Loving Che

As a young Cuban woman reconstructs the life of her mother, she learns the woman engaged in a youthful affair with the dashing, charismatic rebel Ch Guvara in 1960s Havana and bore his child. "Loving Ch" is a brilliant, erotic fantasy that glimpses into the private life of a mythic public figure.

In this “evocative first novel,” an elderly woman looks back on the world of revolutionary Cuba as she recalls her intimate, secret love affair with Ernesto “Che” Guevara (Publishers Weekly). A young Cuban woman has been searching in vain for details of her birth mother. All she knows of her past is that her grandfather fled the turbulent Havana of the 1960s for Miami with her in tow, and that pinned to her sweater—possibly by her mother—were a few treasured lines of a Pablo Neruda poem. These facts remain her only tenuous links to her history, until a mysterious parcel arrives in the mail. Inside the soft, worn box are layers of writings and photographs. Fitting these pieces together with insights she gleans from several trips back to Havana, the daughter reconstructs a life of her mother, her youthful affair with the dashing, charismatic Che Guevara and the child she bore by the enigmatic rebel. Loving Che is a brilliant recapturing of revolutionary Cuba, the changing social mores, the hopes and disappointments, the excitement and terror of the times. It is also an erotic fantasy, a glimpse into the private life of a mythic public figure, and an exquisitely crafted meditation on memory, history, and storytelling. Finally, Loving Che is a triumphant unveiling of how the stories we tell about others ultimately become the story of ourselves. “A moving novel from a writer to watch.” —Publishers Weekly “Inventive and hypnotic . . . [An] artful and restless examination of the exile soul.” —Los Angeles Times “[Menendez] captures Cuba’s potential, its desperation and decay, and also its dark humor.” —The New York Times “The writing is consistently beautiful. Highly recommended.” —Library Journal

Archival Dissonance in the U.S. Cuban Post-Exile Novel documents a body of emergent US Cuban literature published in Spanish and English beyond the scope and historicity of exile. Focusing on the work of Roberto G. Fernández, Ana Menéndez, and Antonio Benítez Rojo, the book proposes that, rather than reinforce US Cuban exile ethnic identity developed between 1960 and the 1980s, or demonstrate a tendency toward cultural assimilation (“Americanization”) over three generations of writers, the discussed historical novels incorporate Caribbean and Latin American archival sources and interpretive frameworks in order to develop a critical and investigative approach to the politics of Cuban exile historiography. Published before the recent apertura between the US and Cuban governments, these post-exile novels anticipate themes of displacement, migration, and social marginalization as common, rather than exceptional, features of modern (and historical) life, as well as such other current (and historical) topics as gender construction and performance, figurations of race, the commoditization of culture, and urban poverty. The post-exile historical novel points to a future for US Cuban narrative and historiography, in part by investigating and featuring dissonances hidden or unacknowledged in previous Cuban exile historical fiction. The literature studied in this book further reinforces a view of two-way migration between Cuba and the United States as a normal phenomenon predating 1959, and, at the same time, as a likely shape of things to come.

This groundbreaking collection offers an understanding of why Cuban-American literature and visual art have emerged in the United States and how they are so essentially linked to both Cuban and American cultures. The contributors explore crucial issues pertinent not only to Cuban-American cultural production but also to other immigrant groups—hybrid identities, biculturation, bilingualism, immigration, adaptation, and exile. The complex ways in which Cuban Americans have been able to keep a living memory of Cuba while developing and thriving in America are both intriguing and instructive. These essays, written from a variety of perspectives, range from useful overviews of fictional and visual works of art to close readings of individual texts.

Photographic Ekphrasis in Cuban-American Fiction introduces the concept of photographic ekphrasis as a reading tool for Cuban-American autobiographies and novels and argues that a focus on photographs provides fresh insights into these texts.

The complex nature of globalization increasingly requires a comparative approach to literature in order to understand how migration and commodity flows impact aesthetic production and expressive practices. This special issue of Symbolism: An International Journal of Critical Aesthetics explores the trans-American dimensions of Latina/o literature in a trans-Atlantic context. Examining the theoretical implications suggested by the comparison of the global North-global South dynamics of material and aesthetic exchange, this volume highlights emergent Latina/o authors, texts, and methodologies of interest in for comparative literary studies. In the essays, literary scholars address questions of the transculturation, translation, and reception of Latina/o literature in the United States and Europe. In the interviews, emergent Latina/o authors speak to the processes of creative writing in a transnational context. This volume suggests how the trans-American dialogues found in contemporary Latina/o literature elucidates trans-Atlantic critical dialogues.

This revealing work looks at representations of motherhood from a wide range of pop culture sources to explore larger questions about the image and self-image of mothers in the United States. How has the popularity of Gilmore Girls influenced perspectives on teenage pregnancies? How did the mother-in-law assume such monstrous proportions? Did the Republicans' view of motherhood—and their continual hectoring of Hillary Clinton for putting ambition ahead of family—cost them the 2008 election? Mommy Angst: Motherhood in American Popular Culture considers questions like these as it probes our country's views on mothers, and how those views shape—and are shaped by—the habitually oversimplified portrayals of mothers in pop culture, politics, and the media. Mommy Angst gets at the heart of America's anxious ambivalence toward mothers—whether sanctifying them, vilifying them, or praising the ideal of motherhood while thoroughly undervaluing the complexities of their lives and their contributions to family and society. To highlight the many sides of motherhood, the collection contrasts the lives of a diverse range of real moms with their pop culture representations, including Jewish mothers, Cuban mothers, teenage mothers, mothers with disabilities, working versus stay-at-home moms, and more.