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"Amaya, Hector"
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Screening Cuba
Hector Amaya advances into new territory in Latin American and U.S. cinema studies in this innovative analysis of the differing critical receptions of Cuban film in Cuba and the United States during the Cold War. Synthesizing film reviews, magazine articles, and other primary documents, Screening Cuba compares Cuban and U.S. reactions to four Cuban films: Memories of Underdevelopment, Lucia, One Way or Another, and Portrait of Teresa._x000B__x000B_In examining cultural production through the lens of the Cold War, Amaya reveals how contrasting interpretations by Cuban and U.S. critics are the result of the political cultures in which they operated. While Cuban critics viewed the films as powerful symbols of the social promises of the Cuban revolution, liberal and leftist American critics found meaning in the films as representations of anti-establishment progressive values and Cold War discourses. By contrasting the hermeneutics of Cuban and U.S. culture, criticism, and citizenship, Amaya argues that critical receptions of political films constitute a kind of civic public behavior.
eBook
A Discipline of Futures
In these departments, the age of the book became the age of literature, just as eventually the age of mass mediation (film, radio, and broadcasting) gave way to the first communication, media, and film studies departments, and the second instantiation of academic disciplines organized around a media technology. Just as English departments are centered on the book, media studies, exemplified by the Radio-Television-Film Program at the University of Texas–Austin, where I was trained, largely organizes itself in terms of different media. Thanks to the influence of sociology and the rise of new knowledges from the 1960s onward, some could also specialize in studying a group of people, such as women, African Americans, and so on. Just as area studies addressed the problem of being human in specific locations and at specific times, we must reorganize our disciplinary commitments to humanistic and social science inquiries in terms of the sociohistorical phenomena shaping our basic assumptions about humans, including those that are helping us newly understand what it means to be a person, a citizen, a US American, a sexed being, a member of an ethnic or racial community, or an able-bodied individual.
Journal Article
Dying American or The Violence of Citizenship: Latinos in Iraq
Three of the first coalition soldiers to die in Iraq in 2003 were non-citizen Latinos who were given posthumous citizenship. This essay places the discursive contexts of the events against the backdrop of liberalism. The central argument is that giving posthumous citizenship to the soldiers was an illiberal practice because (1) it meant naturalizing the Latinos without their consent and (2) the debates obscured the illiberal ways in which the armed forces in America are staffed. These two illiberal elements were supported by ethnocentric discourses on citizenship and nationalism that assumed the soldiers desired naturalization and that reproduced the idea that the volunteer army equally targets all Americans as potential conscripts. Because of this, the honor of posthumous citizenship is reinterpreted as belonging to the American history of imperialism, class, and racial stratification.
Journal Article
Cuban Culture, Institutions, Policies, and Citizens
In 1955, Italian neorealism entered full force in the political culture of Cuba. In that year, the young filmmaker Julio García Espinosa directedEl Megano,a documentary that denounced the living conditions of charcoal burners in the Zapata Swamps region. The film gained immediate fame when Cuba’s president, Fulgencio Batista, decided to seize it right after its first showing at the University of Havana. Espinosa was interrogated and set free only when he promised to bring the film to the authorities. Surrounded by a strong and independent filmmaking community organized around Nuestro Tiempo (a social and artistic group that organized
Book Chapter
U.S. Criticism, Dissent, and Hermeneutics
The rise of foreign film distribution and art house exhibition during the 1950s onward helped constitute the field of professional film criticism in America. By the 1970s and 1980s, the decades in which the Cuban films were reviewed, criticism had a defined place in the field of culture and in the film world, and so did critics. In 1973, the year that the first postrevolutionary Cuban films were distributed and exhibited in the United States,Newsweekmagazine published a small piece in which Arthur Cooper commented on the film critic as superstar (Cooper 1973, 96). Cooper was not referring to
Book Chapter
Memories of Underdevelopment
Memorias del Subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment,1968), directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, develops in Havana in 1961, at a time when the nation was undergoing profound changes and just before the Missile Crisis. Sergio, an educated, middle-class, thirty-something white man has seen his family and friends leave Cuba. Left behind, almost alone (except for his friend Pablo, who continuously criticizes the social changes the revolution is bringing), Sergio walks through the city observing with melancholic interest and, at times, with disdain the altering force of the new order. Through inner monologues, the viewer learns of Sergio’s feelings of superiority. Rooted
Book Chapter
One Way or Another
De Cierta Manera (One Way or Another,1977), directed by Sara Gómez, extensively mixes a fictional narrative with documentary footage and the lives of real Cubans. The narrative, which develops at the beginning of the revolution, tells the story of Mario and Yolanda as they become romantically involved. Mario, a mulatto from Havana’s poor shantytown, faces challenges at work because of his relationship to Humberto (Mario Limonta), who has asked Mario to lie on his behalf so that he can justify a lengthy work absence. Humberto is having an affair with a woman who lives in another city. Mario is
Book Chapter