LITERARY STUDIES 2021 | Chapter Showcase LEXINGTON BOOKS An Imprint of Rowman & Littlefield LEXINGTON BOOKS CHAPTER SHOWCASE FROM THE EDITOR The literary studies program at Lexington Books is committed to publishing the highest quality scholarship across a broad range of literary movements, styles, and theories, from studies in well-established areas such as medieval and francophone literature to works in crucial emerging areas of study such as postcolonial and decolonial literature and race, sexuality, disability, and trauma studies. We are proud to publish works that demonstrate the value of literature and literary theory as a lens through which we may closely consider ourselves and our societies. Regardless of time period or genre, literary works speak to salient issues of the human condition, and the authors and editors who publish with Lexington Books draw out these valuable insights to establish and contribute to indispensable dialogues on literature and its social and cultural resonances. With an extensive array of monographs and edited collections speaking to and from diverse literary perspectives, Lexington Books offers exceptional and innovative academic content for scholars, researchers, and students. The chapters in this showcase—which contribute to scholarly conversations about Latinx trauma and memory; masculinity and race; ecocriticism in speculative fiction; satire in medieval literature; and cultural identity in immigrant narratives—provide a sense of the depth of critical thought and engagement found in our publications and the breadth of our literary studies list. I invite you to publish your next book with Lexington Books. We publish monographs, edited collections, and revised dissertations by emerging and established scholars, including interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary works. While we publish many standalone titles, we also publish books in series that bring together incisive scholarship around key subjects such as After the Empire: The Francophone World and Postcolonial France, Reading Trauma and Memory, and Studies in Medieval Literature. Click here to see a full list of our series. Lexington Books offers an expedited decision-making process, peer review, and a rapid production process to ensure that your research is published quickly. We publish high-quality books with full-color covers and market our new titles aggressively around the globe. Our titles are regularly reviewed in scholarly journals and have received significant awards and honors for academic scholarship. To submit a proposal for a book project, please review our submission guidelines and email a full prospectus to me at [email protected]. Or, if you prefer to discuss your project with me first, please email me to set up a time for a phone call. I look forward to hearing from you. Sincerely, HOLLY BUCHANAN Acquisitions Editor LEXINGTON BOOKS contents 4 - 33 Crescencio Lopez-Gonzalez, “Floating Urban Geographies of Trauma, Detachment, and Dislocation: The Urban Experiences and Realities of Cuban Americans,” in The Latinx Urban Condition: Trauma, Memory, and Desire in Latinx Urban Literature and Culture 34 - 65 LaToya Jefferson-James, “Black Men, Oppositional Definitions, and Primordial Africa” in Masculinity Under Construction: Literary Re- Presentations of Black Masculinity in the African Diaspora 66 - 83 Tereza Dědinová, “‘The Being that Can be Told’ The Telling by Ursula K. Le Guin as a Remedy for the Anthropocene” in Images of the Anthropocene in Speculative Fiction: Narrating the Future, ed. Tereza Dedinová, Weronika Laszkiewicz, and Sylwia Borowska-Szerszun 84 - 104 Joan Ramon Resina, “Inverted Popes, the Apostolic Succession, and Dante’s Vocation as Satirist Ronald L. Martinez” in Dante Satiro: Satire in Dante Alighieri’s Comedy and Other Works, ed. Fabian Alfie and Nicolino Applauso 105 - 115 Wessam Elmeligi, “The In-Between: The Return of the Mind in Miral Al- Tahawy’s Brooklyn Heights (2010),” in Cultural Identity in Arabic Novels of Immigration: A Poetics of Return The pagination of the original chapters has been preserved to enable accurate citations of these chapters. These chapters are provided for personal use only and may not be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means without permission of the publisher. All rights reserved. Crescencio Lopez-Gonzalez, “Floating Urban Geographies of Trauma, Detachment, and Dislocation: The Urban Experiences and Realities of Cuban Americans,” in The Latinx Urban Condition: Trauma, Memory, and Desire in Latinx Urban Literature and Culture (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020), 119–148. Series: Reading Trauma and Memory. All rights reserved. Chapter Four Floating Urban Geographies of Trauma, Detachment, and Dislocation The Urban Experiences and Realities of Cuban Americans When Fidel Castro took control of the Cuban government in 1959, about 250,000 families, mostly from the upper and middle class, left the country and came to the United States. Many of those Cubans did not plan to stay long, and they were “fully expected to return to Cuba as soon as Fidel Castro’s Communist Revolution failed,” considering themselves temporary “exiles rather than immigrants.”1 The majority of those families relocated to Miami, Florida, where they established communities, businesses, and organ- izations that later helped transition the future waves of Cuban economic exiles. Between 1965 and 1973 about 300,000 Cubans came to the states through the program known as the “Freedom Flights.” The continuous exo- dus of Cubans has largely depended on political, economic, and historical events such as the Mariel Crisis, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the general protest in 1994 due to the harsh economic conditions that caused famine and food rationing. When the first waves of exiles came to the United States, they yearned to go back to their country, but as time passed, they stayed and integrated themselves into the American culture, where younger generations developed an identity conflict. The longer a family stayed, the more comfort- able with American culture their children felt. Politics is a divisive factor of Dreaming in Cuban, where Cristina García attempts to exhibit several perspectives of Cuba’s political condition through the Pino family. The different political beliefs cause considerable debate, creating a feeling of alienation among family members. The family dispute 119 4 Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 120 Chapter 4 reproduces tension that exists between the contradictory political ideologies of the Cuban diaspora. The Cuban exodus to the United States caused a geographical displacement, creating an ideological divide among the distinc- tive waves of exiles who left the country and moved to Miami and to differ- ent parts of the United States, including New York, where part of the novel takes place. Katherine B. Payant argues that Cristina García’s experiences as a refugee inspired her to write about Cuban politics in a way that shows the complexity of the issue: “A 1984 trip to the island to visit her mother’s family, supporters of Castro, focused her interest on her identity and larger questions of history and politics, opening up the complexities of the Cuban revolution. Before that visit, she had seen the Cuban situation in the unam- biguous black and white of many Cuban Americans.”2 Another aspect that influenced García was her time working in Miami for Time Magazine where she interacted with the Miami-exile community: “It was a shock, it really was. I felt extremely alienated. I was given a tremendously hard time by my peers and family. They frequently called me communist and attached all kinds of ridiculous labels to me because I was a registered Democrat. I feel that I am not welcome to a daughter in the community.”3 Through the Pino family, García desires to create a broader perception of Cuba’s political history, presenting through her characters other points of view to help the other communities understand other perspectives that are not always repre- sented in the United States. García’s experiences and interactions with family members and Cuban-exiles helped her consider the complexities of the Cu- ban diaspora: She “uses the novel to form in a vaguely autobiographical attempt to reassess her individual and familial dislocation between two an- tagonistic national bodies.”4 García’s perceived geographical dislocation is reproduced in each member of the Pino family at different junctures in their lives. In Dreaming in Cuban (1996), García narrates the story of four women of the Pino family whose lives take different paths during and after the Cuban Revolution of 1959, representing four different perspectives. It explores dif- ferent ideologies detailing how the revolution destroyed and re-created new relationships with an emphasis on Celia, Lourdes, Felicia, and Pilar. Celia, the matriarch of the family, dedicates her life to the revolution and its leader. Lourdes, daughter of Celia, flees Cuba in disagreement with the communist ideas of her mother and moves to New York where she lives with her daugh- ter Pilar and her husband Rufino Puente. Pilar, daughter Lourdes, rebels against her mother and carries the burden of remembering the fragmented history of the family. Although she has lived in New York since she was two years old, she desires deeply to return to Cuba to reconnect with her cultural heritage. Living in a distant country, but feeling a responsibility and, to a certain extent, a loyalty to Cuba, Pilar has to reconcile several versions of the truth of the Cuban Revolution; a revolution that is different for her grand- Lexington Books Literary Studies Chapter Showcase 5 Floating Urban Geographies of Trauma, Detachment, and Dislocation 121 mother, her aunt, and her mother, demonstrating that history is subjective. The same event, the revolution, is remembered differently by all the mem- bers of the family, demonstrating different perspectives and narrating how each experienced it. The distancing of these characters from the family unit creates a state of imbalance, dissatisfaction, and anxiety, separating them further as a family while uniting them with the common battle of their fragile identities.