Elzbieta Sklodowska´s new book, Espectros y espejismos: Haití en el imaginario cubano [Specters and Mirages: Haiti in the Cuban Imaginary, Iberoamericana/Verveurt 2009] examines Cuban-Haitian encounters, interpretations, and (mis)conceptions from the perspective of literary criticism. It proposes various approaches to study the how Haiti is inscribed in the Cuban imagination and, more specifically, represented in Cuban literature, as “Other” —exoticized, admired, sensationalized, suspected, desired, rejected, misread, or vindicated, but always operating in myriad complex functions.
Sklodowska´s exploration situates itself at the intersections of the discursive and the ideological, the aethetic and the sociohistorical, to map out the contradictions and gaps inherent in representations of Haiti, Haitians, and their historical presence in Cuba. She offers an analysis of a great variety of genres and multiple “gazes” from the beginning of the XXth century to the present, including novels and short stories— from Luís Felipe Rodríguez’s Marcos Antilla: relatos de cañaveral (1932) and Alejo Carpentier’s Ecué-Yamba-O (1933) to Joel James Figarola’s En el altar del fuego (2007) —as well as historical and journalistic material, and testimonial narrative. A timely contribution to literary and cultural studies, Espectros y espejismos delves into an area that has previously not been given adequate attention.
Elzbieta Sklodowska is a Randolph Family Professor of Spanish and Chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis. She also serves as general co-editor for Latin American Literature for Revista de Estudios Hispánicos. Sklodowska is an expert on Cuban narrative and culture, the poetics and politics of memory, the Spanish-American narrative from the 19th and 20th centuries, and testimonial literature.
For more information, see http://www.ibero-americana.net/cgi-bin/infodetail.cgi?isbn=9788484894438&doknr=521443&lang=de&txt=inhalt
