Social constructionists argue that through narrative human beings create the realities that they subsequently inhabit. Since Cuba first gained its independence, the nation has been beset by a series of historiographical battles in which various political actors have vied for hegemony over Cuba’s past. If the conflicts that occurred in the first half of the twentieth century revolved around attempts by disparate competing factions to confer legitimacy on their respective ideological projects by successfully appropriating the figure of José Marti, then the last fifty years have been characterised by struggles between revolutionary hagiographers and anticommunist revisionists over the true natures of the Batista regime, its Castroite replacement, as well as of the figures of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. This dissertation examines Cuba’s post-Batista linguistic conflict with itself through the lens of social psychology as well as by employing the closely related disciplines of social constructionism, narrative therapy, and bibliotherapy in an attempt to understand what effects the various discourses have had on the nation. After initially teasing out the relationship between draconian censorship and the emergence of an aesthetics of misanthropy, I proceed to illustrate how the works of certain Cuban mystery novelists in the 1990s highlight the need for historiographical reconciliation by gesturing towards the plethora of historical ambiguities that problematised national reconciliation. The fourth and fifth chapters investigate how these narratological contestations play out with respect to the figures of Castro and Guevara. I use narrative mediation to illustrate how, in order for internecine divisions to be eradicated, a more objective biographical approach to these individuals – and one which transcends Manicheanism – is required.  The concluding chapter focuses on how a redemptive literary aesthetics has been marshalled to lift Cuba out of its ontological abyss.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 192-199).

This dissertation traces how Cuban and Angolan novels published in the final decades of the twentieth century engage with the political and artistic projects promoted by and through the post-revolutionary socialist-aligned political systems. The dissertation sustains that there are a collection of textual practices that insert themselves into the official “orthodox” historiographic and literary debates by reconsidering not just historical moments in the past that are central to these debates, but also reference how these moments are written and read from an official point of view. By employing tactics of ironic citation, parody and anachronism, these works not only comment upon official readings of history and demands of post-revolutionary literature, but they also reveal “silences,” to use Rolph-Trouillot’s term, in the literary corpus and in the experiences of Angolan and Cuban people that these alternative corpuses represent. Through revision of official discourses, they present an alternative reading of present subjects’ interactions with the past. These practices, which together I have termed “poetics of disappointment,” allow an intervention into the discussions surrounding both the production and the criticism of contemporary Cuban and Angolan literatures from a variety of political perspectives. The dissertation analyzes Cubans Alejo Carpentier’s La consagración de la primavera, Reinaldo Arenas’ La loma del ángel and Eliseo Alberto’s Caracol Beach as well as Angolans Manuel Rui’s Memória de mar, J. E. Agualusa’s Nação crioula and Boaventura Cardoso’s Mãe, materno mar. On one hand, these works recall the monumental events that the Cuban Revolution and Angolan independence represented, evoking a collective optimism and sense of community forged among pueblos/ povos in the processes of decolonization and promoting movements for social justice. On the other hand, the novels analyzed point out the limits of programmatic interpretations of post-revolutionary history. Demonstrating positions of discomfort with the notions of messianic immanence, idealized racial synthesis and the aftermaths of violence and displacement that official sources rarely document, these novels both privilege and question literary creation as a way of negotiating this disappointment. / text

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:32:48Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2011-07-29Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T18:07:13Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 maciel_mas_dr_assis.pdf: 1650766 bytes, checksum: e8765694e0af76232dc640bba73ef18f (MD5) / Dentro da área de concentração “Literatura e Vida Social”, sob o prisma da linha de pesquisa “Poéticas do texto literário: cultura e representação (PTL)”, pretende este trabalho, antes, tomando-se como base o romance póstumo El color del verano (1991), do escritor cubano exilado Reinaldo Arenas (1943-1990), analisar a(s) construção(ões) identitária(s) homoerótica(s) masculina(s). Partimos, para tanto, nesse percurso, de teóricos como Jacob Stockinger (1978) e David William Foster (2000), dentre outros, cujos textos apontam na direção de uma ars poetica homotextual consciente, sobretudo, a partir da segunda metade do século XX, diferente do pensamento de muitos para os quais se trata tão somente de um leitmotiv e esteja mais para o conteúdo e menos para a forma. A pesquisa, por fim, não deixa de vislumbrar, outrossim, os mecanismos narrativos que estruturam a referida obra do autor holguineiro, dentre eles, destacamos a intertextualidade, isto é, o diálogo com outros textos e autores alheios, a intratextualidade, ou seja, o diálogo constante consigo mesmo e com seus próprios textos bem como, também, por derradeiro, a extratextualidade, isto é, o diálogo constante e as referências, dentro do texto, à cultura e história cubanas e latinoamericanas / In the area of concentration “Literature and Social Life”, under the aspect of the line of search “Poetics of the literary text: culture and representation (PLT)”, intends this work, before, having as a base the posthumous novel El color del verano (1991), by the exilian cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas (1943-1990), to analyze the male homoerotic identity construction. We started, therefore, in this trajectory, of theorists as Jacob Stockinger (1978) and David William Foster (2000), among others, which texts point to the direction of a conscious homotextual ars poetica, specially, from the second half of the twentieth century, against of the thoughts of many people who things this is just a leitmovit and is more to the content than to the form. So, this search discerns indistinctly, besides, the narrative mechanisms which structure this narrated work of the holguinerian author, among them, we detach the intertextuality, that is, the dialogue with other foreign texts and authors, the intratextuality, that is, the constant dialogue with themselves and with their own texts, as well as conclusive, the extratextuality, that is, the constant dialogue and the references, inside the text, to the culture and Cuban and Latin-American history.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 239-260). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

This dissertation reassesses the dialogues between the aesthetic and cultural projects of Cuban writer José Lezama Lima (1910-1976) and the avant-garde, in both its European and Latin American manifestations. My main assertion is that Lezama Lima’s negative appraisals of the avant-garde are more a symptom of his will-to-power and self-legitimization than a categorical rejection of avant-garde values. My work thus revises the critical consensus that fixates on Lezama Lima’s presumed rejection of the avant-garde by documenting the deep relationships between texts and contexts, that is to say, between his poiesis and the intellectual, artistic and cultural manifestations that conform the late ‘30s and ‘40s Cuban scenario, to which the pervasiveness of European and Latin American avant-garde movements such as muralismo were fundamental. I hence consider Lezama Lima’s intricate engagement with avant-garde manifestations in the visual arts, an essential element in his aesthetics underestimated by critics despite the centrality of the concept of image to his works, and the attention 20th century art and thought gave to vision and visuality, as shown by critics Martin Jay and Mary Ann Caws. My dissertation thus explores the interconnections between intellectual, literary and visual art history in order to demonstrate how, despite his critical pronouncements against the avant-garde’s will-to-novelty and rejection of tradition, Lezama Lima actually incorporates several avant-garde topoi and techniques into his works (such as André Breton’s concept of “objective chance” and Pablo Picasso’s “completive technique”), in direct response to the epistemological shift they embody – a shift that has deeply impacted the contemporary regime of perception and patterns of representation. By driving Lezama Lima’s works back to its original contexts, my dissertation represents an important contribution to Cuban avant-garde criticism and its relationship to the broader cultural context of the avant-garde in Latin America and Europe, dialoguing with recent theories that emphasize the impact of the avant-garde on the establishment of contemporary regime of perception and patterns of representation as well. / text

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Kentucky, 2004. / Title from document title page (viewed Jan. 7, 2005). Document formatted into pages; contains v, 253 p. Includes abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 236-250).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 318-346).

Orientador: Antonio Roberto Esteves / Banca: Altamir Botoso / Banca: Rodrigo Vasconcelos Machado / Banca: Maria Dolores Aybar Ramirez / Banca: Orlando Nunes de Amorim / Resumo: Dentro da área de concentração "Literatura e Vida Social", sob o prisma da linha de pesquisa "Poéticas do texto literário: cultura e representação (PTL)", pretende este trabalho, antes, tomando-se como base o romance póstumo El color del verano (1991), do escritor cubano exilado Reinaldo Arenas (1943-1990), analisar a(s) construção(ões) identitária(s) homoerótica(s) masculina(s). Partimos, para tanto, nesse percurso, de teóricos como Jacob Stockinger (1978) e David William Foster (2000), dentre outros, cujos textos apontam na direção de uma ars poetica homotextual consciente, sobretudo, a partir da segunda metade do século XX, diferente do pensamento de muitos para os quais se trata tão somente de um leitmotiv e esteja mais para o conteúdo e menos para a forma. A pesquisa, por fim, não deixa de vislumbrar, outrossim, os mecanismos narrativos que estruturam a referida obra do autor holguineiro, dentre eles, destacamos a intertextualidade, isto é, o diálogo com outros textos e autores alheios, a intratextualidade, ou seja, o diálogo constante consigo mesmo e com seus próprios textos bem como, também, por derradeiro, a extratextualidade, isto é, o diálogo constante e as referências, dentro do texto, à cultura e história cubanas e latinoamericanas / Abstract: In the area of concentration "Literature and Social Life", under the aspect of the line of search "Poetics of the literary text: culture and representation (PLT)", intends this work, before, having as a base the posthumous novel El color del verano (1991), by the exilian cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas (1943-1990), to analyze the male homoerotic identity construction. We started, therefore, in this trajectory, of theorists as Jacob Stockinger (1978) and David William Foster (2000), among others, which texts point to the direction of a conscious homotextual ars poetica, specially, from the second half of the twentieth century, against of the thoughts of many people who things this is just a leitmovit and is more to the content than to the form. So, this search discerns indistinctly, besides, the narrative mechanisms which structure this narrated work of the holguinerian author, among them, we detach the intertextuality, that is, the dialogue with other foreign texts and authors, the intratextuality, that is, the constant dialogue with themselves and with their own texts, as well as conclusive, the extratextuality, that is, the constant dialogue and the references, inside the text, to the culture and Cuban and Latin-American history. / Doutor

The history of Latin America and the Caribbean was irreversibly altered by the arrival of the conquistadors, destruction of native civilizations and implementation of colonialism for hundreds of years. However, Spain also introduced the high culture of the baroque to Latin America and the Caribbean, which mixed with the cultures of native and African peoples, creating new, distinct forms of literary expression. Subsequent post-colonial cultural movements attempted to explore and reaffirm the variety of cultures that shaped both regions, including the movement of Afrocubanismo in Cuba, which occurred from 1910-1940. Afrocubanismo was a movement intended to incorporate African folklore and music into traditional modes of art. While many authors and artists were instrumental to Afrocubanismo, Nicolás Guillén is considered to be the most influential author of the movement, due to his new and inventive style of poetry that incorporated both Spanish and African influences. This study will demonstrate how Guillén’s use of traditional poetic forms, the son and portrayal of everyday Afro-Cuban life reveal his vision for a post-colonial, transcultured Cuban society, rather than a Cuba subject to colonialism and acculturation.