Cuban Intersections of Literary and Urban Spaces

Cuban Intersections of Literary and Urban Spaces PDF Author: Carlos Riobó
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438442564
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 161

Get Book Here

Book Description
A collection of essays on theories of space in relation to Havana.

The Urban Gardens of Havana

The Urban Gardens of Havana PDF Author: Ola Plonska
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030126579
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 112

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book relates stories of everyday life revolving around small-scale urban gardens in Central Havana and focusing particularly on that of Marcelo, a seventy-four-year-old revolutionary and gardener. The urban gardens are contested spaces: though monitored and controlled by Cuban state institutions, they also offer possibilities of crafting life in resistance. The experiences the authors narrate are not ‘thick descriptions,’ linked to larger political issues, but rather rhizomatic observations that highlight the relationships between humans and non-humans within the nature-culture debate. Using these experiences, the authors argue that ‘the political’ reaches beyond the affairs of state and governance and should be seen as an all-encompassing part of life. The authors thereby invite the social sciences to focus on the microscopic and the day-to-day to illuminate how the political affairs of lives can be imagined differently.

Urban Informality and the Built Environment

Urban Informality and the Built Environment PDF Author: Nerea Amorós Elorduy
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1800086261
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Get Book Here

Book Description
Urban Informality and the Built Environment demonstrates the value of greater and more diverse forms of engagement of built environment disciplines in what constitutes urban informality and its politics. It brings a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of informality and the built environment in diverse contexts, drawing on recent research by architects, planners, political scientists, geographers and urban theorists. The book presents different case studies from multiple geographies, drawing attention to the need for studying urban informality in the Global North and Global South. The cases promote a cross-fertilization between disciplines, lenses, geographies and methodologies. They range from the creative place-making of street artists in Accra, to the morphological evolution of urban Tirana, urban agriculture in la Habana and social reproduction in Greece. Additional contributions highlight the cross-cutting themes of infrastructure, exchange and image. Urban Informality and the Built Environment introduces built environment disciplines to its constitutive roles in producing urban informality. It also tests a range of new methodologies to the study of urban informality, demonstrating the possibilities for new insights when building on the relational understanding of urban informality.

Caribbean Spaces

Caribbean Spaces PDF Author: Carole Boyce Davies
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252095863
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book Here

Book Description
Drawing on both personal experience and critical theory, Carole Boyce Davies illuminates the dynamic complexity of Caribbean culture and traces its migratory patterns throughout the Americas. Both a memoir and a scholarly study, Caribbean Spaces: Escapes from Twilight Zones explores the multivalent meanings of Caribbean space and community in a cross-cultural and transdisciplinary perspective. From her childhood in Trinidad and Tobago to life and work in communities and universities in Nigeria, Brazil, England, and the United States, Carole Boyce Davies portrays a rich and fluid set of personal experiences. She reflects on these movements to understand the interrelated dynamics of race, gender, and sexuality embedded in Caribbean spaces, as well as many Caribbean people's traumatic and transformative stories of displacement, migration, exile, and sometimes return. Ultimately, Boyce Davies reestablishes the connections between theory and practice, intellectual work and activism, and personal and private space.

Havana

Havana PDF Author: Susan Anne Mansel Fitzgerald
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000615219
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 182

Get Book Here

Book Description
Following the crisis of the Special Period, Cuba promoted urban agriculture throughout its towns and cities to address food sovereignty and security. Through the adoption of state recommended design strategies, these gardens have become places of social and economic exchange throughout Cuba. This book maps the lived experiences surrounding three urban farms in Havana to construct a deeper understanding about the everyday life of this city. Using narratives and drawings, this research uncovers these sites as places where education, intimacy, entrepreneurism, wellbeing, and culture are interwoven alongside food production. Henri Lefebvre’s latent work on rhythmanalysis is used as a research method to capture the everyday beats particular to Havana surrounding these sites. This book maps the many ways in which these spaces shift power away from the state to become places that are co-created by the community to serve as a crucial hinge point between the ongoing collapse of the city and its future wellbeing.

People and State in Socialist Cuba

People and State in Socialist Cuba PDF Author: Marina Gold
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137539836
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 239

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book is a political and anthropological analysis of the concept of Revolution as it is understood and experienced by Cubans in their daily lives. Urban agricultural movements, alternative medicine, self-employment, and migration reveal complex interactions and disrupt assumptions that the Cuban sate is a static, anachronistic regime.

Living Ideology in Cuba

Living Ideology in Cuba PDF Author: Katherine Gordy
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472052616
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Get Book Here

Book Description
A revealing look at the complicated and continual negotiation between the Cuban state and society over the meaning of socialism

Methodological Approaches to Societies in Transformation

Methodological Approaches to Societies in Transformation PDF Author: Yasmine Berriane
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030650677
Category : Economic development
Languages : en
Pages : 286

Get Book Here

Book Description
Carefully contextualizing the ethnography by taking scale and time seriously, the book shows why fieldwork is both necessary and insufficient if the aim is to make sense of the contemporary world. It is a significant contribution to the renewal of anthropological theory and methodology. Highly recommended! -Thomas Hylland Eriksen, University of Oslo, Norway With an eye for various scales, biographies of people and things, and processes as they take place, this book provides insights into how, to whom, and when things change, how it feels like - and also how some things stay the same. -Samuli Schielke, Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (Berlin) This important book, drawing on ethnographic research from across the globe, addresses both the 'why' and the 'how' of studying societal change, inviting the reader to reflect on the potential - and the limits - of qualitative methods. - Jonathan Rigg, University of Bristol, UK This open access book provides methodological devices and analytical frameworks for the study of societies in transformation. It explores a central paradox in the study of change: making sense of change requires long-term perspectives on societal transformations and on the different ways people experience social change, whereas the research carried out to study change is necessarily limited to a relatively short space of time. This volume offers a range of methodological responses to this challenge by paying attention to the complex entanglement of qualitative research and the metanarratives generally used to account for change. Each chapter is based on a concrete case study from different parts of the world and tackles a diversity of topics, analytical approaches, and data collection methods. The contributors' innovative solutions provide valuable tools and techniques for all those interested in the study of change. Yasmine Berriane is permanent researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS, Centre Maurice Halbwachs), France. Annuska Derks is Associate Professor in the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Aymon Kreil is Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages and Cultures at Ghent University, Belgium. Dorothea Lüddeckens is Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.

Opening Acts

Opening Acts PDF Author: Catherine Romagnolo
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803285000
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the beginning there was . . . the beginning. And with the beginning came the power to tell a story. Few book-length studies of narrative beginnings exist, and not one takes a feminist perspective. Opening Acts reveals the important role of beginnings as moments of discursive authority with power and agency that have been appropriated by writers from historically marginalized groups. Catherine Romagnolo argues for a critical awareness of how social identity plays a role in the strategic use and critical interpretation of narrative beginnings. The twentieth-century U.S. women writers whom Romagnolo studies--Edith Wharton, H.D., Toni Morrison, Julia Alvarez, and Amy Tan--have seized the power to disrupt conventional structures of authority and undermine historical master narratives of marriage, motherhood, U.S. nationhood, race, and citizenship. Using six of their novels as points of entry, Romagnolo illuminates the ways in which beginnings are potentially subversive, thereby disrupting the reinscription of hierarchically gendered and racialized conceptions of authorship and agency.

Riding with Death

Riding with Death PDF Author: Jana Evans Braziel
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496812751
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 394

Get Book Here

Book Description
On the southern end of the Grand Rue, a major thoroughfare that runs through the center of Port-au-Prince, waits the Haitian capital's automobile repair district. This veritable junkyard of steel and rubber, recycled parts, old tires, and scrap metal might seem an unlikely foundry for art. Yet, on the street's opposite end thrives the Grand Rue Galerie, a working studio of assembled art and sculptures wrought from the refuse. Established by artists André Eugène and Jean Hérard Celeur in the late 1990s, the Grand Rue's urban environmental aesthetics--defined by motifs of machinic urbanism, Vodou bricolage, the postprimitivist altermodern, and performative politics--radically challenge ideas about consumption, waste, and environmental hazards, as well as consider innovative solutions to these problems in the midst of poverty, insufficient social welfare, lack of access to arts, education, and basic needs. In Riding with Death, Jana Evans Braziel explores the urban environmental aesthetics of the Grand Rue sculptors and the beautifully constructed sculptures they have designed from salvaged automobile parts, rubber tires, carved wood, and other recycled materials. Through first-person accounts and fieldwork, Braziel constructs an urban ecological framework for understanding these sculptures amid environmental degradation and grinding poverty. Above all, Braziel presents Haitian artists who live on the most challenged Caribbean island, yet who thrive as creators reinventing refuse as art and resisting the abjection of their circumstances.