This dissertation studies the creative practices of citizens who use cultural resources to engage in political criticism in contemporary Cuba. I argue that, in order to become visible as political subjects in the public sphere, these citizens appeal to cultural forms and narratives of self-representation that elucidate the struggles for recognition faced by emerging social actors. I examine blogs, garage bands, art performances, home art exhibits, digital literary supplements, improvised academies, and informal networks of publication that, as forms of aesthetic experimentation with stories of everyday life, disclose a social text. I suggest that their narrative choices emphasize their status as 'regular citizens' in order to distinguish themselves from both traditional voices of political opposition and institutionally accredited cultural producers--professional artists, academics, musicians. This recasts sites of cultural production as models of alternative citizenship where the concept of the political is re-imagined and where the commonplace, pejorative meaning of the term amateur is contested. On the fringes of the republic of letters, adjacent to traditional sites of cultural production, these oblique uses of culture consequently question legitimate forms of public speech. They demand that the way in which the relationship between aesthetics and politics in Cuba has been traditionally studied be reconsidered. Read in tandem with discourses against and about them from the lettered city--in literature, cultural criticism, film, and visual arts--I also follow the trope of the amateur under revolutionary cultural politics. I suggest that these contemporary voices have a contradictory genealogy in the cultural practices of the early decades of the Cuban Revolution. I try to show that these cultural practices become politically and socially significant because they try to resist--though not always successfully--cooptation by two forces: the remnant of bureaucratic, state-capitalist tendencies on one hand, and the rapid commercialization of popular culture for a foreign audience on the other. As a result, both the reconfigurations of the cultural field and the contested meanings of democracy in post-Cold War Cuba are re-examined through a reading of informal hubs of cultural production. The functions of culture in late socialism can be then comparatively studied by looking at an institutional framework in transition through the social and political subjectivities that are both expressed in, and constituted by, corresponding aesthetic practices and forms.

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in African Languages. Wits University, Johannesburg, 2015 / This report interrogates the representation of blackness in post-1994 black-centred films in South Africa. With a particular focus on Khalo Matabane’s films, I analyse Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon (2005), When We Were Black (2007) and State of Violence (2011) across a spectrum of themes. I also interrogate and introduce several critical concepts such as ‘blackness’, ‘the image of blackness’, ‘black identity’, ‘masculinity’, ‘femininity’, ‘the Gaze’ and ‘Otherness’. These concepts are interlinked in ways that bring about an understanding of the concept of black-centred films, which is central to the research report. Amidst the different interpretations of black-centred films, the vantage point from which the concept is used is interested in black-centred films as films that are made by a black filmmaker, whose content addresses issues of blackness and is targeted at a black audience. However, these three factors need not always resonate in a single film in order for it to be considered and analysed as a black-centred film. The lens through which Matabane holds the camera questions his representation of the black image and whether it is from an insider or outsider’s perspective. The view from which Matabane holds the camera is important in establishing whether he has purported to represent historically stereotypical images of blackness, or whether his endeavours in filmmaking are occupied by the relentless pursuit to present new images of blackness.