Abstract
My dissertation investigates the intermingling of discourses of migration and aesthetics within global market dynamics in the cultural production of late Cuban émigrés in the U.S. and Europe, to whom I refer as “the children of the revolution” —following Mette Louise Berg. I argue that this understudied migratory generation has replaced the diasporic teleology of return of the exile community with other imaginaries. As such, my dissertation sheds light not only on the varying ways of being Cuban in today’s world, but also on the different routes of the children of the revolution in the diaspora. By engaging in a multidisciplinary perspective that involves concepts from diaspora and migration studies in tandem with cultural, literary, and performance studies, I demonstrate how internationalism as an ethical and political ideology predicated by the Cuban revolution evolved into different forms of “being in the world.” I study local migrant television in Miami, the works of writers José Manuel Prieto and Karla Suárez, and Carlos Martiel’s performances through the concept “nomadic cosmopolitanism.” This concept entails a tension with the notion of the world as one, by means of the tangential ways non-privileged migrant subjects engage in solidary practices simultaneously resisting and taking advantage of global capitalism, as much as it reflects on how contemporary migrants elude nation-state “technologies” of control within such a context of global fluxes. It also involves the disjuncture between authors’ self-positioning against locational projects like national/regional literatures, and the fixation by diffused institutional networks in the market that re-capture such fugues by re-inscribing Cubanness as a commodity for cosmopolitan audiences/readers. Thus, this dissertation decenters both Cuba and Miami, the traditional axis within Cuban diaspora research, and puts into perspective the tensional cords in which national identity and origin operate in the midst of global fluxes.