Handbook on Cuban History, Literature, and the Arts

Routledge, 2014
Authors: Mauricio Font, Araceli Tinajero

This handbook explores key themes in the current debate about Cuba’s contemporary cultural and historical dynamics. Leading academics from Cuba, the United States, and Europe bring to light significant revisions of the artistic and literary canon and the historical archive, and they reconsider often neglected subjects and dynamics in historiography as well as contemporary affairs. The book includes new studies on contentious mobilization, leftist activism, and youth organizations in the pre-revolutionary republic. Current analyses include the relation between the Cuban state and intellectuals; institutional legitimation processes; the formation and reconstruction of national identity discourses; and new framings of gender, race, and sexual orientation. The book illuminates the growing salience of social issues and changes in music, literature, cinema, and theater, thus fostering a fuller understanding of historical and current social dynamics of a Cuba in transformation today.