Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T02:53:25.163Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Reinscribing the Aesthetic: Cuban Narrative and Post-Soviet Cultural Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

James Buckwalter-Arias
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba's revolutionary paradigm encounters its greatest crisis to date. As the state's cultural institutions struggle to cope with severe material limitations and strive to square socialist ideology with world events, Cuban writers increasingly publish their work with foreign companies. Not uncommonly these authors reassert the aesthetic priorities that state institutions are said to have repressed or subordinated to political imperatives. It may appear, superficially, that Cuban writers are out to revive some notion of an autonomous literary art. In situating aesthetic discourse in profoundly dialogic, historically specific, and politically charged narrative contexts, however, these writings challenge traditional universalizing formulations of the aesthetic category. Such historico-narrative rearticulation of social practices and theories of art is prerequisite to a more progressive cultural politics than the socialist state has managed to implement and than an uncritical reengagement with the global market can bring about.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 120 , Issue 2 , March 2005 , pp. 362 - 374
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2005

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Alberto, Eliseo. Informe contra mi mismo. Madrid: Alfaguara, 1996.Google Scholar
Buena Vista Social Club. Dir. Wim Wenders. Road Movies Filmproduktion, 1999.Google Scholar
Campa, Román de la. Cuba on My Mind: Journeys to a Severed Nation. London: Verso, 2000.Google Scholar
Carpentier, Alejo. Prologue. Dos novelas. La Habana: Letras Cubanas, 1979. 5–11.Google Scholar
Castro, Fidel. “Discurso de clausura.” Casa de las Américas 65–66 (1971): 21–33.Google Scholar
Castro, Fidel. Palabras a los intelectuales. La Habana: Consejo Nacional de Cultura, 1961.Google Scholar
Collazos, Oscar, et al. Literatura en la revolutión y revolución en la literatura. México, DF: Siglo XXI, 1970.Google Scholar
de Man, Paul. “The Resistance to Theory.” The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. 3–20.Google Scholar
Díaz, Jesús. “De fiesta.” Encuentro 8–9 (1998): 3–4.Google Scholar
Díaz, Jesús. Las palabras perdidas. Barcelona: Anagrama, 1992.Google Scholar
Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990.Google Scholar
Guevara, Ernesto. “El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba.” El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba. New York: Pathfinder, 1992. 51–71.Google Scholar
Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. “Aesthetics and the Fundamentals of Modernity.” Aesthetics and Ideology. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1994. 124–49.Google Scholar
Jameson, Fredric. Foreword. “Caliban” and Other Essays. By Roberto Fernández Retamar. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989. vii-xii.Google Scholar
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Philosophical Writings. Ed. Wellek, René. New York: Continuum, 1991. 127–246.Google Scholar
Padilla, Heberto. Fuera del juego. Miami: Universal, 1998.Google Scholar
Padura, Leonardo. Máscaras. Barcelona: Tusquets, 1997.Google Scholar
Padura, Leonardo. Modernidad, posmodernidady novela policial. La Habana: Unión, 2000.Google Scholar
Padura, Leonardo. Paisaje de otoño. Barcelona: Tusquets, 1998.Google Scholar
Paz, Senel. El lobo, el bosque y el hombre nuevo. México, DF: Era, 1991.Google Scholar
Piñera, Virgilio. Cuentos fríos. Buenos Aires: Losada, 1956.Google Scholar
Piñera, Virgilio. Teatro completo. La Habana: R, 1960.Google Scholar
Ponte, Antonio José. El libro perdido de los origenistas. Mexico, DF: Aldus, 2002.Google Scholar
Quiroga, José. “Homosexualities in the Tropic of Revolution.” Sex and Sexuality in Latin America. Ed. Balderston, Daniel and J, Donna. Guy. New York: New York UP, 1997. 133–51.Google Scholar
Taylor, Diana. Disappearing Acts. Durham: Duke UP, 1997.10.1215/9780822399285CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vázquez Díaz, René. “Crítica de la literatura como compromiso: La cuentística de Manuel Cofiño.” Encuentro de la cultura cubana 1 (1996): 107–12.Google Scholar