Synopses & Reviews
Defining the political and aesthetic tensions that have shaped Cuban culture for over forty years, Linda Howe explores the historical and political constraints imposed upon Cuban artists and intellectuals during and after the Revolution. Focusing on the work of Afro-Cuban writers Nancy Morejón and prominent novelist Miguel Barnet, Howe exposes the complex relationship between Afro-Cuban intellectuals and government authorities as well as the racial issues present in Cuban culture.
Review
"A brilliant synthesis of Cubas cultural production since the Revolution. Linda Howe offers the ultimate guide to understanding the cultural policies of the island. This overview is enhanced by her detailed analyses of the works of Nancy Morejón and Miguel Barnet, two Cuban writers whose fortunes and literary preoccupations closely mirror the larger cultural and political movements of their times. Fascinating and comprehensive."—Cristina García, editor of Cubanísimo
Review
"Transgression and Conformity is foxy, courageous, well-informed. It comes from first-hand knowledge of high-and-low life in Cuba in the nineties. Linda Howe proves that those who do Cuban studies without frequent visits to the island risk knowing nothing of relevance about the rough and tender moods and textures of its human drama."— Eduardo González, Johns Hopkins University
Synopsis
Philip Holden reveals deeply gendered connections between the writing of individual lives and of the narratives of nations emerging from colonialism. Autobiography and Decolonization is the first book to give serious academic attention to autobiographies of nationalist leaders in the process of decolonization, attending to them not simply as partial historical documents, but as texts involved in remaking the world views of their readers. Holden examines Mohandas K. Gandhi s An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Marcus Garvey s fragmentary Autobiography, Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford s Ethiopia Unbound, Lee Kuan Yew s The Singapore Story, Nelson Mandela s Long Walk to Freedom, Jawaharlal Nehru s An Autobiography, and Kwame Nkrumah s Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah. Holden argues that these examples of life writing have had significant influence on the formation of new, and often profoundly gendered, national identities. These narratives constitute the nation less as an imagined community than as an imagined individual. Moving from the past to the promise of the future, they mediate relationships between public and private, and between individual and collective stories. Ultimately, they show how the construction of modern selfhood is inextricably linked to the construction of a postcolonial polity."
About the Author
Linda S. Howe is associate professor of Spanish and director of Latin American Studies at Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.