Speaker
Description
This paper explores the negotiation of identity and the reconfiguration of belonging in the face of diasporic and existential crises within contemporary Cuban literature. Through a comparative analysis of Alejandro Otero Paz’s novel Danubio (2022) and Jennine Capó Crucet’s short story “How to Leave Hialeah” (2009), I examine how contemporary diasporic Cuban writers depart from nostalgia-driven exile narratives and engage in the construction of fluid, transnational subjectivities.
Both texts respond to the social and cultural crises of displacement—not merely as geographic dislocations but as ontological ruptures. Danubio follows a group of Cuban friends navigating life in Barcelona and traveling through Greece, revealing a shared cosmopolitan ethos and emotional solidarity rooted in what Myria Georgiou terms “diasporic cosmopolitanism”. The Mediterranean becomes a symbolic site of reflection, community, and reinvention, against a backdrop of cultural hybridity and historical memory. In contrast, Capó Crucet's protagonist experiences internal migration within the United States, highlighting the racialized and political dimensions of exile without border crossing. Her narrative internalizes displacement as a negotiation of identity through education, memory, and dissent.
Both works underscore how crisis—social, cultural, and psychological—functions as a catalyst for transformation. Rather than presenting migration as mere uprooting, the texts reflect modes of resilience and identity sustainability within translocal communities. This analysis contributes to a broader understanding of how literary narratives engage with crisis not as endpoints but as liminal thresholds for subjective and collective rearticulation.
| Keywords | Cuban diaspora, identity crisis, transnationalism, diasporic cosmopolitanism, literature and migration, memory, cultural sustainability |
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| acastr29@kennesaw.edu |