Prose Narratives from Cuban America

doi:10.1017/9781009168359.045

44 - Prose Narratives from Cuban America

from Part V - Cuba and Its Diasporas into the New Millennium

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 August 2024

Iraida H. López

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 unpacks the category “Cuban America” in order to examine Cuban fiction and nonfiction prose in the US by a rich ensemble of writers whose work elucidates how deterritorialization makes deciphering questions of belonging through literary categories challenging. Whereas Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s literature and criticism popularized the notion of hyphenated identities beginning in the 1990s, this chapter conveys a plethora of issues around Cuban Americanness for a rich and diverse ensemble of writers who, having arrived in the US in different eras, may write in English, Spanish, or a mix of the two, and whose relationship to their country of origin – Cuba or the US – is complicated. The chapter organizes these writers into four groupings: writers linked to the first postrevolutionary wave of exiles, who, it is argued, keep acculturation at arm’s length; writers whose exile was propelled by or contemporaneous with the 1980 Mariel exodus; second-generation Cuban US writers producing work primarily in English and pointing toward a Cuban US Latinidad; and Cuban writers who migrated to the US in the post-Soviet era.

Keywords

fiction and nonfiction prose of Cuban America generational and linguistic complexity of “Cuban Americanness”US Cuban writers of first exile generation US Cuban writers of the Mariel exodus US Cubans writers and Latinidad US Cuban writers of post-Soviet period

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature , pp. 692 - 706

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009168359.045 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2024

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