The Fluid Expressive Communities of Cuba’s Interwar Avant-Gardes

doi:10.1017/9781009168359.016

15 - The Fluid Expressive Communities of Cuba’s Interwar Avant-Gardes

from Part III - Literary and Intellectual Culture in the Twentieth-Century Republic

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 August 2024

Vicky Unruh

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 on Cuba’s avant-gardes of the 1920s and early 1930s focuses on writers associated with the Grupo Minorista and the Revista de Avance, examining their cultivation of porous intellectual communities and the attention they paid to everyday expressive forms in seeking to translate Cuban orality into writing. These writers, the chapter argues, sought new ways of characterizing Cuban experience and identity, engaging critically with their surroundings and positioning themselves as consequential cultural actors. The chapter portrays the Minoristas’ approach to the tertulia as an affective assemblage that thrives on difference and artful disagreement, welcomes international visitors, and, while being capacious enough to include women, clings to gender stereotypes. It also draws connections between the group’s tertulias and the international cosmopolitan interactions forged by the conversational qualities of the Revista de Avance, with a literary and linguistic “art of eavesdropping,” stylistic self-consciousness, interstitial participant-observer positions, and hierarchical views of culture projected by such Minorista writing as the crónicas and essays of Jorge Mañach.

Keywords

Cuba’s historical avant-gardes (1920s–1930s)Grupo Minorista Revista de Avance Jorge Mañach (1898–1961)intellectual communities translation of everyday language to writing tertulia as affective and artful disagreement internationalism of Cuban avant-gardes avant-garde “art of eavesdropping”

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature , pp. 246 - 262

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009168359.016 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2024

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