Call for Papers: Cuba and the Global South

CFP: Cuba and the Global South 

For this special issue of The Global South, the editors invite contributions that explore the relationship between Cuba and the Global South in literature, film, and other cultural texts. One of the earliest sites of European colonization in the Americas, through the turn of the twenty-first century Cuba has been read as one of the last sites of resistance to neoliberalism and globalized capitalism, even as it transitions to a market economy. Cuba’s geographical proximity to North and South America, looking both west to the Americas and east to Europe and Africa, places the island at the center of the concerns of recent theorizations of the Global South. After the Cuban Revolution, notions of revolutionary, Third World and anti-colonial solidarities became central to Cuba’s projection of its own geopolitical location. The international Left in both the Global North and the Global South sought in the Cuban model signs of liberation—political sovereignty, racial equality, anticolonial resistance, or economic independence—while the post-Cold War era has forced a reconsideration of Cuba’s revolutionary history.

--How has this paradigm shift also provoked new engagements of Cuba’s past pre-revolutionary and colonial histories, and new readings of the structures of empire?
--How has Cuba’s centrality in forging solidarities across the Global South created an aesthetics that can be traced trans-nationally?
--In what ways have cultural texts challenged Cuba as a sign of Third-World solidarity and revolutionary resistance?
--How have imaginaries of Cuba constructed elsewhere created lasting cultural registers across time and space?

Additional topics could include, but are not limited to:
--World imperialisms and 1898
--post-socialism and leftist melancholy
--Black radicalism in international contexts
--The aesthetics of exile and/ or insile
--migration, slavery and contracted labor
--speculative geographies in the Global South

Comparative, interdisciplinary and theoretical approaches are particularly welcome. 500-word abstracts due by May 15, 2018 to Lanie Millar,lmillar@uoregon.edu. Articles due by November 15, 2018. Please direct inquiries to Lanie Millar.