What does it mean to be a Black Cuban? How do Black Cubans reinterpret the island’s socio-cultural and historical identities? How is Black agency expressed in contemporary Cuba? These pivotal questions will guide our in-depth exploration of Black Cuban contemporary art, both from the island and the diaspora. In this seminar, we will delve into the ways Black Cuban artists, such as Alexandre Arrechea, Belkis Ayón, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo, Juan Roberto Diago, René Peña, Gertrudis Rivalta, Elio Rodríguez, Carlos Martiel, Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, and Juana Valdés, deconstruct socially imposed identities and create non-conventional representations of Black Cubanness. We will discuss how these artists contest the notion of a non-racialized national identity and combat prevailing misconceptions of Black Cubans as lacking agency.
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Seminar
Tue, Aug 13, 202410:00 am to 12:00 pm -
Seminar
Wed, Aug 14, 202410:00 am to 12:00 pm -
Seminar
Thu, Aug 15, 202410:00 am to 12:00 pm -
Public Talk (Symposium)
Fri, Aug 16, 202412:00 pm to 3:30 pm
Odette Casamayor-Cisneros is an Associate Professor of Latin American & Caribbean Cultural Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the Inaugural Roberto C. Goizueta Distinguished Presidential Fellow at the University of Miami’s Cuban Heritage Collection. She holds a Ph.D. in Arts and Literature from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris and a B.A. in Journalism from the University of Havana. Casamayor-Cisneros is the author of Utopia, dystopia e ingravidez: reconfiguraciones cosmológicas en la narrativa postsoviética cubana(Vervuert, 2013) and the short story collection Una casa en los Catskills (Secta de los perros & Letras cubanas, 2013 & 2016). She is currently working on two new books: In Black Ink: Writings from the Flesh of a Black Cuban Woman and On Being Blacks: Self-Identification Processes and Counter-Hegemonic Knowledge in Contemporary Cuban Cultural Production.