Fourteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

This paper will highlight the creative expressions of a group of Cuban diasporic artists, who participate in an itinerant, multi-generational and multi-media exhibition titled CAFÉ. Reflecting their affinity with their predeccesors, the CAFÉ artists have collectively forged a visual vocabulary that establishes their national or cultural affiliation despite the exigencies of displacement; yet their work also reveals a mode of cultural exchange that has characterized Cuban art and cultural production for centuries. Although their art reflects a collective cultural imaginary that has been preserved and cultivated in diaspora, it simultaneously reveals the manner in which they have rooted and re-rooted in new cultural contexts. At the same time that it speaks to the notion of cultural hybridity and transculturation, the CAFÉ exhibits represent a process of exchange, adaptation, transformation and synthesis that can be located in the larger historical context of colonialism, movement, and displacement; in this sense it represents a very particular Caribbean aesthetic. This paper will foreground a cultural studies approach to the study of diasporic identity formation in a transnational context. When considered from this theoretical perspective, café cubano—the controlling metaphor of the exhibition—encapsulates the diasporic or exilic condition, for it represents fundamental, iconographic cultural practices which enable diasporic Cubans to preserve their sense of Cubanness; yet it is also a powerful metaphor for the manner in which diasporic Cubans are transformed by, and have transformed, their experience in new contexts.