The King’s Toilet: Cruising Literary History in Reinaldo Arenas’ <em>Before Night Falls</em>

Authors

  • Lázaro Lima University of Richmond

Keywords:

Reinaldo Arenas, the arts of cruising, libertinaje mental, Antes que anochezca

Abstract

This chapter revisits Reinaldo Arenas’s Antes que anochezca on the 20th anniversary of its publication in order show why boilerplate political monikers do not stick to this polemical autobiography. Lima proposes that Arenas’ autobiography has been too narrowly subjected to left and right readerly expectations that have failed to see the text as Arenas’ attempt to fashion his own literary history in relation to the Cuban and the Latin American literature canon. This chapter, further, argues that cruising and “the arts of cruising” for Arenas conforms to a broader history of anti-authoritarian “libertinaje mental” initially posited by Jorge Mañach.

Author Biography

Lázaro Lima, University of Richmond

Lázaro Lima is the E. Claiborne Robins Distinguished Chair in the Liberal Arts and professor in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Studies and the program in American Studies at the University of Richmond. His publications include The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory; Ambientes: New Queer Latino Writing (co-edited with Felice Picano); Trevor Young: The Aesthetics of Displacement; and the forthcoming Losing Sonia Sotomayor: An American Life After Multiculturalism. Lima's interdisciplinary work on inter-American literatures and cultural history has also appeared in American Literary History, Revista Iberoamericana, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Hispanic Review and many other journals.

Published

2012-10-15

How to Cite

Lima, L. (2012). The King’s Toilet: Cruising Literary History in Reinaldo Arenas’ <em>Before Night Falls</em>. A Contracorriente: Una Revista De Estudios Latinoamericanos, 10(1), 198–225. Retrieved from https://acontracorriente.chass.ncsu.edu/index.php/acontracorriente/article/view/624

Issue

Section

Dossier: Poesía e imagen