Cuban Fiestas

Cuban Fiestas
Title Cuban Fiestas PDF eBook
Author Roberto González Echevarría
Publisher Yale University Press
Pages 515
Release 2010-01-01
Genre Social Science
ISBN 0300168748

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A luminous history of Cuba’s most dynamic and defining rituals and the ever-improvisational character of Cuban culture In the Cuban town of Sagua la Grande, a young Roberto González Echevarría peers out the window of his family home on the morning of the Nochebuena fiesta as preparations begin for the slaughter of a feast day pig. The author recalls “watching them at a distance, though thinking, fearing, that once I grew older I would have to participate in the whole event.” Now an acclaimed scholar of Latin American literature, González Echevarría returns to the rituals that defined his young life in Cuban Fiestas. Drawing from art, literature, film, and even the national sport of baseball, he vividly reveals the fiesta as a dynamic force of both destruction and renewal in the life of a people. Roberto González Echevarría masterfully exposes the distinctive elements of the fiesta cubana that give depth and coherence to more than two centuries of Cuban cultural life. Reaching back to nineteenth-century traditions of Cuban art and literature, and augmenting them, in the twentieth, with the arts of narrative, the esthetic performances of sport and entertainment in nightclubs, on the baseball diamond, and in movie theaters, Cuban Fiestas renders the lilting strains of the fiesta and drum beats of the passage of time as keys to understanding the dynamic quality of Cuban culture. González Echevarría’s explorations are also illuminated by autobiographical vignettes that unveil the ever-shifting impact of the fiesta on the author’s own story of exile and return.

Fiesta de diez pesos: Music and Gay Identity in Special Period Cuba

Fiesta de diez pesos: Music and Gay Identity in Special Period Cuba
Title Fiesta de diez pesos: Music and Gay Identity in Special Period Cuba PDF eBook
Author Moshe Morad
Publisher Routledge
Pages 304
Release 2016-04-15
Genre Music
ISBN 1317135423

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The ‘Special Period’ in Cuba was an extended era of economic depression starting in the early 1990s, characterized by the collapse of revolutionary values and social norms, and a way of life conducted by improvised solutions for survival, including hustling and sex-work. During this time there developed a thriving, though constantly harassed and destabilized, clandestine gay scene (known as the ‘ambiente’). In the course of eight visits between 1995 and 2007, the last dozen years of Fidel Castro’s reign, Moshe Morad became absorbed in Havana’s gay scene, where he created a wide social network, attended numerous secret gatherings-from clandestine parties to religious rituals-and observed patterns of behavior and communication. He discovered the role of music in this scene as a marker of identity, a source of queer codifications and identifications, a medium of interaction, an outlet for emotion and a way to escape from a reality of scarcity, oppression and despair. Morad identified and conducted his research in different types of ‘musical space,’ from illegal clandestine parties held in changing locations, to ballet halls, drag-show bars, private living-rooms and kitchens and santería religious ceremonies. In this important study, the first on the subject, he argues that music plays a central role in providing the physical, emotional, and conceptual spaces which constitute this scene and in the formation of a new hybrid ‘gay identity’ in Special-Period Cuba.

Kinship, Love, and Life Cycle in Contemporary Havana, Cuba

Kinship, Love, and Life Cycle in Contemporary Havana, Cuba
Title Kinship, Love, and Life Cycle in Contemporary Havana, Cuba PDF eBook
Author Heidi Härkönen
Publisher Springer
Pages 259
Release 2016-04-21
Genre Social Science
ISBN 1137580763

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Kinship, Love, and Life Cycle in Contemporary Havana, Cuba is an ethnographic analysis of gender, kinship, and love in contemporary Cuba. The book documents how low-income Havana residents negotiate their social relations through gendered caring practices over the life cycle from birth to death.

Latin American Cultural Studies: A Reader

Latin American Cultural Studies: A Reader
Title Latin American Cultural Studies: A Reader PDF eBook
Author Jens Andermann
Publisher Routledge
Pages 535
Release 2018-10-03
Genre Social Science
ISBN 1351852515

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Featuring twenty-five key essays from the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies (Traves/sia), this book surveys the most influential themes and concepts, as well as scouring some of the polemics and controversies, which have marked the field over the last quarter of a century since the Journal's foundation in 1992. Emerging at a moment of crisis of revolutionary narratives, and at the onset of neoliberal economics and emergent narcopolitics, the cultural studies impetus in Latin America was part of an attempted intellectual reconstruction of the (centre-) left in terms of civil society, and the articulation of social movements and agencies, thinking beyond the verticalist constructions from previous decades. This collection maps these developments from the now classical discussions of the ‘cultural turn’ to more recent responses to the challenges of biopolitics, affect theory, posthegemony and ecocriticism. It also addresses novel political constellations including resurgent national-popular or eco-nativist and indigenous agencies. Framed by a critical introduction from the editors, this volume is both a celebration of influential essays published over twenty five years of the Journal and a representative overview of the field in its multiple ramifications, entrenchments and exchanges.

Historical Dictionary of Cuba

Historical Dictionary of Cuba
Title Historical Dictionary of Cuba PDF eBook
Author Antoni Kapcia
Publisher Rowman & Littlefield
Pages 725
Release 2022-04-25
Genre History
ISBN 1442264551

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This work is a completely new Historical Dictionary for Cuba (the first since 1988). It gives a comprehensive and detailed coverage and analysis of all of the key elements, factors, biographies, narratives, and treaties in Cuban history from the 1400s to the present day, with an emphasis on the decades after 1959. Historical Dictionary of Cuba, Third Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 1.000 cross-referenced entries on important personalities as well as aspects of the country’s politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Cuba.

No Laughing Matter

No Laughing Matter
Title No Laughing Matter PDF eBook
Author Angela Rosenthal
Publisher Dartmouth College Press
Pages 362
Release 2015-11-22
Genre Art
ISBN 1611688221

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In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, this collection - which gathers scholars in the fields of race, ethnicity, and humor - seems especially urgent. Inspired by Denmark's Muhammad cartoons controversy, the contributors inquire into the role that racial and ethnic stereotypes play in visual humor and the thin line that separates broad characterization as a source of humor from its power to shock or exploit. The authors investigate the ways in which humor is used to demean or give identity to racial, national, or ethnic groups and explore how humor works differently in different media, such as cartoons, photographs, film, video, television, and physical performance. This is a timely and necessary study that will appeal to scholars across disciplines.

Nineteenth-Century Spanish America

Nineteenth-Century Spanish America
Title Nineteenth-Century Spanish America PDF eBook
Author Christopher Conway
Publisher Vanderbilt University Press
Pages 289
Release 2015-07-14
Genre History
ISBN 0826520618

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Nineteenth-Century Spanish America: A Cultural History provides a panoramic and accessible introduction to the era in which Latin America took its first steps into the Modern Age. Including colorful characters like circus clowns, prostitutes, bullfighters, street puppeteers, and bestselling authors, this book maps vivid and often surprising combinations of the new and the old, the high and the low, and the political and the cultural. Christopher Conway shows that beneath the diversity of the New World there was a deeper structure of shared patterns of cultural creation and meaning. Whether it be the ways that people of refinement from different countries used the same rules of etiquette, or how commoners shared their stories through the same types of songs, Conway creates a multidisciplinary framework for understanding the culture of an entire hemisphere. The book opens with key themes that will help students and scholars understand the century, such as the civilization and barbarism binary, urbanism, the divide between conservatives and liberals, and transculturation. In the chapters that follow, Conway weaves transnational trends together with brief case studies and compelling snapshots that help us understand the period. How much did books and photographs cost in the nineteenth century? What was the dominant style in painting? What kinds of ballroom dancing were popular? Richly illustrated with striking photographs and lithographs, this is a book that invites the reader to rediscover a past age that is not quite past, still resonating into the present.