Minima Cuba

Marta Hernández Salván

Description

2016 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

Mínima Cuba analyzes the reconfiguration of aesthetics and power during the Cuban postrevolutionary transition (1989 to 2005, the conclusion of the "Special Period"). It explores the marginal cultural production on the island by the first generation of intellectuals born during the Revolution. The author studies the work of postrevolutionary poets and essayists Antonio José Ponte, Rolando Sánchez Mejías, and Iván de la Nuez, among others. In their writing we find the exhaustion of the allegorical and melancholic rhetoric of the Cuban Revolution, and the poetics of irony developed in the current biopolitical era. The book will appeal to anyone interested in contemporary literary and cultural studies, poetics, and film studies in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. Sovereignty of Violence

2. Violence and Melancholia in the Eighties and Nineties

3. Biopolitics and the Revival of José Lezama Lima in the Eighties and Nineties

4. Humanism, Irony, and the End of Literature

Afterword
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Sujets

• Latin American
• América del Sur
• South America
• Latin America
• History of the Americas
• Central America
• SS Central America
• Caribbean

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 30 juin 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438456713
• Langue: English

Extrait

Mínima Cuba
SUNY SERIES IN L ATIN A MERICAN AND I BERIAN T HOUGHT AND C ULTURE
Jorge J. E. Gracia and Rosemary Geisdorfer Feal, editors
Mínima Cuba

H ERETICAL P OETICS AND P OWER IN P OST -S OVIET C UBA
MARTA HERNÁNDEZ SALVÁN
Cover photograph: Untitled , Lissette Solórzano, from Ferro Carril Series, 2002.
Published by
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS
Albany
© 2015 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact
State University of New York Press
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Laurie D. Searl
Marketing, Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hernández Salván, Marta, 1970- author.
Mínima Cuba : Heretical Poetics and Power in Post-Soviet Cuba / Marta Hernández Salván.
pages cm. — (SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5669-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-5671-3 (e-book)
1. Cuban literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Irony in literature. 3. Poetics. 4. Cuba—History—Revolution, 1959—Influence. I. Title.
PQ7378.H48 2015
860.9 97291—dc23
2014027654
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my mother, Elvira, and Marc
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Sovereignty of Violence
2. Violence and Melancholia in the Eighties and Nineties
3. Biopolitics and the Revival of José Lezama Lima in the Eighties and Nineties
4. Humanism, Irony, and the End of Literature
Afterword
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments
This book, and my scholarly endeavors in general, would not exist without the help of my mentors and dear friends Alberto Moreiras and Teresa Vilarós who believed in me and transformed my exile into the most thrilling intellectual adventure of my life. I hope that my love of Cuba will come out of the many pages of this book, especially as a tribute to all of the friends who have offered their hospitality, their invaluable knowledge and help during my travels: Carlos A. Aguilera, Araceli Carranza, Caridad Cumaná, Ambrosio Fornet, Jorge Fornet, Víctor Fowler, Juan Carlos Flores, Caridad Tamayo, Mayra López, Pedro Marqués de Armas, Desiderio Navarro, Antonio José Ponte, Omar Pérez, Ricardo A. Pérez, Soleída Ríos, Reina María Rodríguez, Rafael Rojas.
Also, I am deeply indebted to my dear friends and mentors who have patiently read and commented on chapters, offered their support, and written letters on my behalf: Ben Heller, Juan Carlos Quintero-Herencia, Ernesto Laclau, Jacqueline Loss, Juan Pablo Lupi, César Salgado, Enrico M. Santí, Gabriel Trop, Gareth Williams, Esther Withfield, Raúl Fernández. Throughout the years, my project has taken shape thanks to intellectual exchanges with friends and colleagues Susan Antebi, Sonja Bertucci, Oscar Cabezas, Alessandro Fornazzari, Erin Graff, Kate Jenckes, Toby Miller, Vorris Nunley, Rachel Price, Juan Carlos Rodríguez, Freya Schiwy. Many of them have also provided helpful feedback of my work.
I extend my deepest gratitude to my editor Alex Martin for his infinite patience, careful editing, and beautiful translations of the poems. It has been extremely gratifying to work with Beth Bouloukos and production editor Laurie Searl, the editors at SUNY Press. I am really thankful for their diligence, patience, and assistance throughout the editing process. I would also like to thank Lissette Solórzano for the cover picture that so hauntingly speaks to my book.
A different kind of acknowledgment goes to my family: my mother Elvira, who taught me resilience, and my father Rodolfo, my brother Javier, and my nephews Elvira, Guillermo, Jorge, and Pablo, without whom nothing would be worth it. To Marc, I owe it all.
I thank the publishers for permission to republish the following essays, which appeared previously as follows: An earlier version of chapter 2 appeared as “A Requiem for a Chimera: Poetics of the Cuban Post- Revolution,” in Revista de Estudios Hispánicos XLIII, no. 3 (2009): 149–69. Portions of chapter 1 were originally published in “Heterodox Marxism,” in The New Centennial Review 12, no. 2 (Fall 2012): 151–82. A short section of chapter 4 appeared as “Out of History,” in Revista hispánica moderna 64 (June 2011): 81–96.
Introduction
In October 1988, as part of a larger performance ( 9 Alquimistas y un ciego [ 9 Alchemists and a Blind Man ]), the art group Arte Calle spread out a large portrait of Ernesto Che Guevara that covered most of Havana’s L Gallery floor. On each side of the painting were written the words: “Hecho historia o hecho tierra [Victory or Defeat].” Right above the painting, there was another inscription reading: “¿Dónde estás Caballero Bayardo? [Where are you, Sir Bayard?].” This work, one of the bravest and most critical examples of the period, presupposes and calls into question the dominant ideological tendencies of the visual arts during the eighties in Cuba. In point of fact, the painting was challenging the legacy of the most popular and beloved revolutionary hero, and by extension the revolution and the fatherland. In addition, it was also criticizing one of the mythical poems written in homage to Che Guevara. “Where are you, Sir Bayard” was the first line of “Canción antigua a Che Guevara [Old Song to Che Guevara],” a conversationalist poem written by Mirta Aguirre one month after Guevara’s death on October 9, 1967 (Aguirre 1979, 9). The fact that it had been written to commemorate the first month of his death sought to render its own subject just as iconic as the hero to which it alluded. Pierre Terraill de Bayard, a sixteenth-century French knight, was the subject of a popular legend, “Chevalier sans peur et sans reproche [Caballero sin miedo y sin tacha, Fearless Knight beyond Reproach]”—a title that was included by Aguirre as the poem’s second line.
Let us shift the focus to nine years later. In 1997, Tania Bruguera—one of the iconic artists of the earlier generation—gives her first performance of El peso de la culpa ( The Burden of Guilt ). She had begun her career by making a very engaged form of art, Memoria de la postguerra , consisting of a collage of news from all types of sources, even Miami papers such as the New Miami Herald . The second issue, which was published in 1994, raised the sensitive topic of migration (especially referring to the balseros, or rafters, who had left the island by the thousands that same year). The paper was censored before it could be distributed, and Bruguera resumed her artistic activity by shifting to solo performance, transforming her body itself into a site of suffering (Weiss 2011, 232–33). In her open house, for a piece entitled Estadísticas (1996–98), Bruguera posed in front of a twelve-foot Cuban flag made out of human hair. A slaughtered lamb hung from her body, and she consumed small balls of moist soil taken from dishes filled with salted water. These actions actually refer to a legend in which the indigenous Cuban population ate soil to commit suicide and thereby performed an act of passive resistance against the Spanish invaders (Mosquera 2009).
We have here two very different performances with similar resonances. Both of them respond to the heroic mythology present in the revolutionary poetry of the sixties and seventies, a mythology exemplified by Aguirre’s poem. The ironic and comic tone of the Arte Calle’s performance poses a stark contrast with the poignant agony of Bruguera’s actions. Bruguera embodies the revolutionary idea of sacrifice. She not only reenacts the gesture of suicide as self-immolation or resistance, but also takes the sacrifices of others upon her like a burdensome weight, initiating a never-ending cycle of guilt and responsibility. Aguirre’s and Bruguera’s representations of sacrifice speak of two different temporalities and understandings of violence and power, the complexity of which is the subject of this book. Whereas Aguirre’s sacrifice consists in a bloody, raucous, and imposing trauma, Bruguera’s appears submissive and silent. Aguirre’s poem demands that revolutionary blood provide water for the soil, ultimately culminating in the life of a new fatherland: “Dónde estás, caballero el más fuerte/ … /En la sangre, en el polvo, en la herida/ … /Hecho saga en la muerte que muero;/hecho historia, señora, hecho historia” (Aguirre 1979, 9). 1 For Bruguera’s generation, however, the source of blood has dried up; it can no longer flow and give rise to filial relationships. Indeed, the performance, as well as Bruguera’s generation’s relation to sacrifice, culminates in a form of abjection, as Bruguera’s performing an ingestion of soil indicates. “Comer tierra” (eating soil) not only alludes to the indigenous population’s legend, it also points to its meaning in Cuban slang “to suffer hardship