New Books on Cuban Culture and Arts

November 11, 2011 - 4:00 pm

Carlos Riobó, The City College of New York and The Bildner Center
Carlos Riobó and his collaborators will present his book Cuban Intersections of Literary and Urban Spaces (SUNY Press), an examination primarily of Havana as a center where urban and literary spaces often come together. Some of the areas of study are urban gardens, architecture, urban planning, cultural institutions, the built environment, social policies, access to books, and literary projections of space onto the metropolis. This book peeks at a dynamic nation through its cultural interstices at a crucial moment in Cuba’s evolving history.

Ana María Hernández, LaGuardia Community College and The Bildner Center
Ana María Hernández will present her edition of Fantoches 1926, a collective crime mystery by eleven authors and illustrators associated with Havana’s Grupo Minorista from the 1920’s. The presentation will focus on the formation and activities of the Grupo Minorista, the echoes of the French avant-garde in Cuban literary publications, and the early manifestations of Afro Cuban themes in Cuban high art. The authors and illustrators include Carlos Loveira, Jorge Mañach, Rubén Martínez Villena, Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring, Max Henríquez Ureña, José Manuel Acosta, Rafael Blanco and Enrique Riverón.

Moderator:
Araceli Tinajero, The City College of New York and The Graduate Center

Carlos Riobó (Ph.D., Yale University) is Assistant Professor of Latin American Literature and Cultures at CCNY-CUNY and Cuba Project Fellow of the Bildner Center for Western Hemispheric Studies at CUNY’s Graduate Center. His primary research interests are twentieth-century Cuban and Argentine literature. He has published articles and reviews in major journals on Manuel Puig, Severo Sarduy, Sigüenza y Góngora, nineteenth-century Argentine literature, Ezra Pound, and Italian and Spanish Medieval Literature. His book, Sub-versions of the Archive: Manuel Puig’s and Severo Sarduy’s Alternative Identities (Bucknell University Press) was published in January 2011. His Cuban Intersections of Literary and Urban Spaces (SUNY Press) is forthcoming (October 2011).

Ana María Hernández (Ph.D., New York University) specializes in Caribbean and River Plate studies and teaches Latin American Literature and Culture at LaGuardia Community College and is a Cuba Project Fellow of the Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies at CUNY’s Graduate Center. Her publications have focused on Julio Cortázar, Horacio Quiroga, Julio Herrera y Reissig, Felisberto Hernández and Antonio Benítez Rojo. She has been part of the reviewing staff of World Literature Today since 1977. She received a Focus Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2003 to explore “The African Roots of Latin Music.” Her recent research has focused on the influence of film techniques on contemporary Latin American fiction and on the Ballet Nacional de Cuba.

Araceli Tinajero is an associate professor at The City College of New York and The Graduate Center and is one of the founders of the Mexico Study Group at the Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies. She is the author of Orientalismo en el modernismo hispanoamericano, El lector de tabaquería(in English: El Lector: A History of the Cigar Factory Reader). Tinajero is the editor of Cultura y letras cubanas en el siglo XXI and is currently co-editing Technology and Culture in Twentieth Century Mexico. Her last book, Kokoro, testimonio de una mexicana en Japón is forthcoming.