Gay Cuban Nation [Hardcover]

Emilio Bejel (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0226041735 | ISBN-13: 978-0226041735 | Publication Date: September 1, 2001 | Edition: 1

With Gay Cuban Nation, Emilio Bejel looks at Cuba's markedly homoerotic culture through writings about homosexuality, placing them in the social and political contexts that led up to the Cuban Revolution. By reading against the grain of a wide variety of novels, short stories, autobiographies, newspaper articles, and films, Bejel maps out a fascinating argument about the way in which different attitudes toward power and nationalism struggle for an authoritative stance on homosexual issues. Through close readings of writers such as José Martí, Alfonso Hernández-Catá, Carlos Montenegro, José Lezama Lima, Leonardo Padura Fuentes, and Reinaldo Arenas, whose heartbreaking autobiography, Before Night Falls, has enjoyed renewed popularity, Gay Cuban Nation shows that the category of homosexuality is always lurking, ghostlike, in the shadows of nationalist discourse. The book stakes out Cuba's sexual battlefield, and will challenge the homophobia of both Castro's revolutionaries and Cuban exiles in the States.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Bejel persuasively asserts that the obsessive attempt to marginalize homosexuality with respect to Cuban nationalism has the paradoxical effect of making it central, through negation, to Cuban national consciousness. . . . The student of Latin American literature will find in Gay Cuban Nation an erudite and comprehensive introduction to the treatment of a central but problematical theme in Cuban history and society.”—Edward J. Tejirian, Archives of Sexual Behavior

(Edward J. Tejirian Archives of Sexual Behavior )

From the Inside Flap

With Gay Cuban Nation, Emilio Bejel looks at Cuba's markedly homoerotic culture through writings about homosexuality, placing them in the social and political contexts that led up to the Cuban Revolution. By reading against the grain of a wide variety of novels, short stories, autobiographies, newspaper articles, and films, he maps out a fascinating argument about the way in which nationalism and other institutions of power struggle for an authoritative stance on homosexual issues. Through close readings of writers such as José Martí, Ofelia Rodríguez Acosta, Carlos Montenegro, José Lezama Lima, Severo Sarduy, Achy Obejas, Sonia Rivera-Valdés, and Reinaldo Arenas, Gay Cuban Nation shows ultimately that the specter of homosexuality is always lurking in the shadows of nationalist discourse.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition (September 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226041735
• ISBN-13: 978-0226041735
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,224,132 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A splendid introduction to homosexuality in Cuban literature, January 15, 2002

By 

Stephen O. Murray "Stephen O. Murray" (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Gay Cuban Nation (Paperback)

Emilio Bejel's sensible analyses of Cuban fiction (on page and screen) shows that the project of Cuban nationalism from the last years of Spanish colonial rule to the middle years of Soviet neocolonialism was tightly interwoven with anxiety about weak, effeminate males and assertive, masculine women.In addition to well-known works such as Reinaldo Arenas's memoir _Before Night Falls_, José Lezama Lima's hallucinatory novel _Paradiso_, and the movie "Strawberry and Chocolate," Bejel discusses some less known earlier Cuban writing and more recent Cuban-American writing with characters who engage in homosexuality.

There is little in the way of comparison to nationalism in other places in this book and some surprising exclusions (especially Arenas's fiction and that of Virglio Piñera, now the martyred saint of younger gay Cuban writers). What Bejel has to say about the set of texts he discusses is almost always insightful, particularly about nuances of class differences and the long-running demonization of cities (paralleling the Jeffersonian tradition in the US). I am not convinced that some of the texts about which he writes (with the exception of "Strawberry and chocolate") reflect or have shaped Cuban nation-building (even in the sense of developing an "imagined community"). In addition to some doubts about the salience of some of the examples he selected I would have found more about the reception (especially any incorporation into standard Cuban school curricula) useful. Nonetheless, this is an outstanding and insight-filled reflection on homosexuality, homophobia, literature, and nation-building in Cuba from 1889 to 1997.