The study analyzes how the socialist bloc film industry integrated Cuba in socialist internationalism, and how Cuba benefited from and resisted that integration. I argue that negotiating two competing narratives – socialist internationalism (solidarity) and the Cuban anti-neocolonialism (sovereignty) – affected this cultural exchange. Cubans enjoyed the material benefits of socialist solidarity, but strongly resisted when it threatened their decision-making. As a result of this, Cuba downplayed the importance of the socialist bloc aid for its film industry, even though the socialist bloc contributed significantly to its development.

The socialist bloc also played a role in the formation of the cinematic narrative of the Cuban Revolution through films that represented the “new” Cuba. Filmmakers attempted to integrate Cuba in the narrative of socialist internationalism, capitalizing on shared enemies like imperialism and the bourgeoisie, although these enemies and conflicts did not have the same significance for all parties.

The study reconstructs a cultural history of collaboration between Cuba, Czechoslovakia, the GDR, and the USSR in the 1960s, using three co-productions as case studies: the Soviet Soy Cuba (Kalatozov, 1964), the Czechoslovak Para qui�n baila La Habana (Čech, 1962) and the East German Preludio 11 (Maetzig, 1964). I explore understudied and unpublished primary sources from archives in the Czech Republic and Germany, regarding the films’ conception, production, and reception. I also study film press reviews to assess the films’ historical value and add oral histories to cover the gaps in archival documentation.

I conclude that distinct visions of socialist internationalism informed the three countries’ relationships with Cuba. While all three countries contributed material support and training, and their documentaries were praised in Cuba for reflecting the ideals that Cuban leaders wanted to broadcast, the three co-productions were rejected for not fulfilling the Cuban people’s expectations. Cubans were wary of the political ambiguities the films had introduced, worried that they might destabilize the official narrative of the Cuban Revolution. My dissertation reveals that although the films were dismissed for their Eurocentric gaze and lack of authenticity, they demonstrate the filmmakers’ capacity to understand the Cuban Revolution and connections it had with their own socialist reality.

This dissertation maps out the connections between the Cuban author José Lezama Lima (1910-1976) and a network of anti-modern intellectuals, journals, and publishing houses that had an active presence in Latin American’s public sphere during mid 20th century. My dissertation argues that in order to understand, not only Lezama’s singular position in the history of Cuban and Latin American literatures, but also some of the most characteristic and polemic features of his work —his radical critique of rational subjectivity, his explicit Catholicism, and his nostalgia for the past—, it is crucial to recuperate a context that has been largely ignored both by Lezama scholarship and traditional Latin American intellectual history. The anti-modern milieu, which took deep roots in Latin America and Europa between 1920 and 1959, embarked on a fierce critique of Modernity that transcended the paradigms of rejection and revisionism. The singularity of their critiques comes from the fact that they were able to see Modernity trough lenses that were at the same time anachronistic and contemporaneous, archaic and ultramodern.

The connections between Lezama and anti-modern writers such as Paul Claudel (1868-1955), Jacques Maritain (1882-1973), and G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), or his interest in journals such as Sur (1931-1970), Sol y Luna (1938-1943), and Cruz y Raya (1933-1936), to mention just a few, have traditionally been seen as a part of a larger debate about the orthodoxy or heterodoxy of his Catholicism. Taking a set of traditional ideas about Catholicism as a starting-point, this approach tends to emphasize the ontological and theological dimension of those interactions by reducing religion to one all-encompassing concept: transcendence. Following what appears to be a precise logic, this slant concludes that the “transcendent” poetics of the anti-modern Lezama are not only anachronistic, but have an implicit link with what Rafael Rojas has called “the formulae of authoritarian nationalism”.

My dissertation situates this debate within the rather different domains of intellectual history and comparative literature. More specifically, I propose that any assessment of Lezama’s anti-modernism should be preceded by a careful analysis of the transnational and transatlantic intellectual net that made possible the dissemination of an anti-modern agenda in cultural capitals such as Buenos Aires, Havana, Paris, and London. In this new context, the very idea of an anti-modern Lezama gains in complexity and, at the same time, offers both a more flexible framework to understand the paradoxical modernity of the Cuban writer and a way to recover an alternative response to the narratives of Modernity that have prevailed in the continent.

This dissertation examines texts from selected Dominican and Puerto Rican authors written during the second half of the twentieth century and whose main themes are lesbianism and the development, behavior, and impact of lesbian women in Caribbean society. When one looks at a text from the queerness standpoint,one is forced to challenge and rethink the national identity of the country in which the work is written (Molloy and McKee xii).

I argue that the texts studied in this investigation not only question the fundamental constructs of society, but also reveal the rules of the sexual and gender identities that govern the idea of behaviors considered "normal". I also suggest that these texts present an alternative scenario for the development of a different society; one that accepts the homosexual as an active subject in the definition of the national construct. Finally, I propose that the selected texts are a way of deliverance for the woman writer opposite to what may serve the male writer who tends to use them as an instrument to go against the implementation of alternative lifestyles.

In Chapter 1, I analyze the discursive frameworks of prejudice against "the other" as a prelude and a symbol of discrimination toward the homosexual. I also trace the marginalization of the gay voice that is forced into the periphery of society in order to silence it. I argue that if the gay voice were to be heard, it would be disallowed by social judgment precisely because of its source. In Chapter 2, I study how male writers view the lesbian woman and how the male point of view reflects the thinking of a society that is primarily sexist and heterosexual. The main hypothesis in this chapter is that men view lesbians as a potential threat to the proper functioning of the society in which he lives and where he is the central focus. Finally in Chapters 3-4, I examine texts written by women to analyze how the women define themselves and their aspirations, independent of their sexual orientation.

My dissertation delves into the interrelations between feminism and nationalism during periods of political, economic and social crisis associated with the influence of the United States over the Caribbean nations. I especially focus on the writings of Cubans Ofelia Rodríguez Acosta and Ofelia Domínguez, Puerto Ricans Ana Roqué, Carmela Eulate Sanjurjo, Luisa Capetillo, and Ricarda López, and Dominicans Ercilia Pepín, Abigaíl Mejía, Petronila Gómez, and Consuelo Montalvo. Although the metaphor of "motherhood" has been considered the most important concept in the discourses promoted by nationalist feminism, I argue that, in the context of the Caribbean region, the notion of solidarity provides an ideology that fits into the nationalist agenda, allowing feminists to engage in the political dialogue of the time. From the 1880s to the 1940s, feminist writers of the Hispanic Caribbean created literary works and published newspaper articles that proposed an idea of unity among women conceived initially to gain support for their feminist crusade, but that was afterwards broadened to plead for a national solidarity essential to ensure the future of their nations. To explain the development of the discourse of solidarity I first examine how the narrative structure and the relationship between female characters in short stories such as Carmela Eulate Sanjurjo's "Marido y mujer" and "Noche-Buena," and novels such as Ana Roqué's Luz y sombra and Sara la obrera, Ofelia Rodríguez Acosta's El triunfo de la débil presa and La vida manda, and Abigaíl Mejía'sSueña Pilarín underscore the significance of an alliance among women or the disadvantages of its absence. Then, I analyze fiction and newspaper articles that deal with the colonial situation of Puerto Rico, the U.S. occupation of the Dominican Republic in 1916, and Gerardo Machado's dictatorship in Cuba to explore how feminists endow their plea for female unity with nationalist overtones. I conclude that, using a multi-layered discourse, the nationalist feminists produced a vision of society in which the social and political empowerment of women was necessary to construct and uphold a cohesive nation capable of assuming its future as a modern, civilized and productive country. The image of a coherent nation integrated by its entire social and racial constituents allowed women to create a new rhetoric for political action and to elaborate their own definition of the nation, its members and themselves.

This dissertation explores the treatment of urban spaces in Latin American dirty realist fiction from the 1990's to the present, focusing on the works of Guillermo Fadanelli (Mexico), Fernando Vallejo (Colombia), and Pedro Juan Gutiérrez (Cuba). Whereas Fadanelli centers his works in the megalopolis of a Mexico City straining under the pressures of rapid modernization and development, Gutiérrez depicts a Havana crumbling during the economic crises of the Special Period, and Vallejo portrays Medellín as utterly degraded by drug trafficking and its associated violence. All three authors, however, employ the gritty, almost visceral dirty realist style to best depict poverty-stricken societies populated by unexceptional individuals in a quest for survival in a rapidly transforming and decaying urban landscape. This dirty realist space is thus primarily defined by abjection and the uncomfortable coexistence of a focus on distinctive local minutia and the homogenizing effects of global, postmodern consumer society, a phenomenon accompanied by the proliferation of non-places as defined by Marc Augé. In these non-places, the meta-narratives of family, religion and nation that previously marked spaces of identity formation no longer function, leaving a sense of purposelessness. While there exists some nostalgia for the spaces that produced and reproduced these previous narratives, these spaces also prove to be marginalizing and have contributed to the city's current state of violence and decay. In light of the negative meanings ascribed to earlier spaces of individual and community identity formation, the evacuation of all meaning from these spaces has a positive connotation. Even though the manner in which these dirty realist authors are conceptualizing the urban space shows this new space to be decadent, empty, and violent, its transitional nature and the questioning of previous narratives that it implies open room for the creation of a new type of space that could grow to be more inclusive, even if this is never accomplished within the narratives themselves.

This dissertation provides an analysis of the representation of violence in contemporary Mexican and Argentinian literature, with emphasis on works depicting gender crimes. This study focuses on what I call “ficciones especulares,” a literary category defined by embedded texts that perform as notional configurations, in which connectedness replicates the construction of collective memory after traumatic events. In these narratives, Mexican writers (David Toscana, Fernanda Melchor) and Argentinian writer (Selva Almada) explore femicides or violence against queer people, unresolved due to impunity, by organizing and confronting discursivities from assorted literary genres and archives. The method of inquiry involved in the analysis stresses a search for internal relations within and between narrative units. My project argues that twenty-first century Mexican and Argentinian literature promotes the deconstruction of patriarchal ideology while foregrounding sociocultural frames that regulate affective and ethical responses to violent phenomena.In Chapter One I examine the excess of violence reverberated in the several novels abridged in David Toscana's El �ltimo lector (2004). Focusing on the impaired emotional involvement of the main characters, Lucio and Remigio, I outline the pedagogy of cruelty (Segato 2018), a process aimed at the removal of human qualities, attributes and rights. In examining a scene of animal sacrifice, I underline violence as a bonding element of hegemonic, toxic masculinity. In Chapter Two I continue the survey of representations of violence through the analysis of Fernanda Melchor's Temporada de huracanes (2017). In this chapter, I repurpose the concept of embeddedness (Sassen 2017) to connect the multiple cases of gender violence portrayed: child sexual abuse, femicide, compulsory prostitution, rape, sexual assault, and violence against queer people. Based on this violence network, I emphasize the devaluation of the human body in neoliberal capitalism, an epoch I characterize by the production of performance-oriented subjects and a surge of pleonexia, a Greek philosophical concept related to insatiable, materialistic desires. In Chapter Three, by comparing Selva Almada's Chicas muertas (2014) with its fictional precursor, “Chicas lindas” (2007), I scrutinize the social forces or institutions in charge of concealing gender violence, in specific during the last Argentinian dictatorship (1976-1983). On the other hand, I highlight the recent efforts to give visibility to the problem within academia, social movements, and law amendments. Moreover, I contemplate Almada's posture towards the revision of collective memory, as well as the methods used to choralize the voices of the victims. The main contribution of my dissertation is the identification of polyphonic narratives which multi-layered design provides supplementary perspectives to gender violence, from its origins to its perpetuating factors. I recognize in the selected works a hermeneutic construction that extends to the sociopolitical sphere, which contextual symbolic economy functions as a tool to interpret the triggering cycles of subordination, emotional and physical abuse.