Reinscribing the Aesthetic: Cuban Narrative and Post-Soviet Cultural Politics

Abstract

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba's revolutionary paradigm encounters its greatest crisis to date. As the state's cultural institutions struggle to cope with severe material limitations and strive to square socialist ideology with world events, Cuban writers increasingly publish their work with foreign companies. Not uncommonly these authors reassert the aesthetic priorities that state institutions are said to have repressed or subordinated to political imperatives. It may appear, superficially, that Cuban writers are out to revive some notion of an autonomous literary art. In situating aesthetic discourse in profoundly dialogic, historically specific, and politically charged narrative contexts, however, these writings challenge traditional universalizing formulations of the aesthetic category. Such historico-narrative rearticulation of social practices and theories of art is prerequisite to a more progressive cultural politics than the socialist state has managed to implement and than an uncritical reengagement with the global market can bring about.

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