Cuban Anti‐slavery Narrative through Postcolonial Eyes: Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab

Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab (1841) has come to be regarded as an iconic work in the canon of nineteenth‐century Cuban fiction, celebrated as much for its literary pedigree as for its radical combination of anti‐slavery and feminist ideas. Yet it has been the subject of very divergent critical appraisals. This essay sets out to breathe new life into Avellaneda’s novel by interpreting it through a postcolonial optic. Drawing on ideas from the scholarship of Edward Said and Frantz Fanon, as well as the ideas of literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, these pages explore the implications of its nationalist, racial, sexual and feminist politics for Sab’s anti‐slavery meaning. This postcolonial reading provides a possible solution for the conflicts between its various interpretations.     

The ambivalent Apostle of 1953: a liminal reading of the centenary of José Martí

This article has common Cuban motifs at its core: the prevalent obsession with the notion of collective identity, the ideological and psychological importance of national anniversaries, and the omnipresence of the archetypal patriot José Martí. It approaches all from a particular theoretical perspective, however, and thus presents a new reading of the so-called ideario martiano and of the Cuban “national narrative” at a critical moment of the island’s historical trajectory: 1953, the centenary of Martí’s birth. Taking its lead from cultural anthropology (and particularly from the work of Victor Turner), this article presents the half-century since independence in 1902 as a post-colonial “rite of passage” punctuated by a series of turning points, or “limens,” within which the sense of national identity was exposed to sustained scrutiny by public intellectuals and activists. The article provides evidence of such intense collective introspection in 1953 when commemorations of Martí’s centenary stimulated a re-examination of the Republic in the light of his luminous example. Importantly, this turning point is also exposed as a battleground on which antagonistic interpretations of martiano heroism, Republican history, and national identity faced each other in exegetical strife.     

Apartheid,Jim Crow,and Comparative Literature

This article examines John Greyson’s film, Proteus, for the way it figures queer masculinity and race in South Africa’s national historical narrative. The film offers an esthetic rendering of an eighteenth century interracial sodomy trial set on Robben Island. Drawing on contemporary queer theory and recent South African narratives of masculinity that privilege heternormativity and nationalism, this paper argues that the film carves out a space for queer identity within national history where it had previously been denied. The paper traces the way that the film interjects queer narratives into South Africa’s national identity, disrupts the heteronormalization of various sites of national iconography on South Africa’s historical terrain (such as Robben Island), and offers a queer masculinity that resists racial segregation. Moreover, this paper traces the ways that the film has implications for contemporary queer communities within South Africa.     

Coming in from the Cold: Grenada and Cuba since 1983

Abstract

The Grenada Revolution’s radical course was stamped by the bold turn to Cuba in April 1979. Cuban commitment to Maurice Bishop’s regime was crucial to its consolidation. In 1983 counter-revolution and invasion ruptured Grenada–Cuba ties and damaged Havana’s relations with Caribbean Community states. Since the demise of the Cold War, Havana’s survival strategy has prioritised regional integration and cooperation in the Americas. In the Anglophone Caribbean, Grenada has been at the centre of this rapprochement since 1993. Despite Washington’s disapproval, Grenada champions expanded ties with socialist Cuba. The rekindled alliance brings tangible mutual benefits and validates the strategy of South–South cooperation advocated by Maurice Bishop’s People’s Revolutionary Government and New Jewel Movement.     

The Illusion of Equality: Machismo and Cuban Cinema of the Revolution

This article attempts to show how certain Cuban films both reflect and construct behaviour concerning male–female relations. In so doing, they illustrate how Cuban cinema provided a mainstream cultural forum for controversial and contradictory debates on gender relations. At times, films that attempt to produce images of gender equality, or at least the possibility of this, merely provide the illusion of equality while maintaining the status quo of patriarchy. That is, the images they present of male–female relations appear on the surface to represent an increasing desire to achieve absolute equality between men and women. However, close analysis of these films, using various tools of feminist and feminist film theory, reveals a continuation of certain patriarchal tendencies that the films themselves are attempting to criticise. The films to be discussed are: De cierta manera (Sara Gómez, 1974–1978), Retrato de Teresa (Pastor Vega, 1979) and Hasta cierto punto (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1983).     

Intimacy at work: servant and employer relations in Que horas ela volta? (The second mother)

ABSTRACT

This chapter examines servant/employer relationships in Anna Muylaert’s film Que horas ela volta? (The Second Mother, 2015). Written in the first person by someone who locates herself as a white, middle-class Brazilian from humble origins who has lived abroad for nearly 30 years, the chapter focuses on the sense of discomfort caused on her by the film and by Brazilian middle-class reliance on domestic servants, whilst at the same time analysing the role played by intimacy and servitude in the film. In dialogue with Sérgio Buarque de Holanda’s definition(s) of “cordialidade” (and with later discussions of it), the chapter examines what “cordialidade” can mean in the context of employers/domestic servants relationships in contemporary Brazil.     

Capturing Brazilian society in movement: from cordiality to circulation and “spaces between” in Maria Augusta Ramos’s Futuro junho (2015)

ABSTRACT

This article analyses Maria Augusta Ramos’s 2015 observational documentary Futuro junho (Future June), filmed in the Brazilian city of São Paulo in the lead-up to the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Taking as its starting point a connection, established by one of the film’s four main “characters,” or subjects, between Brazilian historian Sérgio Buarque de Holanda’s influential work on cordiality and the idea of circulation between public and private spheres, the article explores how circulation (economic, urban, media, and cultural) is portrayed in the documentary, as well as how it foregrounds both spatial and temporal movements. This is complemented by a discussion of the film’s own circulation through attention to critical reviews which have debated the film’s success in documenting, in a timely way, a national conjuncture characterised by crisis and conflict as well as unpredictability and rapid change. The article argues that by imbricating and intertwining multiple cultures of circulation, and by drawing attention to the varied economic and urban experiences of its characters and the spaces between them, Futuro junho captures a Brazil in flux.     

“Zones of indistinction” and visions of post-reconciliation South Africa in District 9

In this article, I explore the ways in which District 9 reflects South Africa’s current socio-political transition through the problematical representation of the film’s eponymous slum and its impoverished inhabitants as well as its protagonist, Wikus van der Merwe. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s influential ideas of biopolitics, I demonstrate the ways in which the film provides a compelling critique of the effects of neoliberal capitalism on post-apartheid transition and South Africa’s complex geopolitical landscape. In this regard, I analyze how the slum figures as a “zone of indistinction” where political and economic forces combine to produce the paradoxical conditions in which impoverished South Africans are included in a democratic social contract, but are simultaneously excluded from the socioeconomic benefits that it promises.     

“Zimbabwe is Mine”: Mugabe,Murder, and Matabeleland

Searching for Sugar Man, the celebrated 2012 documentary of Sixto Rodriguez’s musical life, opens onto (but does not adequately address) important questions concerning musical circulation and reception. It is a story of two albums, Cold Fact (1970) and Coming From Reality (1971) that traveled in very different ways in the USA and South Africa and of how these travels were shaped by cultural politics and cultural circuits. But, it is also a story about the ways that the music industry complicated these cultural circuits by muddying and interrupting financial pathways—that is, by acting as a circuit breaker. Unfortunately, the film misses an opportunity to explore any of these stories in a sustained manner, crafting instead a narrative that engages them only to the extent that they help the director, Malik Bendjelloul, present a lost-and-found narrative of musical rebirth, featuring South African fans and audiences as the supporting cast. In choosing this entertaining, but myth-making path, the film itself configures new circuits and inaugurates additional circuit breakers that must be disentangled from and read in relation to Rodriguez’s musical life.     

“Tongpan”: An important event in Thai cinema

Abstract

Films being made in Asian countries are now beginning to express an Asian reality. This is happening in a small way, but it is happening. The scale of the movement to break away from Hollywood and Bombay-type extravaganzas, and from films as a kind of “celluloid LSD,” is still small, constrained as it is by film-makers and sellers out to make quick profits. One little ripple that has recently emerged from the stagnant waters of Asia's film world is called “Tongpan.” The work of a group of creative amateurs, “Tongpan” is not the result of a commercial venture, and is not a professionally-made film in the conventional sense. It is also not a film in the style of what has come to be known as the “New Wave Cinema,” for “Tongpan” is not an art film to be “museumed” for wealthy connoisseurs. But precisely for all these reasons it is important that a film called “Tongpan” has been made. Indeed an important event has occurred in Thai Cinema. Important because it shows what is happening to the Thai people in the name of ‘development’ and captures for posterity the tensions and strains of an important period in Thailand's recent history.     

The Silent Scream of the Locas in Mariposas en el andamio

This article explores the way cross-dressing has been used as a tool of dissent by queer subjects in the film Mariposas en el andamio . This documentary not only advocates the integration of homosexuals in the realm of Cuban society, but also evidences the establishment of a culture of transvestism on the island. The ultimate intention of Mariposas is to posit the male-to-female transvestite as a figure that contests hegemonic heteronormativity as well as the machista values predicated by the Cuban revolution. The film not only opposes sexist heteronormativity (machismo in Latin American societies), but also establishes a link between homosexuality and cross-dressing practices in Latin America, as transvestism becomes an externalisation of these individuals' homosexual identity. Furthermore, the film seems to suggest that the transvestites feel trapped in the wrong biological sex. The second focus of this article is on the geographical spaces where such transvestic practices are permissible on the island. Although the film makes a case for a more open and inclusive Cuban society, it fails to show that same-sex desire and cross-dressing can be played out outside the neighbourhood's canteen in which the show takes place. Finally, I intend to show how camp becomes the best strategy for the transvestites to challenge the idea of homosexuals as anti-revolutionary figures as well as Latin American heteronormativity. To this end, I engage in a study of a strategy of gender subversion that I call 'camp fuck'. This type of campness de-constructs the idea of a bourgeois camp to transform it into a more political device, which permits the contesting of heteronormativity through elements that have traditionally been regarded as frivolous and apolitical.     

Desire,Misogyny, and Official Power in Mark Dornford-May's U-Carmen eKhayelitsha

As the most frequently adapted narrative in film history, the story Carmen – based originally on Proper Mérimée’s 1845 novella and George Bizet’s 1875 opera of the same name – offers differing response to various intertextual debates concerning feminism, sexual freedom, interracial relations, high versus low art, and urbanism versus ruralism. This paper situates a recent Xhosa language, cinematic adaptation of the Opera, Mark Dornford-May’s U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha (2005), in response to these various cultural critical debates, while invoking previous critical discussions of American Carmen adaptations, by Charles Vidor and Otto Preminger respectively, as templates for furhter analysis. I argue that Dornford-May’s film offers a self-reflexive, and indeed progressive, response to the Carmen narrative’s contradictory ideological stance on issues of female sexual empowernment and misogny. U-Carmen also downplays the themes of interracial romance and rural nostalgia present in previous Carmen adaptations, so as to hone in on the various intra-township dynamics at work within the Khayelitsha communiy that the film depcitrs. U-Carmen offers a cynical depiction of the post-apartheid township society in which romantic and sexual freedom are presumed to be at odds with the forces of official power. When placed within the context of the post-apartheid Khayelitsha mileau, the failure of Carmen’s rebellious, anti-authoritarian, and romantic disposition comes to symbolize the unfullfilled promises of the post-apartheid era.     

Afro‐Cuban Religion,Ethnobotany and Healthcare in the Context of Global Political and Economic Change

‘Globalisation’, driven by neoliberal‐based policies, can be seen to have significant impacts on ethnobotanical practices, particularly through the commercialisation of traditional knowledge and rise in identity‐based social movements. Despite its relative political and economic isolation in comparison to more ‘neoliberalised’ areas of Latin America, local‐level shifts occurring in post‐Soviet Cuba are similar to those occurring elsewhere in the region. Afro‐Cuban ritual activities have proliferated, particularly in Havana, leading to an increased dependence on the rich magico‐medicinal pharmacopoeias employed in hybridised religions such as santería and palo monte – suggesting that ‘globalisation’ may have profound, albeit indirect, implications for even the most economically marginalised countries such as Cuba.     

City of Fear: Reimagining Buenos Aires in Contemporary Argentine Cinema

Argentine cinema has experienced a rebirth since the late 1990s, despite the country’s economic crisis. Buenos Aires, long a key setting for the nation’s films, has not escaped the negative impact of the crisis, yet filmmaking in the capital has thrived. This article explores the radically different presentation of the city since the first explosion of film in Argentina after the end of the military dictatorship of 1976–1983. It takes Luis Puenzo’s controversial La historia oficial as a starting point for a reflection on the current presentation of Buenos Aires as a city plagued by fear in productions from the late 1990s to the early twenty‐first century.     

The Revolution and its Discontents: Grenadian Newspapers and Attempts to Shape Public Opinion during Political Transition

Abstract

What role did the newspaper play in attempting to influence public opinion in the early stages of the Grenada Revolution and what are the terms in which printed discourses on the revolution were conceptualised? The Grenada Revolution was a discursive political process where branding and narration were necessary elements in securing the revolution’s authority and legitimacy. This paper argues that Cuba functioned as a metonym through which the revolution was translated in Grenadian periodicals. Even before the coup of 13 March 1979 Grenadian media represented the New Jewel Movement—the revolutionary party—as Cuban-inspired and socialist. In order to examine how socialism in general, and the socialist character of the People’s Revolutionary Government (PRG) in particular, was narrated, a comparison is staged between two newspapers—the government-run Free West Indian and the privately owned The Torchlight. Competing discourses on Cuban communism are analysed for the ways in which they stood-in for the Grenadian people’s hopes, aspirations and anxieties in the midst of radical political change. Issues including race, gender equality, property ownership, freedom of religious practice and freedom of travel are examined in relation to capitalism and socialism, and the PRG’s efforts to maintain narrative authority of the revolution.     

The Pancasila Delusion

Rather than producing a new liberal democracy, Indonesia’s sudden democratising process that started in 1998 has produced a mere electoral democracy. This commentary argues that this situation cannot be separated from the preservation of the Five Principles, or the Pancasila, in the political reform agenda (reformasi). In this case, the Indonesian version of exceptionalism (national self-righteousness) has unwittingly legitimised some fundamental deviations from internationally well-established practices in global constitutionalism as the post Suharto Indonesia proceeds to “electoralise” its public life. Indonesia’s version of exceptionalism might best be described in an unabated conviction about the inviolable nature of Pancasila in national political life and beyond. This Pancasila delusion has gone further with the introduction of some legal efforts to prosecute any sacrileges against it. To make matters worse, this delusional conviction in Pancasila has stubbornly featured in Indonesia’s political thinking, which eventually has also prompted the process of reformasi to drift from one ad hoc response to another.     

Disempowering Music: The Amandla! Documentary and Other Conservative Musical Projects

Scholars of black South African popular music have established important connections between music and society. Lara Allen’s studies of pennywhistle-kwela, Christopher Ballantine’s research on marabi and African jazz/mbaqanga,and David Coplan’s social history of black city music, among others, have underwritten the new literature in South African musicology and cultural studies. Previous neglect of black popular culture has made oral testimony crucial to the writing of these musical pasts. Recent investigations in the field, which are preoccupied with the articulation of black struggle to music, and the expression of struggle through music, have adopted a more popular format. Within these, the autobiographies of Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela are integral, as is Lee Hirsch’s documentary film, Amandla!. The popularity of these studies and their subjects, and their foregrounded debt to oral testimony and veneration of ‘the Struggle’ has tended to foreclose scrutiny of their representational politics. This article questions whether their homological substitution of music and musicians for anti-apartheid struggles in a postapartheid South Africa enables the radical stories they would tell of that past.     

Searching for the Sugar-coated Man

Proclamations of the excellence of the film Searching for Sugarman, directed by Malik Bendjelloul, ignore its contrived narrative. The film violently yokes the singer’s South African popularity to the struggle against apartheid. This article argues that the film capitalizes on white South African nostalgia and that the tours subsequent to the film’s release have offered occasions for the performance or endorsement of this problematic phenomenon. Through describing the suburban approbation of Rodriguez’s music in the 1980 and 1990s and the homogeneity of his audiences, then and now, I suggest that the salvaging of his career and reputation needs to be approached, not ecstatically, but in ways that are cautious and qualified.     

The Gender Ethics and Politics of Affection: The ‘Feminine’Melodramatic Mode in Walter Salles' Central do Brasil (1998)

This article reads Walter Salles's Central do Brasil (1998) through a reappraisal of the film's relationship to melodrama in order to emphasise the significance of the association of affect with ethical judgment in thinking about the complex and contradictory gender politics of the film, thereby challenging the conventional tension between pathos and logos. Using a number of filmic and psychoanalytic theories, this article argues that Central do Brasil's melodramatic search for a ‘space of innocence’ in the Sertão could offer less a nostalgic return to anachronistic forms of living than a survival strategy for living in late modernity. Finally, this article argues that Central do Brasil, while lamenting the state's withdrawal from the public sphere, calls for an ethical imperative that is associated with a ‘feminine’ responsible and generous capacity to embrace the other as a necessary form of social and political action for the redefining of citizenship in Brazilian neoliberal society.