The Cuban Post-Socialist Exotic

Contemporary U.S. American Travel Narratives about Cuba
Erscheinungsjahr 2020
ISBN: 978-3-86821-769-8
Verlag: WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier

Buch, Englisch, Band 22, 266 Seiten, Format (B × H): 148 mm x 210 mm, Gewicht: 428 g

Reihe: Inter-American Studies / Estudios Interamericanos

Travel writing is more than the simple account of a journey. It is a political act. There is an entire market of travel books about Cuba that emerged in the United States in the 1990s and that subscribe to a long tradition of narratives serving as a space of projection for U.S. political fantasies. The journey-based stories offer an intricate maze of perspectives and personal impressions, which translate history and politics with a considerable dose of sentimentality. Using an interdisciplinary approach anchored in the field of Inter-American Studies, this book investigates the relation between the Cuban cultural imaginary and U.S. American exceptionalism in a series of travel narratives about the island that conceive of Cuba as the Caribbean locus of a post-socialist exotic. The goal of this book is to raise awareness of the othering discourses at work in travel writing that foster hidden political agendas and that may easily be overlooked when reading travel literature for leisure. In reality, the cultural labels endorsed by travel writing shape our expectations, our interpersonal relations, and the way we see the world.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fulger, Maria Diana

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Contents Acknowledgements ................................................................................................. vii 1. Introduction .................................................................................................... 1 2. Theoretical Approach and Methodology ........................................................ 4 3. On Travel Writing .......................................................................................... 10 4. Towards a U.S. American Mission ................................................................. 15 4.1. Civil Religion ....................................................................................... 15 4.2. Manifest Destiny .................................................................................. 19 4.3. The Cuban War of Independence ......................................................... 24 5. Othering Discourses ....................................................................................... 26 5.1. Tropicalization and the Tropical Sublime ............................................ 26 5.1.1. The Cuban Revolution of 1959 ............................................................. 29 5.1.2. Cuba in U.S. Caricatures ...................................................................... 34 5.1.3. Conceptual Metaphors .......................................................................... 36 5.1.4. Metaphors of Cuba in the U.S. American Imagination ......................... 38 5.2. Racialized Erotics ................................................................................ 47 6. Othering Discourses in Travel Literature ....................................................... 53 6.1. Latin America through the Eyes of the European Conquista ................ 53 6.2. Representations of Cuba in Nineteenth-Century United States ............ 61 6.3. Early Twentieth Century ...................................................................... 71 6.4. The Cuban Revolution in U.S. American Travel Literature ................. 80 7. Post-Socialist Nostalgia .................................................................................. 89 8. The Corpus of Travel Narratives .................................................................... 97 9. This is Cuba: An Outlaw Culture Survives by Ben Corbett ............................ 101 10. Es Cuba: Life and Love on an Illegal Island by Lea Aschkenas .................... 127 11. Mi Moto Fidel: Motorcycling through Castro’s Cuba by C. P. Baker ........... 151 12. Conversations with Cuba by C. Peter Ripley ................................................. 174 13. Real Life in Castro’s Cuba by Catherine Moses ............................................ 194 14. Further Travel Narratives on the Special Period ............................................. 211 15. Synthesis and Conclusion ............................................................................... 221 Epilogue .................................................................................................................. 231 Works Cited ............................................................................................................ 232 Further Reading ....................................................................................................... 248