ReMembering Cuba: Legacy of a Diaspora - Softcover

O’Reilly Herrera, Andrea

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0292731477 ISBN 13: 9780292731479

Publisher: University of Texas Press, 2001

Synopsis

Longing for their lost homeland unites Cuban exiles and their children, many of whom have never seen the Island. Yet as decades pass and the hope of "next year in Cuba" fades, the Cuban American community has had to forge new understandings of where "home" is and what it means to be "Cuban," "American," and/or "Cuban American." The testimonies gathered in this book offer over one hundred perspectives on the Cuban diaspora and on what it means to be Cuban in exile. Through narratives, interviews, creative writings, letters, journal entries, recipes, photographs, and paintings, Cubans from various waves of the migration and their descendants piece together a complex mosaic of the exile experience and diasporic identity. In her introduction, Andrea O'Reilly Herrera describes how she conceived the project and chose the contributors, including both unknown and established artists and writers such as Gustavo Perez Firmat, Sylvia Curbelo, Pablo Medina, Lourdes Gil, Ricardo Pau-Llosa, Heberto Padilla, and Jose Kozer. The contributors' diverse and sometimes conflicting voices offer a more inclusive and complex understanding of Cuban American identity and the various Cuban "presences" residing throughout the United States. Likewise, they overthrow a perceived "hierarchy of suffering" among Cuban Americans, which purports to dictate who can and cannot speak authentically about exile and loss, as well as what form their expression can take.

About this title

Review:

"To date, no [other] book representing such a wide and extensive sampling of views and experiences of the Cuban Diaspora exists." -Isabel Alvarez Borland, author of Cuban-American Narratives of Exile: From Person to Persona

About the Author:

ANDREA O'REILLY HERRERA is Professor of Literature and Director of Women's and Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. In addition to being a published poet and literary critic, she is the author of a number of critical works including ReMembering Cuba: Legacy of a Diaspora, the novel The Pearl of the Antilles, the edited collection of essays Cuba: Idea of a Nation Displaced, and the coedited textbook The Matrix Reader: Examining the Dynamics of Oppression and Privilege.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0292731477
• ISBN 13: 9780292731479
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 376