Literature, History, and the Lost Republic Rafael Rojas’s <em>Essays in Cuban Intellectual History</em>

Authors

  • Román de la Campa University of Pennsylvania

Keywords:

Cuban REvolution, post-socialism, Cold War, Rafael Rojas

Abstract

To say that Cuban history presents unusual challenges may be an understatement. A sequence of colonial, republican, socialist and postsocialist regimes awaits unifying narratives, a succession of radical changes that could threaten the survival of any nation, perhaps even more so in the case of a Caribbean island. The degree of difficulty only deepens when one takes on board the symbolic role seized by the Cuban Revolution during the Cold War, an event that turned that nation’s history into a story involving all of the Americas, if not the world, a proximity to the here and now that only heightens the need for nuance and rigor. Multiple and contentious views abound for readers and writers, not only in the scholarly realm, but also in the arena occupied by living witnesses who claim their own form of authority. Few thinkers really attempt this task in a comprehensive way.

Author Biography

Román de la Campa, University of Pennsylvania

Román de la Campa ocupa la cátedra Edwin B. and Lenore R. Williams en Lenguas Romances en la Universidad de Pennsylvania. Es especialista en las literaturas latina, latinoamericana y caribeña, así como la teoría y el estudio de las prácticas culturales. Es autor de más de cien ensayos publicados en Estados Unidos, América Latina y Europa, y de varios libros, incluyendo Late Imperial Cultures (co-editor) (1995), America Latina y sus comunidades discursivas: cultura y literature en la era global (1999), Latin Americanism (2000), Cuba on My Mind: Journeys to a Severed Nation (2001), América Latina: Tres Interpretaciones actuales sobre su estudio, con Ignacio Sosa y Enrique Camacho (2004) y Nuevas cartografías latinoamericanas (2007). Su más reciente libro, Split-States and Global Imaginaries, será publicado próximamente por la editorial Verso.

Published

2011-01-01

How to Cite

de la Campa, R. (2011). Literature, History, and the Lost Republic Rafael Rojas’s <em>Essays in Cuban Intellectual History</em>. A Contracorriente: Una Revista De Estudios Latinoamericanos, 8(2), 245–266. Retrieved from https://acontracorriente.chass.ncsu.edu/index.php/acontracorriente/article/view/422