Home > Events > On (Our-)American Ground: Caribbean-Latino-Diasporic Cultural Production and the Post-National "Guantanamera"

On (Our-)American Ground: Caribbean-Latino-Diasporic Cultural Production and the Post-National "Guantanamera"

Ricardo L. Ortíz. Organized by the Cuba Caribbean Working Group.

Friday, May 04, 2007
4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
1301 Rolfe Hall
UCLA
Los Angeles, CA United States

This presentation is a strategically provisional attempt to trace some variously relevant genealogies, and itineraries, of a song, “Guantanamera”, and a site, the US Naval base on Guantánamo Bay. Together, as Ricardo Ortíz will argue from various angles below, these two decidedly “local” institutions have, especially across the long twentieth century, drawn into themselves an impressive procession of public figures, and equally public figurations, a procession that has collectively embodied, and performed, the complex and simultaneous careers of the nation, the trans-nation and the post-nation, in ways that belie their origination in any one locality, and in ways that resist their definitive reduction to the terms, and the claims, of any one nation.

Ricardo Ortíz is Associate Professor of US Latino Literature in the English Department at Georgetown University. From January 2006 through August 2007 he has also held the Joseph A. Bailey II, MD, Chair in American Communities at Cal State LA. Prof. Ortíz's first book, Cultural Erotics in Cuban America, was published by the University of Minnesota Press in early 2007

Cost: Free and open to the public

For more information please contact

Robin Derby
derby@history.ucla.edu
www.international.ucla.edu/lac/

Sponsor(s): Latin American Institute