Performing Cuba

The Author: Denis Jorge Berenschot is Assistant Professor of Modern Languages at Shepherd University, West Virginia. He received his Ph.D. in Latin American literature from the University of Maryland at College Park. He is the author of numerous articles on contemporary Cuban literature and theatre.

«This book represents an original and thorough reading of three novels/novellas and their filmic and dramatic versions. The author’s approach is intertextual and transnational in its examination of the ways that subsequent versions of the texts respond to each other, and that gender historically gets rewritten by post-1959 Cubans in and out of the island. Denis Jorge Berenschot sees the first versions of the texts as enacting gender performances that question the dictates of the institutional discourse of the Cuban Revolution. In later movie and play versions of the novels, however, such liberating performances can get co-opted by more ideologically conforming texts. The book also explores the notion of internal exile, referring to the isolation gay men are subjected to in post-1959 Cuba and examines how this notion plays for a Cuban American audience. ‘Performing Cuba’ is a significant contribution to the study of gender, genre, memory, rewriting, identity, and exile in Cuba.» (Ana Serra, Assistant Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies, American University, Washington, D.C.)