Lydia Cabrera, the acclaimed 20th-century Cuban writer and ethnographer, is widely recognized for her pioneering studies, beginning in the 1920s, of Afro-Cuban religions and cultures. The broad scope of her contribution to Cuban culture, one that encompasses both Cuba’s African and European cultural heritage, however, has been all but overlooked in critical studies. Often categorized as either fiction or ethnography, Cabrera’s work tends to be dismantled and the various pieces, when not altogether ignored, relegated to critical study from distinct academic disciplines (anthropology and literary studies, and to a lesser extent, lexicography and ethnomusicology). In this study I set aside these disciplinary distinctions by viewing the different parts of Cabrera’s career as a coherent whole. In conjunction with her Afro-Cuban story collections and her extensive ethnographic work documenting Afro-Cuban cultures, which produced not only El monte but also dictionaries and glossaries of Afro-Cuban languages and traditions, I examine Cabrera’s lesser known projects related to Cuba’s colonial European cultural foundations, and particularly her work on decorative arts and the restoration and curation of Cuba’s colonial architecture. I argue that these apparently unrelated and even conflicting facets of her career are not only related but in fact indivisible. To bring together her work on Afro-Cuba and her work on Cuba’s Spanish colonial history, I address two physical and conceptual spaces that overlap and intersect in Cabrera’s career as they do in Cuban culture: the vieja casa criolla, or the traditional Cuban home, and the monte—the sacred ancestral forest. Part I of my study centers on the vieja casa criolla, an intimate and majestic space characterized by Spanish colonial architecture, period furniture and decorative arts. I use the concept of the vieja casa criolla broadly to include religious architecture and artistic traditions associated with Cuba’s Spanish colonial influences. I propose that Cabrera’s work to conserve Spanish colonial architecture and antiques beginning in the 1920s and continuing through the 1950s was not an aberration in her career but integral to her effort to create a living archive of Cuba’s cultural history, both African and European. In the same way that she painstakingly documented Afro-Cuban religions, oral traditions, and cultural practices, she worked to conserve, restore and promote Cuba’s European material culture. Part II of my study focuses on the physical and textual spaces of the monte in Cabrera’s work and in Afro-Cuban culture. I explore the monte (the place) in Cabrera’s fiction and ethnographic writing and move into a discussion of El monte (the book). As the home to Afro-Cuban spirits and the source of traditions and ritual objects, I demonstrate that the monte mirrors Cuba’s casa criolla and religious architecture. Accordingly, in El monte and its complementary studies of Afro-Cuban liturgical languages and customs Cabrera curates the plants and mythology of the monte in the same way that she does her art and antique exhibitions. Cabrera’s conservation of colonial architecture and her documentation of Afro-Cuban religions and cultures together represent integral components for understanding and preserving Cuba’s cultural history.

My dissertation delineates the Dominican intelligentsia’s collecting of unofficial archives from the local bourgeoisie’s emergence after the Restoration of independence from Spain in 1865 through the Dominican State’s consolidation as a sovereign entity in the 1920s. By unofficial archives bourgeois actors meant, from foundational writer Manuel de Jesús Galván and first national historian José Gabriel García to scholars Pedro Henríquez Ureña and Abigaíl Mejía, private or nonofficial repositories, real or metaphoric, containing anything from personal belongings and printed works to unclaimed ruins. In dialogue with Walter Benjamin, Michel-Rolph Trouillot and Pierre Bourdieu, I show how in the Dominican context the use of authorized and state knowledge lagged behind that of informal, object-based knowledge. In doing so, “The Unofficial Archive” questions traditional understandings of the archive in intellectual history—Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault—as well as in Performance, Caribbean, and Latin American studies, reassessing the foundational role that a lack of records played in postcolonial archives during nation-building. Chapter one introduces my reading of “archives.” Because Foucault and Derrida consider physical files and intellectual ideas separately, I contend that their methods account insufficiently for postcolonial archives, where material records and ideas are inextricably intertwined. To trace how the materiality of archives produce national habits and traditions the second chapter centers on the 1877 discovery of Christopher Columbus’s relics. As my close reading of historical works such as historian Emiliano Tejera’s Los restos de Colón en Santo Domingo (1878) shows, this recognition prompted supporters of the relics’ authenticity to create a national narrative describing the pillage and loss of the country’s archives, and to popularize this narrative through reproductions in print, visual, and architectural media like the 1898 Columbus Mausoleum in Santo Domingo’s Cathedral. In my third chapter, I examine how prominent bourgeois actors such as the Sociedad Amigos del País used the tradition about the missing archives to legitimize a national literature and historiography leading nation-building by creating unofficial archives in fiction, nonfiction, and printed ephemera. I read García’s Compendio de la historia de Santo Domingo (1867-1906) together with Galván’s Enriquillo: leyenda histórica dominicana, 1503-1533 (1882) as unofficial archives that meditate upon what it meant to the Dominican nation that its archives remained wanting. My fourth chapter analyzes the nationalization of colonial ruins as unofficial archives by the intellectual bourgeoisie as a means for the group to continue gaining power and to fight U.S. imperialism from the post-Restoration through the U.S. military intervention (1916-1924). I focus on the anti-colonial origins of a national archaeology in the work of Alejandro Llenas Julia, Pedro Henríquez Ureña’s philosophical writings on the ruin in Horas de Estudio (1910), and the use of the edifices by intellectuals such as Max Henríquez Ureña to stir an international cultural debate during the occupation in order to defend the country’s right to sovereignty. I conclude with the government’s gradual appropriation and display of unofficial archives during the 1927 inauguration of the National Museum as described in press articles by Abigail Mejía, which resulted in a political iconography that I call a “bric-à-brac” that officially stages the national archives as half-finished. Under this official lens, a new generation of intellectuals used the lack of records to sustain the hispanicist rule of Rafael L. Trujillo (1930-1961) on the idea that he would be the one to protect the nation’s heritage. This dissertation brings together historical and material culture studies from a hemispheric point of view and bridges critical Caribbean and Latin American studies. From a Caribbean perspective, the project challenges Archival Studies to consider non-Western forms of archive emerging out of colonial contexts that remain unaddressed in scholarship about the origin of modern state archives in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “The Unofficial Archive” brings new insights into transnational debates on cultural heritage, its corruption and plunder, and into the social aftermath of colonial governance and state coercion. It urges scholars to address the long-term effects that conflicts over the inalienability of historical treasures have had in former colonies and Empires, and to ponder the role that advances in technology have had in the democratization of the past and the shaping of race and gender identities from modern times to the present. Ultimately, this research reveals how individual citizens who were ignored by or disagreed with official politics used unconfirmed knowledge and information networks to prevail upon officialdom on matters concerning human rights, universal truth, and the meaning of nationhood.

Dancing a duet with my shadow by integrating dance and digital media in an elaborate and entertaining performance.

acase@tulane.edu / 1 / Joseph E Hiller

The dissertation “Ambigüedades éticas y estéticas: La narrativa peruana contemporánea y la violencia política” explores the complex relationship of literature and the recent history of Peru by analyzing ideological positions expressed in three novels, Alonso Cueto’s La hora azul (2005), Santiago Roncagliolo’s Abril rojo (2006), and Daniel Alarcón’s Radio Ciudad Perdida (2007), and in a collection of short stories, Jorge Eduardo Benavides’ La noche de Morgana (2005). This dissertation discusses how these authors employ different literary discourses (detective fiction, literature of the fantastic and the dystopian novel) to recreate artistically the period of internal conflict, as well as the ethical perspectives that each artistic option entails. The analysis continues a long tradition of scholarship in Latin American Literary Studies that examines the way in which history is (re)presented and questioned in literature. By comparing the writings of Peruvian authors based in different cultural areas (Peru, Spain and the United States), this study proposes an original approach to these works which also considers the concept of ‘Peruvian Literature’ (‘National Literature’) in this age of globalization and the ever-expanding Andean diaspora.

El propósito del ensayo siguiente será analizar el contraste entre Jorge Luis Borges y Roberto Arlt en cuanto a sus distintos construcciones literarias del mundo porteño por medio de un estudio cuidadoso de sus varios textos. Después de un poco de contexto histórico y biográfico sobre los dos autores examinados, la comparación entre ellos se centra primero en la obra temprana de Borges (la poesía, unos ensayos) y las crónicas y obras teatrales de Arlt (sus Aguafuertes porteñas, Trescientos millones). Luego, se examina los cuentos de ambos autores y como reflejan sus perspectivas diferentes de Buenos Aires durante la época tumultuosa de los años veinte y treinta.

My thesis is a creative expression in poetry about my study abroad experience in Chile. During my time in Chile I traveled all over the country and tried to experience as much of the culture as possible. These poems speak of different parts of the country that I visited and different cultural aspects to which I was exposed. The work also includes photos from my travels to accompany several of my poems. This thesis was written with the hope that others might be able to better understand my semester in Chile.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI/Dissertation Abstracts International.

The Paris-based literary magazine Mundo Nuevo disseminated some of the most original and experimental Latin American writing from 1966--the date of its founding--to 1968, the year its editor-in-chief resigned and the magazine moved to Buenos Aires. Despite its fame, the magazine's role in the Boom and the cultural Cold War has been misunderstood by critics, who have either viewed Mundo Nuevo as a tool for CIA propaganda (it was recipient of CIA funds for two years) or non-political, avant-garde magazine. Mundo Nuevo's founding editor, Emir Rodríguez Monegal, saw the magazine as an outlet for turning Latin American literature in world literature. Mundo Nuevo published essays, interviews and fiction from such writers as Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Because its funding has been traced back to the CIA-sponsored Congress for Cultural Freedom, Mundo Nuevo has also been a lightning rod for political controversy. Since the magazine's inception, Cuban intellectuals denounced Mundo Nuevo as "imperialist propaganda" for the U.S. government. Although Monegal insisted on calling Mundo Nuevo "a magazine of dialogue," it was both financially and ideologically linked to European and American liberalism, which sought, in Arthur Schlesinger's words, to assert "the ultimate integrity, of the individual." Mundo Nuevo's stance toward Cuba became evident in editorials against the repression of artists in Cuba, as well as in the publishing of works by writers who found themselves at odds with the cultural politics of the new regime and in the publication of feature articles highlighting the economic failures of the Revolution. I argue that Mundo Nuevo was neither an instrument of "Yankee imperialism"--as Roberto Fernández Retamar called it in Casa de las Américas--nor a disinterested, politically non-committed "magazine of dialogue," as the journal's editor often claimed. As much of the material from the archives in the Congress for Cultural Freedom demonstrates, Mundo Nuevo was set up by the Congress as a bulwark against the Cuban Revolution, and used the rhetoric of disinterested, cosmopolitan literature to counter the Revolution's model of literature engagée.e / text

“Indigenousness and the Reconstruction of the Other in Guatemalan Indigenous Literature” examines the production of a contemporary Indigenous literature in Guatemala. With the aid of a multidisciplinary approach informed by cultural, feminist, gender, socio-anthropological, and postcolonial studies, I analyze the emergence and ongoing struggle of Maya writers in Guatemala to show how the production of an alternate ideology contests official notions of nationhood and promotes a more inclusive space. I argue that Maya writers redefine Indigenous identity by reinstating Indigenous agency and self-determination, and deconstructing and rearticulating ethnicity, class and gender, among other markers of identity. I begin by examining the indio as the basis of colonial and national narratives that logically organize the Guatemalan nation. I then observe the emergence of a contemporary Indigenous literature in Guatemala in the 1970s, a literature that, I argue, isolates and contests the position that was assigned to the indio and proposes a literature written by and for the Indigenous peoples of Guatemala. I posit that the inauguration of a Maya cultural space occurs with Luis de Lión’s novel El tiempo principia en Xibalbá (1985) and Gaspar Pedro González’ La otra cara (1992). I then observe the destabilization of traditional Maya female roles and symbols in the recent work of female Indigenous poets, Calixta Gabriel Xiquín and Maya Cu. Lastly, in the work of Víctor Montejo and Humberto Ak’abal I identify a negotiation of heterogeneity and essentialism for the development of a cultural project that looks to the formation of a pluricultural, plurinational Guatemalan state.