Cuban Artists Across the Diaspora: Setting the Tent Against the House

HERRERA, Andrea O'Reilly

ISBN 10: 029272392X / ISBN 13: 9780292723924

Published by University of Texas Press, Austin, 2011

About this Item

Illustrated abundantly in color and in black and white. xiv, 253 pages. Large 8vo, black cloth with white lettering. Austin: University of Texas Press, (2011). First Edition. Near fine.

Seller Inventory # 319949

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Cuban Artists Across the Diaspora: Setting the Tent Against the House
• Publisher: University of Texas Press, Austin
• Publication Date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 029272392X
• ISBN 13: 9780292723924
• Binding: hardcover
• Edition: First.
• Condition: near fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • ART
  • IMMIGRATION
  • AMERICANA
  • CUBA
  • PSYCHOLOGY

About this title

Synopsis

As an islandoa geographical space with mutable and porous bordersoCuba has never been a fixed cultural, political, or geographical entity. Migration and exile have always informed the Cuban experience, and loss and displacement have figured as central preoccupations among Cuban artists and intellectuals. A major expression of this experience is the unconventional, multi-generational, itinerant, and ongoing art exhibit CAFE: The Journeys of Cuban Artists. In Cuban Artists Across the Diaspora, Andrea O'Reilly Herrera focuses on the CAFE project to explore Cuba's long and turbulent history of movement and rupture from the perspective of its visual arts and to meditate upon the manner in which one reconstitutes and reinvents the self in the context of diaspora. Approaching the Cafeteros' art from a cultural studies perspective, O'Reilly Herrera examines how the history of Cuba informs their work and establishes their connections to past generations of Cuban artists. In interviews with more than thirty artists, including Jose Bedia, Maria Brito, Leandro Soto, Glexis Novoa, Baruj Salinas, and Ana Albertina Delgado, O'Reilly Herrera also raises critical questions regarding the many and sometimes paradoxical ways diasporic subjects self-affiliate or situate themselves in the narratives of scattering and displacement. She demonstrates how the Cafeteros' artmaking involves a process of re-rooting, absorption, translation, and synthesis that simultaneously conserves a series of identifiable Cuban cultural elements while re-inscribing and transforming them in new contexts. An important contribution to both diasporic and transnational studies and discussions of contemporary Cuban art, Cuban Artists Across the Diaspora ultimately testifies to the fact that a long tradition of Cuban art is indeed flourishing outside the island.

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.