Handbook on Cuban History, Literature, and the Arts: New Perspectives on Historical and Contemporary Social Change (Paradigm Handbooks) - Tapa dura

"This handbook fills a need to bring interested readers up to date with developments in Cuban culture and society after the Special Period, when the Soviet Union disappeared together with its generous subsidies. . .Summing Up: Recommended. All libraries."
―CHOICE

"Handbook on Cuban History, Literature, and the Arts offers in one volume a comprehensive view of the status of Cuban studies today. The book illuminates the growing salience of social issues and changes in music, literature, cinema, and theater, thus fostering a fuller understanding of historical and current social dynamics of a Cuba in transformation today. This compilation contributes to the development of a framework for understanding the ongoing transformations in the presence of changing structural dynamics."
― Sir Read-a-Lot

Puzzled by the conditions that made possible a socialist revolution in Cuba-the first and only in the Western Hemisphere-scholarship after 1959 focused on the historical and cultural aspects of the making of a revolutionary order. Since 2008, the end of Fidel Castro's direct rule, world economic conditions and a wave of reforms and social transformation have forced a reconsideration of Cuban cultural and historical dynamics. The scholarly gaze is now on possibilities for alternative transformations rather than on the deepening of conventional twentieth-century state socialism. This handbook explores key themes in the current debate about Cuba's contemporary cultural and historical dynamics. Leading academics from Cuba, the United States, and Europe bring to light significant revisions of the artistic and literary canon and the historical archive, and they reconsider often neglected subjects and dynamics in historiography as well as contemporary affairs. The book includes new studies on contentious mobilization, leftist activism, and youth organizations in the pre-revolutionary republic. Current analyses include the relation between the Cuban state and intellectuals; institutional legitimation processes; the formation and reconstruction of national identity discourses; and new framings of gender, race, and sexual orientation. The book illuminates the growing salience of social issues and changes in music, literature, cinema, and theater, thus fostering a fuller understanding of historical and current social dynamics of a Cuba in transformation today.