New Edited Volume on the Cuban Diaspora

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Humberto Calzada, Refrán de Atlantis | Atlantis Refrain, 1999

In early 2014, the Spanish press Aduana Vieja will publish Un pueblo disperso: Dimensiones sociales y culturales de la diáspora cubana [A Dispersed People: Social and Cultural Dimensions of the Cuban Diaspora], a selection of the papers presented at the Ninth Conference on Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, sponsored by FIU's Cuban Research Institute on May 23-25, 2013. CRI Director Jorge Duany is the editor of the volume.

The main theme of the call for papers for the conference was "Dispersed Peoples: The Cuban and Other Diasporas," with the intention of promoting comparisons between the Cuban experience and that of other countries. Because of space limitations, the collection will be limited to the Cuban case. It includes 25 chapters (aside from Duany's introductory essay) on subjects ranging from Cuban and Cuban-American politics and economy, to literature and music, to art and film. The collection features essays by well-known experts in Cuban and Cuban-American studies, such as Cristóbal Díaz Ayala, Alejandro Portes, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Ruth Behar, Eliana Rivero, and Isabel Alvarez-Borland, as well as many younger scholars.

The authors represent diverse disciplines of the humanities and the social sciences, particularly literary criticism, cultural studies, art history, history, sociology, anthropology, and geography. The texts will be published in Spanish and English, according to their authors' preference, as a reflection of the bilingual character of Cuban-American culture. Many of the essays in this compilation document the transition in the Cuban-American community from the "historical exile" to a contemporary diaspora—a transition evident in cultural fields such as narration, popular music, and the visual arts.