Acknowledgements IX
Introduction 1
1
Missing Pictures: A Compressed Philosophy of Photography 1
2
Locating Cuban-American Literature: Diaspora and the Politics of Longing 5
3
Photography Displaced: A Conversation between Theories 14
4
Rethinking Ekphrasis: Photography in Cuban-American Literature 21
1
ReMembering Cuba in Autobiographical Writing 28
1
Autos, Bios, Graphē, and Ikóna: Elements of Autobiographical Writing 28
2
The Erotics of Exile: Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s Next Year in Cuba 35
3
Reading the Past: Carlos Eire’s Waiting for Snow in Havana 49
4
“Dying is the only option and not an option at all”: Negotiating Cultural Attachments 62
2
(Post-)Nostalgia Novels and the Mediation of History 65
1
Cuba Reinvented: Strategies of Nostalgia, Pastiche, and Simulation 65
2
Nostalgia and the Uncanny: Oscar Hijuelos’s The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien 73
3
Nostalgia and Cannibalization: Roberto G. Fernández’s Holy Radishes! 89
4
Pastiche Revisited: Inauthenticity and Dislocation 100
3
Rewriting History in Female Fiction 103
1
Histories of Skin: Photography, Genealogy, and Dislocation 103
2
“Cuba’s Dying Birds”: Cristina García’s The Agüero Sisters 109
3
Veiled Origins and Secret Histories: Achy Obejas’s Days of Awe 121
4
Umbilical Cords and Reproduction: The Discontinuous Strings of History 136
4
Ekphrasis in the Age of Globalization 139
1
“I am a Cosmopolitan”: Self-Narration and Globalized Image Culture 139
2
“A Game with History”: Ana Menéndez’s Loving Che 143
3
Mediating Love and War: Ana Menéndez’s The Last War 155
4
Images without Origin and the Failures of Self-Narration 165
Conclusion 167
Works Cited 171
Index 179