Revolutionary Subjects explores the literary and cultural significance of Cold War solidarities and offers insight into a substantial and under-analyzed body of German literature concerned with Latin American thought and action. It shows how literary interest in Latin America was vital for understanding oppositional agency and engaged literature in East and West Germany, where authors developed aesthetic solidarities that anticipated conceptual reorganizations of the world connoted by the transnational or the global. Through a combination of close readings, contextual analysis, and careful theoretical work, Revolutionary Subjects traces the historicity and contingency of aesthetic practices, as well as the geocultural grounds against which they unfolded, in case studies of Volker Braun, F.C. Delius, Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Heiner Müller. The book’s cultural and comparative approach offers an antidote to imprecise engagements with the transnational, historicizing critical impulses that accompany the production of disciplinary boundaries. It paves the way for more reflexive debate on the content and method of German Studies as part of a broader landscape of world literature, comparative literature and Latin American Studies.

Mexican novelist and historian Paco Ignacio Taibo II here captures the life and character of Che Guevara, the preeminent Latin-American revolutionary of the late twentieth century. The symbol of radical egalitarianism and the war against social injustice, Guevara was gunned down in the jungles of southeastern Bolivia in 1967, his death surrounded by questions that remain unanswered. In the years since he died, fascination with Che and his independent and pragmatic brand of Guerilla Marxism have become increasingly focused. Taibo, whose extensive contacts in Latin American political activism gives him unprecedented access to hitherto untapped sources, probes Che's life with a storyteller's pen and an historian's judgment. Delving into vast archives to which few researchers have entry, Taibo investigates the mystery and myth surrounding Che's life, careers, and ideals.

International Latino Book Awards, Honorable Mention, Best Biography (English) American Educational Research Association, Division B: Curriculum Studies, Outstanding Book Award Focusing on the didactic nature of the work of Reinaldo Arenas, this book demonstrates the Cuban writer’s influence as public pedagogue, mentor, and social activist whose teaching on resistance to normative ideologies resonates in societies past, present, and future. Through a multidisciplinary approach bridging educational, historiographic, and literary perspectives, The Dissidence of Reinaldo Arenas illuminates how Arenas’s work remains a cutting-edge source of inspiration for today’s audiences, particularly LGBTQI readers. It shows how Arenas’s aesthetics contain powerful insights for exploring dissensus whether in the context of Cuba, broader Pan-American and Latinx-U.S. queer movements of social justice, or transnational citizenship politics. Carefully dissecting Arenas’s themes against the backdrop of his political activity, this book presents the writer’s poetry, novels, and plays as a curriculum of dissidence that provides models for socially engaged intellectual activism. Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Explores the ideological and emotional trauma created after the withering of the socialist utopia in Cuba. Mínima Cuba analyzes the reconfiguration of aesthetics and power during the Cuban postrevolutionary transition (1989 to 2005, the conclusion of the “Special Period”). It explores the marginal cultural production on the island by the first generation of intellectuals born during the Revolution. The author studies the work of postrevolutionary poets and essayists Antonio José Ponte, Rolando Sánchez Mejías, and Iván de la Nuez, among others. In their writing we find the exhaustion of the allegorical and melancholic rhetoric of the Cuban Revolution, and the poetics of irony developed in the current biopolitical era. The book will appeal to anyone interested in contemporary literary and cultural studies, poetics, and film studies in Latin America and the Caribbean. “Marta Hernández Salván tackles head on the complex nature of philosophical tendencies within the poetics of Cuban cultural production in the last few decades to offer magnificent and precise readings of lesser-known writings and films, as well as profound renderings of canonical texts. This is a remarkably rich book that will take multiple readings to give it justice.” — Jacqueline Loss, author of Dreaming in Russian: The Cuban Soviet Imaginary

Beyond the Blood, the Beach and the Banana emphasises the significance of the Caribbean in an increasingly globalised social world and draws attention to the contribution that scholarship in Caribbean Studies makes in coming to terms with a multi-cultural heritage. The compilation deliberately ranges in focus across periods, geographies, linguistic divisions and subject matter to present the fruition of significant research projects by 25 researchers from the Caribbean, North America and Europe. Contributors on the Hispanic, Dutch, African, Indian and Anglophone Caribbean juxtaposed with work on the Caribbean diasporas of the USA, UK, Canada and the Netherlands enrich the text with multiple perspectives.

1990s' Cuban literature, caught between a beleaguered socialism and an encroaching global capitalism.

In Forces of Nature, the authors investigate the relationships between the natural world and gender and sexuality. The authors explore the frameworks within which femininity and nature have been constructed, as well as the impact nature has had on our understandings of masculinity, homosexuality, and heterosexuality. For some writers nature has restorative powers, for others nature embodies violence and destruction. Yet, one common thread runs across all of the chapters in this collection: nature and animals can not be separated from the human experience. Forces of Nature brings to light the intimate connection humans have with the natural world and provides students and scholars with innovative readings of both canonical and noncanonical texts.