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- Convenors:
-
Rebecca Ogden
(University of Manchester)
Patrick O'Shea
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- Location:
- UP 4.214
- Start time:
- 12 April, 2013 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel explores the imagination as a social practice in contemporary Cuba.
Long Abstract:
No longer exclusively a site of fantasy and escape, the imagination has become understood as an organized field of social practices that involves the construction and negotiation of sites of agency and possibility. Images are exchanged, imaginaries are edified, and imagined communities are inhabited within increasingly complex and interconnected local and global processes. The imagination is central to the dialogical composition and reproduction of cultural narratives. In today's Cuba, narratives of mobility, belonging and morality (among many others) are in dialogue with notions of family, generation, nation and revolution through the social practice of imagination. This panel invites contributions that explore the multiple manifestations of Cuban imagination through contemporary contexts and practices such as tourism, new technologies, economic/ political reforms, international commerce, consumerism, migration, or through theoretical approaches such as narrative/discourse analysis, transculturation, collective memory, diaspora or transnationalism, etc.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
This paper considers textual articulations of the tourist imaginary in contemporary Cuba.
Paper long abstract:
Cuba's economic crisis of the 1990s, following the Soviet bloc collapse and the ongoing US embargo, meant a radical rupture in the direction of its social revolution and forced the strategic growth of the tourist industry in order to generate foreign exchange. Despite the conditions of poverty Cubans endured during the Special Period, the tourism sector was "highly conditioned and structured to meet a tourist's needs - physical, emotional and sexual" (Cabezas, 2006: 509). In Cuba's current touristic exchanges, lack of material resources is often compensated for by the appropriation of other seemingly abundant type of capital - exotic, human, emotional, social, affective - which are marketed as inherent features of the landscape and population. Beyond scholarship's previous focus on sex-for-money encounters (O' Connell Davidson, 1996; Brennan, 2004; Cabezas, 2004) this project aims to explore the complex politics of encounters that operates in contemporary tourism in Cuba, based on discourses of fantasy, sexuality, morality, the exotic, love and human solidarity.
Paper short abstract:
My paper investigates the representation of Cubaness in Padura Fuentes' novels as a construction based on symbolical images, cultural and social practices. Considering a nation as an imagined community I investigate the elements that form Padura's complex image of contemporary Cuban identity
Paper long abstract:
My paper will investigate the representation of Cubaness as an imagined construction in Leonardo Padura Fuentes' novels.
Once the creation of a new Cuban nation was declared in political terms, the revolution started the creation of the new nation in terms of common identity. Considering a nation as an imagined political community, I argue that, form 1960s, the government edified a new national imaginary, using cultural symbols to give a image of unity and communion to the Cuban population and create the cultural base for the realization of the national project.
Cultural perception and social imagination are central to the composition of Padura Fuentes' narrative. I will show how the author exposes the effects that the creation of this national imaginary had on his characters' life. I will explain how the manipulation of collective imagination led first to the creation of a collective utopia and then to a harsh disillusion when the reality failed in complying with the imagined model. Finally I will analyse how different characters that do not fit in the revolutionary imaginary model of Cubaness are represented by Padura Fuentes. I will focus my attention on some characters representing strong violations of the official image of Cubaness (such as exiles and dissidents) to study how different Cuban identities confront themselves with the revolutionary imaginary notions of identity and nation. The paper, thus, will analyse how Padura Fuentes critiques the stereotyped revolutionary image of Cubaness, presenting Cuban identity as a wider, hybrid and plural imaginative construction.
Paper short abstract:
This paper will explore the Cuban cultural imagination as a site of diasporic practice through an examination of the experiences with emigration and the narration of absence by Cubans currently living on the island.
Paper long abstract:
Based on the on-going PhD project of the same title, this paper proposes to rethink the concept of Cuban diaspora by exploring the experience and narration of diasporic absence in contemporary Cuba. Fundamentally, the present research examines emigration and diaspora as central features of contemporary Cuban society but, crucially, understands these processes as lived simultaneously by both those who emigrate and those who do not. Through interviews conducted in Cuba, the narratives of those who have not emigrated serve to interrogate some assumptions that characterise the study of Cuba and attempt to account for the complexity of the Cuban cultural encounter with emigration, exile and diaspora. A generational approach is employed to better understand how the absence of family members, friends, colleagues and compatriots has been experienced over several generations of Cubans living on the island. The complex, intertwined, multiple and emotional processes of migration and transnational relationships narrated in the interview material reveal the cultural penetration of the diasporic condition in the Cuban imagination. Through these various diasporic imaginaries, negotiated and edified as narratives, a more nuanced understanding is permitted of the dialogical cultural practice of diaspora in contemporary Cuban society.