Havana Beyond the Ruins

Havana Beyond the Ruins
Author: Anke Birkenmaier
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2011-08-10
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 082235070X

Looks at portrayals of Havana in literature, music, and the visual arts in the post-Soviet era, as the city is reinvented as a destination for international tourists and business ventures.

(Post)Socialist Dance

(Post)Socialist Dance
Author:
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2024-10-03
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1350408166

This book sets out to search for the Second World - the (post)socialist context - in dance studies and examines the way it appears and reappears in today's globalized world. It traces hidden and invisibilized legacies over the span of one century, probing questions that can make viewers, artists, and scholars uncomfortable regarding dance histories, memories, circulations and production modes in and around the (post)socialist world. The contributions delve into a variety of dance practices (folk, traditional, ballet, modern, contemporary), modes of dance production (institutionalization processes, festival-making and market logics), and dance circulations (between centres and peripheries, between different genres and styles). The main focus is Eastern Europe (including Russia) but the book also addresses Cuba and China. The book's historical examples make the reader aware, too, of the (post)socialist bodies' influence in today's dance, including in contemporary dance scenes. The (post)socialist context promises to be a prosperous laboratory to explore uncomfortable questions of legitimacy. Whose choreographic work is staged as a 'quality' dance production? Which dance practices are worthy of scholarly study? What are the limits of dance studies' understanding of what dance is or should be? In view of reclaiming the Second World through dance, this book thus probes questions that should be asked today but are not easy to answer; questions that dance practitioners, facilitators, critics, and researchers, including ourselves, are often not at ease with either. In doing so, the cracks of dance history begin to be sealed, and neglected dance practices are written back into history, provided with the academic recognition that they deserve.

Havana

Havana
Author: Susan Anne Mansel Fitzgerald
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2022-05-01
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1000615219

Following the crisis of the Special Period, Cuba promoted urban agriculture throughout its towns and cities to address food sovereignty and security. Through the adoption of state recommended design strategies, these gardens have become places of social and economic exchange throughout Cuba. This book maps the lived experiences surrounding three urban farms in Havana to construct a deeper understanding about the everyday life of this city. Using narratives and drawings, this research uncovers these sites as places where education, intimacy, entrepreneurism, wellbeing, and culture are interwoven alongside food production. Henri Lefebvre’s latent work on rhythmanalysis is used as a research method to capture the everyday beats particular to Havana surrounding these sites. This book maps the many ways in which these spaces shift power away from the state to become places that are co-created by the community to serve as a crucial hinge point between the ongoing collapse of the city and its future wellbeing.

Sound, Media, Ecology

Sound, Media, Ecology
Author: Milena Droumeva
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2019-06-27
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 3030165698

This volume reads the global urban environment through mediated sonic practices to put a contemporary spin on acoustic ecology’s investigations at the intersection of space, cultures, technology, and the senses. Acoustic ecology is an interdisciplinary framework from the 1970s for documenting, analyzing, and transforming sonic environments: an early model of the cross-boundary thinking and multi-modal practices now common across the digital humanities. With the recent emergence of sound studies and the expansion of “ecological” thinking, there is an increased urgency to re-discover and contemporize the acoustic ecology tradition. This book serves as a comprehensive investigation into the ways in which current scholars working with sound are re-inventing acoustic ecology across diverse fields, drawing on acoustic ecology’s focus on sensory experience, place, and applied research, as well as attendance to mediatized practices in sounded space. From sounding out the Anthropocene, to rethinking our auditory media landscapes, to exploring citizenship and community, this volume brings the original acoustic ecology problem set into the contemporary landscape of sound studies.

Street Art and Activism in the Greater Caribbean

Street Art and Activism in the Greater Caribbean
Author: Jana Evans Braziel
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2022-09-06
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000636119

Foregrounding street art in the capital cities of Cuba, Haiti, and Puerto Rico, this book argues that Antillean street artists diagnose the “impossible state” of the arrested present (colonized, occupied, or under dictatorship) while simultaneously imagining liberated futures and fully sovereign states. Jana Evans Braziel launches a comparative study of art, politics, history, urban street cultures, engaged citizenships, and social transformations in three Antillean capital cities—Havana, Cuba; Port-au-Prince, Haiti; and San Juan, Puerto Rico—of the Greater Caribbean. The book includes a photo documentary archive of street art, murals, and installations by key muralists in these cities: Yulier Rodriguez Pérez, "Jerry" Rosembert Moïse, and Colectivo Moriviví (Chachi González Colón, Raysa Rodríguez García, and Salomé Cortés). Braziel offers art historical and geopolitical analyses of the urban street art in their cities of production, underscoring street art as political, economic, and environmental engagements (and not as exclusively aesthetic ones) with urban space and street life. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Caribbean studies, Latin American studies, and urban studies.

The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature

The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature
Author: Sarah Quesada
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2022-08-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1009085964

The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature unearths a buried African archive within widely-read Latinx writers of the last fifty years. It challenges dominant narratives in World Literature and transatlantic studies that ignore Africa's impact in broader Latin American culture. Sarah Quesada argues that these canonical works evoke textual memorials of African memory. She shows how the African Atlantic haunts modern Latinx and Caribbean writing, and examines the disavowal or distortion of the African subject in the constructions of national, racial, sexual, and spiritual Latinx identity. Quesada shows how themes such as the 19th century 'scramble for Africa,' the decolonizing wars, Black internationalism, and the neoliberal turn are embedded in key narratives. Drawing from multilingual archives about West and Central Africa, she examines how the legacies of colonial French, Iberian, British and U.S. Imperialisms have impacted on the relationships between African and Latinx identities. This is the first book-length project to address the African colonial and imperial inheritance of Latinx literature.

My Havana

My Havana
Author: Maria Carida Cumana
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2014-09-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 1442669004

For more than thirty years, musician Carlos Varela has been a guide to the heart, soul, and sound of Havana. One of the best known singer-songwriters to emerge out of the Cuban nueva trova movement, Varela has toured in North America, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Europe. In North America, Varela is “Cuba’s Bob Dylan.” In Cuba, he is the voice of the generation that came of age in the 1990s and for whom his songs are their generation’s anthems. My Havana is a lyrical exploration of Varela’s life and work, and of the vibrant musical, literary, and cinematic culture of his generation. Popular both among Cubans on the island and in the diaspora, Varela is legendary for the intense political honesty of lyrics. He is one of the most important musicians in the Cuban scene today. In My Havana, writers living in Canada, Cuba, the United States, and Great Britain use Varela’s life and music to explore the history and cultural politics of contemporary Cuba. The book also contains an extended interview with Varela and English translations of the lyrics to all his recorded songs, most of which are appearing in print for the very first time.

Historical Dictionary of Cuba

Historical Dictionary of Cuba
Author: Antoni Kapcia
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 725
Release: 2022-04-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 1442264551

This work is a completely new Historical Dictionary for Cuba (the first since 1988). It gives a comprehensive and detailed coverage and analysis of all of the key elements, factors, biographies, narratives, and treaties in Cuban history from the 1400s to the present day, with an emphasis on the decades after 1959. Historical Dictionary of Cuba, Third Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 1.000 cross-referenced entries on important personalities as well as aspects of the country’s politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Cuba.

Cuba

Cuba
Author: Julia E. Sweig
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2016-05-25
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0190620382

Ever since Fidel Castro assumed power in Cuba in 1959, Americans have obsessed about the nation ninety miles south of the Florida Keys. America's fixation on the tropical socialist republic has only grown over the years, fueled in part by successive waves of Cuban immigration and Castro's larger-than-life persona. Cubans are now a major ethnic group in Florida, and the exile community is so powerful that every American president has curried favor with it. But what do most Americans really know about Cuba itself? In this third edition of the widely hailed Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know®, Julia Sweig updates her concise and remarkably accessible portrait of the small island nation. This edition contains a new foreword that discusses developments since Obama and Raul Castro announced the normalization of US-Cuba relations and restored formal diplomatic ties. A new final chapter discusses how normalization came to pass and covers Pope Francis' visit to Cuba, where he met with Fidel and Raul Castro. Expansive in coverage and authoritative in scope, the book looks back over Cuba's history since the Spanish American War before shifting to recent times. Focusing equally on Cuba's role in world affairs and its own social and political transformations, Sweig divides the book chronologically into the pre-Fidel era, the period between the 1959 revolution and the fall of the Soviet Union, the post-Cold War era, and -- finally -- the post-Fidel era. Informative, pithy, and lucidly written, it is the best compact reference on Cuba's internal politics, its often fraught relationship with the United States, and its shifting relationship with the global community. What Everyone Needs to Know® is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press.

Cuba

Cuba
Author: Julia Sweig
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2016
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190620374

Informative, pithy, and lucidly written, Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know, 3rd edition, is the best compact reference on Cuba's internal politics, its often fraught relationship with the United States, and its shifting relationship with the global community.