17 - The Fictions of New Urban Subjects

Summary

In the context of rapid modernization, urban growth, and immigration, this chapter examines the fiction of Carlos Montenegro, Lino Novás Calvo (both working-class Spanish immigrants), and Ofelia Rodríguez Acosta (a feminist from a bourgeois background). The analysis elucidates the emergence from the 1920s to 1940s of new urban characters whose stories were brought into Cuban literature by these writers, and these characters’ complex enactment of the intertwining of class, gender orientation, sexuality, and race. The chapter’s comparative analyses of work by writers who all enjoyed promotion by or association with the avant-gardist Minorista group or the Revista de Avance encompass Montenegro’s prison narratives, told through the perspective not of intellectual political prisoners but of working-class inmates who have committed crimes, and exploring complex hierarchies shaping interracial homoerotic love; Novás Calvo’s stylistically inventive narratives of the fluidity of race and class intersections in settings of exploitative heavy labor; and Rodríguez Acosta’s fictional renditions of middle-class women resisting norms of sexuality, marriage, motherhood, and heteronormativity.