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Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01zp38wh02x
Title: Un/Exceptional Shadowlands: Necropolitics, Insurgency, and Archives in the Wake of the Cuban Revolution, 1959-2022
Authors: Alfonso, Andy
Advisors: Price, Rachel L
Contributors: Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures Department
Keywords: Archives
Cuba
Insurgency
Necropolitics
Revolution
Shadowland
Subjects: Latin American studies
Caribbean studies
Modern literature
Issue Date: 2024
Publisher: Princeton, NJ : Princeton University
Abstract: Un/Exceptional Shadowlands interrogates spaces of confinement conceived by the Cuban regime to reform wayward citizens. By exploring three case studies—labor camps in Cuba (1965-1968), militarized compounds in Angola (1975-1991), and HIV sanatoria on the Island (1986- )—, it argues that these “shadowlands,” as I call them, succeed one another as concentration sites for the State to control antisociales under the pretext of reintegration. Because the government has classified relevant documentation, scholars tend to downplay such places, overlook the connection among them, and discuss them almost exclusively as structures of systemic violence. My dissertation, in contrast, reconstructs the conditions that have enabled the enclosure of racialized bodies, fleshing out how subjects have resisted internment, rebelled against the system, and produced testimonies. To do so, it draws on oral histories and lyrical compositions, works of art and of fiction, as well as materials I’ve unearthed in digital, heritage, and ephemera collections. Prompted by archival and scholarly constraints, I have developed a conceptual framework to examine the nexus between such types of institutions and the expressions of subjectivity that unfold therein, braiding theories of race, necropolitics, archive, and revolt. I ultimately contend that the shadowlands constitute paradigmatic spaces for practices of systemic violence and sociocultural disruption that have shaped Cuban politics to the present day. First, I demonstrate how the zones of captivity have followed one another as pharmakons to reanimate the Revolution in times of emergency. Then, I analyze how the topologies have not only behaved as hotspots of insurgency, but also informed the archival policies and cultural narratives that keep competing for their memorialization. The first cultural history from below to link the three spaces in question, Un/Exceptional Shadowlands foregrounds survival and subversive practices enacted by individuals on site to cope with the trauma of captivity. I compare the shadowlands with analogous structures in Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America, situating them in a transnational and transhistorical context. In doing so, my study sheds light on global phenomena where the confinement of subaltern people has prompted racial categories and disenfranchised workers, institutions of discipline and acts of indiscipline, archival policies and cultural artifacts.
URI: http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01zp38wh02x
Type of Material: Academic dissertations (Ph.D.)
Language: en
Appears in Collections:Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures

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