IRH Seminar: Repairing Cuba

Monday Seminar:
Guillermina De Ferrari
Senior Fellow (2018–2022)
Spanish and Portuguese, UW-Madison

Contemporary Cuban art often highlights the widespread practice of repair. Fixing broken appliances and subdividing houses via DIY construction are frequent real-life responses to economic and social precarity. At the same time, these creative practices constitute political and ethical forms of engagement with crises, inequality, and an uneven access to modernity. In this talk, Prof. De Ferrari will discuss specific objects and practices as a way to explore what repair says about Cuba today, as well as to reflect on how Cuban repair art contributes to a more general understanding of what it means to live in a world at risk.

Guillermina De Ferrari (Ph.D. Columbia University, 2001) is professor of Spanish American and Caribbean Literatures and Cultures. She is the author of Vulnerable States: Bodies of Memory in Contemporary Caribbean Fiction (University of Virginia Press, 2007), and Community and Culture in Post-Soviet Cuba (Routledge, 2014). She has published many articles on Cuban and Caribbean literature, visual culture, photography, and world literature. She directed the Center for Visual Cultures (2014–2018) and curated the exhibition Apertura: Photography in Cuba Today (Chazen Museum of Art, 2015). She is co-editor with Ursula Heise (UCLA) of the Routledge Series Literature and Contemporary Thought.