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Winter 2002
This information effective for Winter 2002.
Check with instructor the first day of class for any changes.
Instructor: Professor Lourdes Martínez-Echazábal
MW 5:30–7:15 p.m.
Merrill 130
E-mail: lourdes@macmail.ucsc.edu
Office: 157 Merrill
Hours: M: 4:00-5:00; W: 7:30-8:30 p.m.
Phone: 459-2701/459-2855
COURSE DESCRIPTION
The course addresses narratives of the Cuban Diaspora produced and/or performed,
primarily, by Cuban-born women. Our point of departure will be the writings
of Gertrudis Gómez the Avellaneda, one of the most important figures
of 19th century Cuban literature. From Avellaneda, the course will move on to
explore the problematic of diasporic production in the late 20th century. We
will focus on a group of women that share a set of common experiences: they
all left Cuba as a result of the Revolution of 1959 and its aftermath (though
the times and conditions of their respective departures from the island were
by no means homogeneous), and they all came-of-age, professionally speaking,
in various parts of the world during the decades of the 1980s and 1990s. Notwithstanding
the commonality of their deterritorializing experiences, they constitute a polygenous
group marked by differences in sexual orientation, class extraction, family
histories, race, and political views.
We will discuss texts by writers Lourdes Casal, Cristina Garcia, Achy Obejas, and Zoe Valdés, as well as other cultural texts such as lyrics performed by Celia Cruz, Gloria Estefan, and Albita Rodriguez, as well as art work, installations, and performances by Coco Fusco, Ana Mendieta, and Carmelita Tropicana. Theirs, I contend, are “diasporic narratives,” ones produced, published, and/or performed, in locations as varied as the USA and France in the last two decades. Yet, as with most diasporic texts, they are inhabited not only by their itinerant subjects and their experiences of dis/re/location but equally by those people and experiences that stayed behind, fixed in a pristine place/space of origin.
Hence we will be asking a set of impending questions: is the designation “Cuban” an appropriate referential category when addressing these specific group of women writers, artists, and performers (and here we ought to necessarily pause to consider that literary, cultural, and art critics and historians have repeatedly used this epithet when referring, for instance, to writers like José María Heredia, Jose Martí and Alejo Carpentier, to musicians like Machito and Pérez Prado, or to performers like Desi Arnaz, just to mention a few, all of whom not only spent most of their adults lives abroad but forged a substantial part of their career outside Cuba)? How do memory, dreaming, and the quest for identity work on these texts? How do these texts grapple with issues of “home,” “origin,” dis/re/location, return, and/or a “homing desire,” (which, by the way, should not be conflated with a desire for a “homeland”)? How do the narratives created and/or performed by this group of women dialogue with (the) “Cuban” tradition(s) as well as with the experience of self, community and exile?
Overall, the course will allow us to interrogate theoretical concepts such as Diaspora versus Border, “border writings,” diasporic writings, the concept of “home”and of “roots/routes,” among others, and to address the politics of location, as well as the location of cultures.
PRIMARY TEXTS
Behar, Ruth, BRIDGES TO CUBA/PUENTES A CUBA
Casal, Lourdes, PALABRAS JUNTAN REVOLUCION (Course Reader)
García, Cristina, DREAMING IN CUBAN
Obejas, Achy, MEMORY MAMBO
O’Reilly Herrera, Andrea, REMEMBERING CUBA
Valdés, Zoe, LA NADA COTIDIANA
SECONDARY TEXTS
Troyano, Alina, I, Carmelita Tropicana: Performing Between Cultures
A PROFESSOR’S READER including the following:
Brah, Avtar, “Diaspora, Border and Transnational Identities”
Clifford, James, “Diasporas”
Freud, S., “The Method of Interpreting Dreams”
Freud, S., “The Means of Representation in Dreams”
Gómez de Avellaneda, Gertrudis, Selected Poems
Landau, Saul, “Asking the Right Questions About Cuba”
Matos, Daniel, “Exile in the Cuban Literary Experience”
Pérez Firmat, Gustavo, “Introduction: In Other Words”
Pérez Firmat, Gustavo, “The-Desi-Chain”
Pérez Firmat, Gustavo, “A-Brief-History-of-Mambo-Time”
Terdiman, Richard, “Mnemo-Analysis-Memory in Freud. II. Hermeneutics”
VISUAL TEXTS (FILMS and DOCUMENTARIES)
“Lejania”
“Ana Mendieta: fuego de tierra”
“Carmelita Tropicana: your kunst is your waffen”
MUSICAL TEXTS
Selections by Albita, Celia Cruz, and Gloria Estefan.
COURSE REQUIREMENTS
· An oral presentation (each student will be responsible for finding
and presenting one or two sources on a given author and/or topic). This presentation
will account for 30% of your final grade and/or narrative evaluation.
· Two directed writing assignments (to be prepared at home). I will hand
out the questions one week in advance of the due date.
· A final paper on the topic of your choice, providing that it pertains
to the theme of the class. Students should run their
· topics by me before “embarking” on it.