New Directions
Postcolonial Gestures from Literature to Dance in the Cultural Production of the Cuban Revolution (1970s)
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lester Tome
Cuban poet and literary critic Roberto Fernández Retamar published the essay “Caliban: Notes Toward a Discussion of Culture in Our America” (1971) at a time when prominent Latin American writers were defining their positions as allies or critics of the Cuban Revolution. In “Caliban,” Retamar accused Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes and Severo Sarduy of siding with the geopolitical enemies of Fidel Castro’s regime. Furthermore, he dismissed those writers’ literary output as the expression of colonialist ideology and pro-imperialist agendas. Ultimately, the essay transcended that narrow literary dispute and Retamar’s dogmatic discussion of regional alliance/opposition to the Revolution. Despite its partisan limitations, “Caliban” became a seminal text for postcolonial studies in Latin America for its analysis—expanded in Retamar’s other articles from that period—of the fraught bond between national culture and European/Western heritage in Latin America. The text embraces Caliban (the indigenous American character from Shakespeare’s The Tempest who speaks in a European language) as a metaphor of the uneasy relationship of the region’s hybrid national cultures to the irreversible European heritage of the post-colonies. Here, I discuss the significance of Retamar’s theses for that era’s cultural production in Cuba beyond the writer’s specific concerns with literature and linguistics. I analyze the choreography of Alberto Méndez’s El río y el bosque (1973), which hybridized ballet and dances from the Afro-Cuban santería religion, as an instance of the calibanesque strategies through which the Ballet Nacional de Cuba approached the postcolonial challenge of articulating cultural nationalism within a European dance genre.
Incest as the Divine Unknown in Genesis 19 View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tomi Drucker
My paper investigates the connection between sex and knowledge in Genesis 19, by comparing the way in which the verb “to know” appears twice at the beginning of the chapter to describe sexual acts when the Sodomites seek to rape Lot’s guests, and when Lot, in the name of hospitality, offers them his virgin daughters instead, and twice in its negation – “to know not” at the end of the chapter in relation to the incestuous act between Lot and his daughter. I ask: what could this juxtaposition reveal about the connection between sex and knowledge; body and knowledge; incest and knowledge? Considering that Lot’s body was able to function and impregnate his daughters in the cave, what exactly didn’t he know? I think of this juxtaposition through the theme of hospitality that is central to Genesis 19, through questions of host and guest, mastery and house, property, propriety, and the proper name. How might the knowledge of the name divide sex into proper and improper? How might the daughters free themselves in the cave from being a nameless property into being nameless hostesses through the improper act of incest? How might the incestuous act suggest a different way of (un)knowing, and allow the possibility of imagining a different kind of hospitality, a non-patriarchal one, without mastery, without the Name?
Nature, Culture, and the Anthropocene in Sarnath Banerjee’s Doab Dil (2019): An Ecocritical Commentary on Discourses of Power View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Nishevita Jayendran
This paper comments on the depictions of nature, culture, and the anthropocene in Sarnath Banerjee’s graphic essay, Doab Dil (2019). Doab Dil uses fragments, visio-textual narratives and muralistic representations to invite reflections on ecological balance that comprises one of its many thematic concerns. In the process, it functions as an ecocritical text where the delineation of the nature-culture dichotomy spans space and time. Instances of this depiction include reflections on/of nature in metaphysical poetry, genetics, global practices of gardening and American transcendentalism, as well as contemporary discourses on the country and the city, and sub/urban development in the Global South where nature blends into concrete jungles as a marker of sophistication and style. Within and through each fragment, Doab Dil constructs new discourses on nature and culture that are hinged on their interconnectedness and/as difference in values and ontologies. Significantly, while the values associated with these constructs position the nature-culture diad within theoretical formulations of posthumanism, ecocriticism and the anthropocene, and replicate (post)colonial constructs of difference/othering through hierarchies of power, they also urge reflection on alternative values of respect, empathy and humility for ecological balance. Through a literary criticism of Doab Dil’s representation of the nature/culture dichotomy, this paper comments on the discourses of power in the work, and the politics of possibilities signposted by the (counter) discourses of respect and empathy in the age of the anthropocene.
