carmelita Tropicana), Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Yali Romagoza, Coco Fusco, Alicia Rodríguez Alvisa, Leandro Soto, and Carlos Martiel, and the collectives ARTECALLE, Los Carpinteros, and Desde Una Pragmática Pedagógica (DUPP), among others.

This chapter examines the recurrent search for self-determination and identity at the core of modern Cuban theater, a search portrayed as embodied in theater’s own distinctive engagement with time. The chapter locates the birth of modern Cuban theater between 1902 and 1959 as a point of departure to elaborate upon representations of family and the disintegrating republic in the mid-twentieth century, characterized by a nonprogressive temporality within works by Virgilio Piñera and José Triana. The past, contrasted to the utopian-seeking, revolutionary present, unfolds in work by, for example, Abelardo Estorino and Eugenio Espinosa Hernández, the chapter argues. However, the chapter suggests that, by the end of the twentieth century, such a paradigm was replaced by undeniable frustration and desire for change in work, for example, by Alberto Pedro Torriente and Ulises Rodríguez Febles, as well as within the many new theater collectives, for example El Ciervo Encantado, that arose in the midst of the socioeconomic and political crisis of the Special Period and beyond.

Drawing on work by numerous playwrights, this chapter provides a detailed overview of the theater of the Cuban diaspora in the US, including extensive contributions to elaborate theater scenarios and initiatives since the 1960s, and addressing some playwrights, like María Irene Fornés (a mentor to numerous US Cubans) and Nilo Cruz, who have been instrumental within US American drama as a whole. The chapter organizes its account of many well-established theater groups and ensembles; theatrical venues and performance spaces; festivals and regular events; and key playwrights, directors, and mentors into those linked to New York and those anchored in Miami, and also includes the work of a new generation of millennial playwrights, most of whom were born in the US but who continue to evoke in their work complex, sometimes painful, connections to the island.

This chapter explores how Black writers link the subjects of racial inequality and what it means to be human. This linking prompts a perennial question for critics and students alike: when it comes to examining African American literature’s long memory, do we examine the history of racial inequality to find out more about what it means to be human, or do we look to rich humanistic social relations in fiction to reimagine and/or resolve any remaining concepts of racial inequality? For this chapter, I examine the terms of the debates over how to represent Black humanity, and I claim that the debate has produced only ongoing and unanswered questions. Hence, I posit that it is in fact the irresolvable human conflict that asks and re-asks questions about Black humanity, and I claim that it is this ongoing instability or tension that defines race’s seminal role in African American literature.

Women figure prominently in Kerouac’s work, from novels explicitly about women he had encountered in his life (Maggie Cassidy and Tristessa), to short stories like “Good Blonde,” to the lengthy, often lyrical passages about women in The Subterraneans and On the Road. This chapter explores Kerouac’s controversial representations of women, which are often sexist, misogynist, essentialist, racist. Women in Kerouac’s works, even at their most indelible and dramatic, are, as the Beat writer Joyce Johnson termed them, “minor characters”; they catalyze or support action, struggle for recognition, then disappear from the story. Even when the female characters are presumptively protagonists, as in Maggie Cassidy or Tristessa or “Good Blonde,” they are still not much more than objects of narrative delectation or vehicles for emotional expression.

This chapter examines Kerouac in the context of 1950s literary culture in the United States, with particular emphasis on the Cold War. The 1950s was the decade Kerouac became famous overnight with the publication of On the Road, and the decade he produced the bulk of his most significant writing, including Visions of Cody, Doctor Sax, The Subterraneans, The Dharma Bums, and Mexico City Blues, among others. This chapter explores the relationship between Kerouac’s literary production during the 1950s and the multilayered cultural imperatives of the Cold War.

In the post-Reconstruction USA, biopolitical technologies of governmentality became central to the project of racial control. As the USA moved from a settler colonial and slave-owning nation to a settler colonial and nation of overseas colonies, a politics of violence was followed by a pedagogy of recovery, particularly in education and health, through which the lives of racialized populations could be “improved.” The salubrious racial management of populations through discourses of health in the Philippines, Guam, Hawai’I, and Indian reservations emphasized distinctions between clean and unclean bodies, hygienic and unhygienic behaviors, and ultimately moral and immoral lifestyles. However, the technologies of care in the USA occupation of Japan during its reverse course phase (1948–1952) illustrate how racial–cultural difference could be refashioned for geopolitical purposes. While early in the occupation the Japanese were Orientalized as conformist, obsequious, and feudalist, Brides Schools for wives of American GIs exemplified how the creation of Japanese wives as perfectly assimilable subjects functioned to demonstrate American racial democracy during the Cold War.

Nineteenth-century mixed-race heroine fiction reflected and contributed to US racial constructions. In its antislavery iterations, it critiqued slavery by revealing the slipperiness of racial categories. Because children inherited the condition of their mothers – regardless of their fathers’ race – enslavers profited from the sexual assault of Black women. Enslavers targeted Black women for sexual violence and hypersexualized them, imagining them as always sexually available to white men. Depictions of mixed-race Black heroines in antislavery fiction addressed these problems. Scholars have discussed these concerns in William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or the President’s Daughter, but less attention has been given to his three subsequent revisions of this text. This chapter reads Brown’s serialized novel, Miralda; or, the Beautiful Quadroon as an revealing revision of Brown’s theorization of race in the USA. This revision makes important shifts in both audience and focus and anticipates further development in mixed-race heroine fiction, including writing by Black women whose work has been given less attention than Brown’s or white antislavery authors, skewing perceptions of this genre.

This chapter locates a throughline of Indigenous resistance to settler dominance that stretches from the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth to the 2016 NoDAPL movement on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation. It is a throughline marked not by warfare and violence, but by diplomacy and strategic action founded in traditional Indigenous responses to the irresponsible use of power. Recognizing how Native peoples, across many cultures and regions, were philosophically aligned toward hospitality and peaceful conflict resolution, disrupts racist notions of savagery, and age-old assumptions of Indigenous peoples as strictly “warrior societies.” By highlighting a number of diplomatic practices and actions occurring between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, this chapter suggests the type of movement that took place at Standing Rock, founded in respect for the environment and peaceful resistance to uncivil government, was not a modern-day innovation, but a series of responses in keeping with the long-standing praxis of Indigenous communities.

This chapter presents contemporary African American theater and drama as a democratic art form that addresses social injustice and racial inequalities in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement and the Obama presidency. The plays The White Card by Claudia Rankine and Fairview: A Play by Jackie Sibblies Drury are discussed in light of recent developments in Black performance theory and with regard to Jacques Rancière’s argument on the democratic and egalitarian potential of theatrical performance. Both plays work toward a revision of how racial identities are configured in what Rancière has called the “distribution of the sensible.” The White Card reflects on the theatrical representation of police brutality and its mediation through photography and art. Fairview provides an example of how contemporary playwrights elaborate on a tradition of actor–spectator interaction in African American theater as a means for destabilizing the social allocation of racial and spatial positions in society. In this sense, Rankine and Drury transform African American theater into an oppositional site that challenges the configuration of racial discourses in a variety of contexts and instances.

This chapter assesses Kerouac’s literary career from the perspective of the profession of authorship. Despite his bohemian reputation, Kerouac was a diligent professional writer who engaged publishers directly and via literary agents in order to actively manage his professional career. Kerouac’s goal was to convince publishers and thus the reading public of the significance of his signature artistic style, which he called “Spontaneous Prose.” Viking Press was not interested in his Spontaneous Prose books as viable sellers, and his income and reputation declined in proportion with his insistence on producing books in this style. Despite the belief held by many Kerouac fans today that he was a literary saint who disavowed money and materialism, in fact he both wanted to make money and earn literary respect based on his artistic merits. He was not a commercial writer per se, since he sacrificed publication for the integrity of his art, but he did want the publishing industry to see the inherent value in his Spontaneous Prose books.