Roots and Offshoots: New Approaches to Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

This panel explores Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés (1882) in a comparative framework. Leslie Bary and Thomas Genova reroute the novel’s genealogy through the Francophone and Spanish-speaking Americas, probing what these transnational origins mean for a text of national foundation. Lucy Harney and Vanessa Nelsen, meanwhile, delve into the book’s afterlives, tracking the shifts in the novel’s very particular racial and gender paradigms as they are adapted to the conventions of opera, television miniseries, and puppet show. Finally, William Luis considers the work as a comparative economic analysis of the contrasting slave societies generated by different kinds of cash crops.

Sub Track

• Literary Studies: Colonial and 19th Centuries

Session Organizers

• Thomas F Genova, University of Minnesota, Morris

• Leslie Bary, University of Louisana at Lafayette

Chair

• Thomas F Genova, University of Minnesota, Morris

Individual Presentations

• Textual Influences and Infidelities: Cecilia Valdés in the Americas - Thomas F Genova, University of Minnesota, Morris

• Cecilia Valdés in New Orleans - Leslie Bary, University of Louisana at Lafayette

• The Cultural Franchise of Cecilia Valdés - Lucy D Harney, Texas State University

• Norge Espinosa Mendoza’s La Virgencita de Bronce: From Cecilia Valdés to the Puppet Unstrung - Vanessa A Nelsen, Emory University

• Sugar, Coffee, and Tobacco and the Construction of the Cuban Nation in Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés - William Luis, Vanderbilt University