The Cubalogues

by Tietchen, Todd F.

• ISBN13: 9780813035208
• ISBN10: 0813035201
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-10-17
• Publisher: Univ Pr of Florida

Summary

"As an early supporter of the original non-Communist Cuban revolution, I much appreciate this story of the involvement of American beat poets with the Fidelista cause. Dubbed the 'Cubalogues,' their interaction with Cuban editors and poets is a unique part of Cuban cultural history, and it needs to be told to an American audience."--Lawrence Ferlinghetti "An exciting, timely, and wide-ranging intervention which reassesses the Beat Movement, the Beat canon, Cold War politics, and the Cuban Revolution. . . . A tight, lively and skillful presentation of the topic."--Sarah MacLachlan, author ofThe Cambridge Introduction to Chicano/a Literature and Culture Immediately after the Cuban Revolution, Havana fostered an important transnational intellectual and cultural scene. Later, Castro would strictly impose his vision of Cuban culture on the populace and the United States would bar its citizens from traveling to the island, but for these few fleeting years the Cuban capital was steeped in many liberal and revolutionary ideologies and influences. Some of the most prominent figures in the Beat Movement, including Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Amiri Baraka, were attracted to the new Cuba as a place where people would be racially equal, sexually free, and politically enfranchised. What they experienced had resounding and lasting literary effects both on their work and on the many writers and artists they encountered and fostered. Todd Tietchen clearly documents the multiple ways in which the Beats engaged with the scene in Havana. He also demonstrates that even in these early years the Beat movement expounded a diverse but identifiable politics.

Author Biography

Todd F. Tietchen is assistant professor of English at Union County College in Cranford and Elizabeth, New Jersey.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction: The "Stranger Relations" of Beat	p. 1
Hemispheric Beats(in the Bay Area and Beyond)	p. 22
On the Crisis of the Underground and a Politics of Intractable Plurality	p. 50
Unsettling the Democratic Score: Music and Urban Insurgency	p. 69
Beat Publics and the "Middle-Aged" Left	p. 98
(Back) Toward a Stranger Democracy	p. 120
Coda: A New Imaginary...?	p. 150
Notes	p. 161
Bibliography	p. 179
Index	p. 187
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