Panel Discussion: Borders of Cuba and Cubanidad
Thursday, December 1, 2022 at 4:30pm
Romance Languages and Literatures Common Room, 300 High Street, Middletown
FREE!
How do diaspora and exile shape or contest the (imagined) borders of Cuba? Who gets to define “cubanidad,” that is, what it means to be Cuban? Invited speakers grapple with these questions by turning to late nineteenth- to twentieth-century archives and literary works that shed light on the consolidation of anticolonial efforts across the Caribbean, the links between Cuba and the island of Fernando Pó (now Equatorial Guinea), and the shifting racial borders of cubanidad.
TALKS
Benita Sampedro Vizcaya (Hofstra University), “Freedom Struggles and Punitive Relocations—from Cuba to Africa—in the Late Nineteenth-Century”
César A. Salgado (University of Texas at Austin), “Triangulating Inter-Caribbean Exchange during the Cuban-Spanish-American War: Lola Rodríguez de Tió’s Letters to Laura Nazario (Cuba-New York-Puerto Rico, 1896-1899)”
Odette Casamayor-Cisneros (University of Pennsylvania), “The Fabrication of Cuban Blackness: Racialization, National Identity, and the Pursuit of Universality in Twentieth-century Cuba”
PROFILES
Benita Sampedro Vizcaya (PhD NYU) is Professor of Spanish Colonial Studies at Hofstra University. Her research engages with Spanish colonial pasts and presents, archives, and legacies, both in North and Sub-Saharan Africa and in Latin America and the Caribbean. She is invested in the study of colonial links within and beyond the frame of the multiple Spanish imperial Atlantic and global networks, and she has published extensively on the politics and processes of decolonization, colonial medicine, colonial domestic labor, the colonial politics of meteorology, colonial carceral systems, colonial archives, border mobility, and on the intersections of gender and empire. Sampedro Vizcaya is also a translator of Galician and Equatoquinean authors as well as the editor of the volumes Border Interrogations: Questioning Spanish Frontiers (2008) and Rerouting Galician Studies: Multidisciplinary Interventions (2017). Her talk is titled “Freedom Struggles and Punitive Relocations—from Cuba to Africa—in the Late Nineteenth-Century.”
César A. Salgado (PhD Yale) is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Program in Comparative Literature at The University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include Caribbean and Latin American print culture, literary and historical archives, and intellectual history; Latin American Baroque and Neobaroque literature and art; Cuban visual culture; and the Works of James Joyce. He is author of From Modernism to Neobaroque: Joyce and Lezama Lima (2001) and coeditor of Latino and Latino Writers (2004), Cuba (2011), TransLatin Joyce: Global Transmissions in Ibero-American Literature (Palgrave 2014), and La futuridad del naufragio: Orígenes, estelas y derivas [The Futurity of Shipwreck: Orígenes, Wakes, and Drifts] (2019). His presentation is titled: “Triangulating Inter-Caribbean Exchange during the Cuban-Spanish-American War: Lola Rodríguez de Tió's Letters to Laura Nazario (Cuba-New York-Puerto Rico, 1896-1899).”
Odette Casamayor-Cisneros (PhD École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris) is Associate Professor of Latin American literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She specializes in Afro-Diaspora and Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean and post-Cold War Latin American literary and cultural productions. She is the author of Utopia, distopía e ingravidez: reconfiguraciones cosmológicas en la narrativa postsoviética cubana [Utopia, Dystopia, and Weightlessness: Cosmological Reconfigurations in post-Soviet Cuban Fiction] (2013), which examines the existential void experienced by Cubans after the collapse of the Socialist Bloc in the 1990s. Casamayor-Cisneros is currently writing a book titled On Being Blacks: Self-Identification Processes and Counter-Hegemonic Knowledge in Contemporary Cuban Cultural Production. As a writer of fiction, Casamayor-Cisneros has published the collection of stories Una casa en los Catskills (1st edition, 2012; 2nd edition, 2016). The title of her talk is “The Fabrication of Cuban Blackness: Racialization, National Identity, and the Pursuit of Universality in Twentieth-century Cuba.”
This panel is co-sponsored by the Thomas and Catharine McMahon Fund of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, the Allbritton Center, and the Latin American Studies Program. This event is held in conjunction with the exhibition fron/terra cognita + Hostile Terrain (HT94), on display from Tuesday, November 1 through Sunday, December 11, 2022. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Sunday from Noon to 5pm. For more information, please visit the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery website. Funding for the exhibition and related programming is provided by the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life, the College of the Environment, the Anthropology Department, the Thomas and Catharine McMahon Fund of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, African Studies, and CT Humanities.