Minima Cuba: Heretical Poetics and Power in Post-Soviet Cuba

by Marta Hernández Salván

Overview

Explores the ideological and emotional trauma created after the withering of the socialist utopia in Cuba.

2016 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

Mínima Cuba analyzes the reconfiguration of aesthetics and power during the Cuban postrevolutionary transition (1989 to 2005, the conclusion of the "Special Period"). It explores the marginal cultural production on the island by the first generation of intellectuals born during the Revolution. The author studies the work of postrevolutionary poets and essayists Antonio José Ponte, Rolando Sánchez Mejías, and Iván de la Nuez, among others. In their writing we find the exhaustion of the allegorical and melancholic rhetoric of the Cuban Revolution, and the poetics of irony developed in the current biopolitical era. The book will appeal to anyone interested in contemporary literary and cultural studies, poetics, and film studies in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781438456690
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	06/30/2015
Series:	SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Marta Hernández Salván is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of California, Riverside.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. Sovereignty of Violence

2. Violence and Melancholia in the Eighties and Nineties

3. Biopolitics and the Revival of José Lezama Lima in the Eighties and Nineties

4. Humanism, Irony, and the End of Literature

Afterword
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Marta Hernández Salván tackles head on the complex nature of philosophical tendencies within the poetics of Cuban cultural production in the last few decades to offer magnificent and precise readings of lesser-known writings and films, as well as profound renderings of canonical texts. This is a remarkably rich book that will take multiple readings to give it justice." — Jacqueline Loss, author of Dreaming in Russian: The Cuban Soviet Imaginary

From the Publisher