Cuba in the Special Period (0230606547) HERNANDEZ-REGUANT

This collection is a multidisciplinary evaluation of the impact of market reforms in Cuba’s cultural policies and practices after the fall of the Soviet bloc. Anthropologists, musicologists, and literary, film, media and art scholars examine revolutionary discourses, representations of people and places, ideologies and practices of cultural production, dissemination and consumption, and the circulation of various cultural forms in transnational networks of publicity and exchange. These insightful contributions shed light on the changes that Cuba’s opening to global markets of mass culture brought to the cultural field during the so-called Special Period in Times of Peace.

“Those readers, who, like me, lived in Cuba during the austere Special Period, will find echoes of their own experiences. However, those who have never even visited the island will also discover a great deal in the rich details of these essays. This specificity is the book’s strength – in providing rich detail.”--Helen Yaffe, Journal of Cuban Studies

“This is a first rate collection comprised of work by respected specialists who develop a collective view of a knotty issue: how Cuban socialism survived, or didn’t, in the period attending the dissolution of the Soviet Union. While the express ambition of the book is to refine debates about globalization, to read Hernandez’s introduction, the fate of late socialism, and other broad political and economic patterns of observation, the practice of focusing on particular cultural phenomena makes good on the ambition precisely because macro questions cede to the micro-histories of art’s negotiation with particular constraints and opportunities. A strong contribution to the field.”--Doris Sommer, Ira and Jewell Williams Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University

"This book offers a definitive backward-glance at a contradictory threshold in Cuban history, a moment that has been celebrated and over-exposed at the level of consumption but relatively under-analyzed. Hernandez-Reguant’s unprecedented collection gathers a host of thinkers who dwell critically in the culture of the Special Period and think through its contradictions with subtlety and rigor. Hernandez-Reguant and her contributors illuminate what was at stake -- politically, culturally, and socially -- in the Special Period, and remind us why it is important to understand both its exceptionality and its lasting effects.”--Ana Maria Dopico, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Spanish and Portuguese, New York University

Writing the Special Period: An Introduction--Ariana Hernandez-Reguant * PART I: FOREIGN COMMERCE * Truths and Fictions: The Economics of Writing, 1994–1999--Esther Whitfield * Filmmaking with Foreigners--Cristina Venegas * Spiritual Capital: Foreign Patronage and the Trafficking of Santería--Kevin M. Delgado * PART II: PLURAL NATION * Multicubanidad--Ariana Hernandez-Reguant * Preemptive Nostalgia and La Batalla for Cuban Identity: Option Zero Theater--Laurie Frederik Meer * Wandering in Russian--Jacqueline Loss * The “Letter of the Year” and the Prophetics of Revolution--Kenneth Routon * PART III: TRANSNATIONAL PUBLICS * El Rap Cubano: Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop the Movement!--Roberto Zurbano, Translated by Kate Levitt * Audiovisual Remittances and Transnational Subjectivities--Lisa Maya Knauer * Ending the Century with Memories . . . : Paper Money, Videos, and an X-Acto Knife for Cuban Art--Antonio Eligio Fernández, “Tonel,” Translated by Kate Levitt

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