Beginnings

doi:10.1017/9781009168359.023

22 - Beginnings

Testimonios, Experimentalism, and Their Legacies

from Part IV - The Revolution’s Literary-Cultural Initiatives and Their Early Discontents

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 August 2024

Par Kumaraswami

Edited by

Vicky Unruh and

Jacqueline Loss

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Vicky Unruh: Affiliation:
University of Kansas
Jacqueline Loss: Affiliation:
University of Connecticut

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Summary

This chapter addresses the developments in literary and intellectual culture following the 1959 triumph of the Cuban Revolution, including the complex debates about the relationship between form and content that featured in the literature and the literary landscape of the new revolutionary society. Outlining the national and international contexts in which cultural policy was being developed and implemented, and within and against which individual and grouped actors, discourses, and texts were contributing to a heterogeneous understanding of literature in the revolution, the chapter underscores the relationship in the 1960s and 1970s among literature, cultural trends, processes of legitimization, political actions, and newly founded state institutions. In this context, the chapter then investigates how intermedial creations – and,m more specifically, the testimonio, a genre portrayed as a “radical anticolonial and decolonizing experiment” – negotiate individual agency and collective identity.

Keywords

Cuban postrevolutionary literary culture in the 1960s and 1970s debates about relationship between form and content national and international contexts of postrevolutionary literature postrevolutionary intermedial creations testimonio literature as anticolonial and decolonizing experiment

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature , pp. 353 - 367

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009168359.023 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2024

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