Fighting the Opposition: Lack and Excess in Cuban and Cuban-American Narratives of Selfhood

This essay presents a comparative discussion of two novels — one Cuban, one Cuban-American and both by women writers — that examines the roles played by the oppositional tropes of lack and excess in their respective portrayals of post-revolutionary Cuban female identities. Zoé Valdés’ La nada cotidiana (1995) and Dreaming in Cuban by are examined here via three shared thematic concerns — food, the female gendered body, and artistic expression — in which portrayals of lack and excess serve as vehicles for revealing and negotiating the oppositions often identified as inherent to the ‘Cuban condition’. Ultimately, I argue, these two literary works challenge the simplistic dualisms often used as paradigms for demarcating female Cuban identities in the post-1959 context, both within the national border and throughout the Cuban-American diaspora.     

Psychological Distress of Cuban Americans Affected by Restrictive U.S. Travel Policies

We describe the mental health consequences of United States travel policies affecting Cuban Americans (CAs) with relatives in Cuba and discuss these policies in the context of U.S. domestic politics and the Bush administration's desire for regime change in Cuba. Policies put into effect in 2004 restrict CAs from visiting relatives in Cuba more than once every 3 years, narrowly define family whom CAs can legally visit, and limit the assistance they can provide their Cuban relatives. We share case reports based on qualitative interviews with 53 Cuban Americans that illustrate travel-related psychological distress (TRPD) experienced by CAs in response to the restrictions. We note the difficulties CAs experience in coping with TRPD and the need for political and mental health interventions to address this condition. TRPD is directly related to the government's violation of the human and constitutional rights of CAs to travel freely. It is the responsibility of the state to restore those rights. Human services professionals should oppose TRPD as antithetical to family well-being.     

The use of cultural repertoires of everyday nationhood and citizenship in national identity boundary-drawing: The case of Syrian refugees in Turkey

Elaborating on salient contextual factors, such as historical conditions, national history, militarised masculinity, and language, this study looks at how repertoires of everyday nationhood are deployed in relation to boundary-drawing in the context of the recent refugee influx in Turkey. Drawing on ethnographic observations, semi-structured interviews and focus groups with ordinary Turkish citizens in Adana, this paper sheds light on the complexities of everyday understandings of citizenship and nationhood with regards to the emergence of ‘insider versus outsiders’ notions. Results suggest that ordinary citizens evoke various notions of nationhood in everyday life in drawing boundaries against ‘outsiders’ (i.e., refugees) by deploying historically rooted national identity constructions (militaristic, unitary) and symbols (language, flag). This article, therefore, reveals a national identity boundary-drawing mechanism involving widespread adherence to a militarised sense of nationhood, related more to other ideas of belonging than ethnicity. It further indicates that ordinary citizens, in their narratives, link such constructions and symbols with historical and current political contexts (e.g., the conflict between Turks and Arabs during WW1, or; current military operations in Syria).     

Deciphering the modern Janus: societal multiplicity and nation-formation

ABSTRACT

How to theorize the nation’s Janus-like form, its simultaneous modernity and antiquity? This paper provides an original answer to this longstanding question. It argues that nations arise from the interaction of ‘societal multiplicity’ and the expansionist tendency of historical capitalism. The emergence of capitalism super-adds a modern inflection to the inherently relational process of collective identity formation by generating modern sovereignty as an abstract form of rule. Crucially however, just like its emergence, capitalism’s expansion also refracts through societal multiplicity. Non-capitalist societies are therefore pressured into ‘nationalist’ projects of emulative self-preservation in which the nation’s political form (i.e. the sovereign state) is forged before its sociological content (i.e. primitive accumulation). Thus, the original site of this process, France, produced the modular nation-form that unlike Britain’s imperial nationhood could be globalized. The paper therefore shows that IR’s premise of multiplicity may be the key to one of social sciences’ most enduring puzzles.     

ANA MENDIETA AND THE POLITICS OF THE VENUS NEGRA

The theorizations by some early feminists of the affiliation between Earth and woman, the ‘archetype of the Great Goddess’, and the ‘universal female’, are today regarded with embarrassment as essentializing, ultimately disempowering gestures. This article examines a 1981 project by Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta for the feminist art journal Heresies. In this project she combines a photograph of one of her own earthworks with her translation of the nineteenth-century Cuban legend The Venus Negra. By investigating this legend in the context of nineteenth-century Cuban nationalism, and this earthwork in terms of twentieth-century US/Latino politics, this article argues that the Earth is not necessarily the essential category it appears to be. It claims that the discursive deployment of the Earth - the nation's primitive Other - subverts ideologies of the nation and contributes to its performative renegotiation. Further, it suggests that, in using this legend to disrupt the hegemonic construction of nation, both the legend's authors and its contemporary translator play with the performativity of both gender and race.     

Grieving for mestizaje: alternative approaches to Maya identity in Yucatan,Mexico

This article takes as its point of departure the highly contested theoretical terrain of ‘Maya’ identity in Yucatan, Mexico. Set in the physical terrain of a state psychiatric hospital, this article uses a framework of identity culled from the narrative of a young woman, ‘Claudina’, committed to its wards, to argue that being ‘in-between’ categories of ethnic identity, an experience she characterises as a painful sense of ambiguous loss, can be fruitfully analysed using an analytical framework of ethnic identity introduced by Claudina herself. Specifically, I argue that categories of identity culled from Claudina's story – mestizaje and elegancia – represent a valuable opportunity to think about how power dynamics and relationships operate in situations of ambivalent identities and social suffering. To this end, I use Claudina's language as a point of departure for understanding the lived experience of everyday life in Yucatan today.     

What makes a Gael? Identity,language and ancestry in the Scottish Gàidhealtachd

Scholars know far less about ‘national identity’ than ‘nations’ and ‘nationalism’. The authors argue that the concept is sociologically important and briefly discuss its relationship with language. They examine empirically how people living in the Gàidhealtachd, the area of Scotland associated with Gaelic language and culture, whether they are Gaelic speakers or not, whether incomers or not, go about their territorial identity business. The article shows how respondents’ Gaelic identity relates to their British and Scottish identity; how people living in the Gàidhealtachd assess putative claims to a Gaelic identity based variously on language, residence and ancestry; and how they see the balance between ‘cultural’ and ‘political’ elements in Gaelic. The authors argue that to study ‘what makes a Gael?’ highlights the key role territorial identity plays in connecting social structure to social action, and also that identity provides a set of meanings and understandings through which people experience social structure and feel empowered to act.     

Manacled to Identity: Cosmopolitanism,Class, and ‘The Culture Concept’ in Stephen Crane

Abstract

This article begins with a close reading of Stephen Crane’s short story ‘Manacled’ from 1900, which situates this rarely considered short work within the context of contemporary debates about realism. I then proceed to argue that many of the debates raised by the tale have an afterlife in our own era of American literary studies, which has frequently focused on questions of ‘identity’ and ‘culture’ in its reading of realism and naturalism to the exclusion of the importance of cosmopolitan discourses of diffusion and exchange across national borders. I then offer a brief reading of Crane’s novel George’s Mother, which follows Walter Benn Michaels in suggesting that the recent critical attention paid to particularities of cultural difference in American studies have come to conflate ideas of class and social position with ideas of culture in ways that have ultimately obscured the presence of genuine historical inequalities in US society. In order to challenge this critical commonplace, I situate Crane’s work within a history of transatlantic cosmopolitanism associated with the ideas of Franz Boas and Matthew Arnold to demonstrate the ways in which Crane’s narratives sought out an experience of the universal within their treatments of the particular.     

Jose Marti’s Confederate Affinities

ABSTRACT

Jose Marti examines the American Civil War and the period of Reconstruction through the lens of Cuba’s failed attempts at independence as a way of disenchanting modernizers and annexationists who, seeking rapprochement with the U.S., would compromise South American and, more specifically, Cuban sovereignty. More to the point, as much as Marti draws parallels between Cuba and the U.S. South vis-à-vis Spain and the U.S. North, respectively, his troubling affinity with the Confederacy and the postbellum South chiefly exposes the North’s ideological elision of its imperial project.     

Prisoners of conscience in the Plowshares and School of the Americas Watch movements: the politics of privilege,gender, and religious identity

ABSTRACT

The American peace movement has always been predominantly white and Christian, and this essay makes the privileged identities of nonviolent prisoners of conscience in the Plowshares and School of the Americas Watch movements its analytical starting place. From the axes of gender (female or male) and religious identity (laity or vowed religious), it examines how privilege and experience are understood and animated by movement participants, and how this impacts activist experience. Specifically, it investigates how some prisoners of conscience negotiate and employ their whiteness, education, class, and status as a strategic use of ‘privilege power,’ as well as how the ‘moment of action’ is a gendered experience of empowerment that is shaped by religious identity. The data illuminate the ways that privilege can be a site of intentional contestation and power, while un-examined areas of identity can shape experience in meaningful ways.     

Pulping the Black Atlantic: Chester Himes’ A Case of Rape and the Limits of Expatriation

Abstract

This article examines the early expatriate career of Chester Himes, and his overlooked Paris-set novella A Case of Rape (1956). Scholars have identified postwar Paris as the locus of a ‘Black Atlantic’ cosmopolitanism that allowed African American writers to transcend American racial and literary regimes, and in particular the stigma of black ‘protest’ fiction. By contrast, this article argues that Himes’ exile was paradoxical; defined by an exchange, rather than an ‘exceeding’ of American racial and literary stigmas. First, I explore the fetishistic racial politics that energized the Left Bank’s construction of black expatriates as symbols of individualist, masculine, and specifically western transgression. Second, I examine the way in which A Case of Rape, and its narrative of the false conviction of four African American expatriates for rape, dramatizes this paradox. With supreme irony, the novella sees the expatriate celebrity merge with a central symbol of the African American ‘protest’ novel: the black male rapist of white women. Finally, I argue that A Case of Rape is of particular importance for the ways in which it anticipates Himes’ move into pulp fiction. Like his later detective series, A Case of Rape captures Himes’ own disillusionment with conventional notions of authorial autonomy, and literary instrumentality. I conclude that expatriation worked to galvanize, rather than displace, Himes’ interest in the overdetermination of African American literature within dominant western racial discourses.     

Curative fictions: The ‘narrative cure’ in Judith Herman's trauma and recovery and Chantal Chawaf's Le Manteau noir

Abstract

The possibility of a so‐called ‘narrative cure’, whereby a survivor of traumatic experience can begin to deal with her past through integrating it into narrative, has become central both to psychotherapy and to literary criticism on writings of trauma as a means of ethical, ‘truthful’ testimony and of healing. This article seeks to question the correlation between testimony and ‘cure’ through analysing the function of the ‘narrative cure’ in a psychotherapeutic text and in a literary text. This highlights how any notion of ‘truthful’ testimony is always underwritten by fiction, which raises crucial ethical questions about the relation between fiction and ‘truth’, testimony and ‘cure’ and psychotherapy and literature. I argue that the ‘narrative cure’ is not a privileged space of curative ‘truth’, but a point of tension between memory and amnesia and between ‘truth’ and fiction; it is precisely this tension, I suggest, which should characterize and structure interdisciplinary responses to trauma.     

Depoliticising literature,politicising diversity: ethno-racial boundaries in Dutch literary professionals’ aesthetic repertoires

Although still a neglected area, over the years a growing body of sociological research on the position of ethno-racial minorities in Western artistic fields has emerged. With this article we aim to contribute to this research area by focusing on ethno-racial diversity in the Dutch literary field. Through in-depth interviews, we analyse how gatekeepers mobilise specific cultural repertoires and by doing so draw ethno-racial boundaries when discussing acquisition, assessing quality and positioning themselves in the literary field. We argue that literary publishers and other professionals (selectively) employ an ‘old school’ modernist repertoire that especially values the formal aspects of literary products, by which non-white writers and publishers concerned with diversity are often positioned in an identity politics framework. Their work is said to take in a less prestigious ‘political’/’subjective’ position rather than a ‘literary’/‘universal’ one. As such, this paper informs on how gatekeepers’ practices shape the position of non-white authors in the Dutch literary field.     

Race,Gender, and Class in the Persistence of the Mariel Stigma Twenty Years after the Exodus from Cuba

The study examines the mediating effects of gender, race, and class in the Mariel Cuban immigrant adaptation process. It explores the significance of the Mariel identity by comparing the experiences of pre‐1980 arrivals with those of the Mariel cohort (1980–1981) and post‐Mariel arrivals (1982–1990, 1990–2000). The central question of the study is the extent to which the Marielitos’ experience as a group with stigmatization and being labeled as “different” and pathological has persisted in having a different effect on their adaptation to the U.S. from that of other Cuban arrivals before and after Mariel. This study bases its definition of stigma on sociologically grounded theoretical orientation of the construction of a social identity in which a dominant group(s) attribute an undesired difference from what was anticipated to an out‐group such that it leads to varieties of discrimination that reduce one's life chances.     

‘Keeping it real’: tryhards,clones and youth discourses of authentic identity from Hollywood to high school

Authenticity is a key cultural rubric for youth in the contemporary West. Texts aimed at young people frequently direct viewers to ‘keep it real’, to ‘be themselves’ and to avoid ‘putting up a front’. ‘Being yourself’ is portrayed as a moral achievement, yet also as something subjects should ‘naturally’ be. This article examines how students at an urban high school in Aotearoa/New Zealand conceive of being ‘real’, exploring what they deem to be authentic identity and its expressions. This article considers the students' use of both constructionist ‘surface’ and essentialist ‘depth’ discourses of identity. It examines how the students conceive of authentic identity as both stable and fluid, anchored in bodily experience and produced at the moment of recognition by others. It argues that through the production of the figures of the ‘clone’ and the ‘tryhard’, the students resolve the tension created by their positioning of identity as inseparable from the gaze of others and their view that to live for others is inauthentic. The students distance themselves from the behaviour of these Others, who they conceive as presenting themselves inauthentically. The students' conceptualisation of authenticity and use of the figures of the clone and the tryhard provides impetus for the positioning of authentic identity as performative, produced through its enactment.     

From world citizenship to purified patriotism: Obama’s nation-shaping in a global era

This analysis responds to two questions in recent scholarship. The first is Ulrich Beck’s call for scholars to empirically explore how nationhood is evolving in a global context – whether and how nation-states are being cosmopolitanised. The second concerns normative debates regarding what form belonging should take in a global era – patriotic attachments or cosmopolitan ones. The rhetoric of Barack Obama provides empirical fodder for both explorations. As a leader who proclaimed and was widely noted for his cosmopolitan sensibilities, yet ultimately relied heavily on themes of patriotism and American exceptionalism, Obama’s case confirms that nationhood remains a potent form of collectivity in the contemporary era; suggests that although the conditions of globalisation may be facilitative ones with regard to cosmopolitanisation, they are not sufficient ones; and calls into question Martha Nussbaum’s recent claim that if ‘purified’, patriotism lends itself to a ‘striving for global justice and inclusive human love’.     

‘Europeanness’ ‐ a new cultural battlefield?

The nation‐state is par excellence a product of ‘modernity’ in Europe. Its supercession has been trumpeted of late, hard on the heels of the fashion for post‐modernity. However, the self‐service conceptions of political identity that pertained until the end of the Cold War now need to be discarded as ethnicity and nationhood evidently become the predominant obsessions of the 1990s. Consequently, ‘Europeanness’ has become a cultural battlefield for sharply divergent views.