Cuba and the Global South

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

This panel takes up the themes of justice in “Nuestra América” by exploring the relationship between Cuba and the Global South in literature and other cultural texts. Papers interrogate Cuba´s centrality in forming networks among the geographical and ideological “souths” in which anti-colonial and anti-imperial cooperation are forged: the US South from José Martí's writings to 20th-century queer culture; from Caribbean intellectual collaboration to solidarity with Africa. Cuba’s geographical proximity to North and South America, looking both west to the Americas and east to Europe and Africa, places the island at the center of recent theorizations of the Global South. The panel spans debates over slavery to notions of Third World and anti-colonial solidarities, showing that trans-hemispheric relations have been central to Cuba’s projection of its own geopolitical location. The international Left in both the Global North and the Global South have sought in revolutionary Cuba signs of liberation—political sovereignty, racial equality, anticolonial resistance, or economic independence—while the post-Cold War era has forced a reconsideration of Cuba’s recent history. This panel considers Cuba's relationship to the United States' South in José Martí's writing in New Orleans and queer culture between Miami and Havana in the 1980s, its role in creating networks of anticolonial intellectuals in the Caribbean through the 1968 Havana Congress, and the legacies of its leadership in Africa in contemporary cultural memories of the war in Angola.

Sub Track

• Literature and Culture: Interdisciplinary Approaches

Session Organizer

• Lanie M Millar, University of Oregon

Chair

• Marilyn G Miller, Tulane University

Individual Presentations

• 'Allá en tierras del Sur': Civility and Barbarism in José Martí's New Orleans - Marilyn G Miller, Tulane University

• Caribbean Intellectual Visibility, Caliban, and the 1968 Cultural Congress of Havana - Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann, Emerson College

• Silence, Secrets and the Global South: Mariel, the Homosexual Male and the US Deep South - Bridgette W Gunnels, Oxford College of Emory University

• Los hijos del heroismo: Cultural Reverberations of the Angolan War at Home - Lanie M Millar, University of Oregon