Unpacking Feminist Consciousness and Racial Politics: Representation and the Vanguard in Contemporary Cuban Visual Culture

Abstract

In the 1990s and 2000s, sensing that the critical situation had loosened with the fall of the Berlin Wall, post-Soviet aesthetics in Cuba ranged from bloodletting to bitching and from comical to grandiose. How then do women artists in Cuba deal with the contradictions, ironies, ambiguities and social negotiations in Cuban life? This paper will look at how Cuba’s artists have participated and contributed to this discourse on gender and racial politics. Now more than ever, the artistic production represents a quasi-independent space in dialogue with the State in their views of the revolutionary experience. Drawing on a variety of experimental and conceptual contemporary Cuban artists this paper shows how they have challenged accepted artistic and political discourse not only in their own society but in the global arena, reversing conventional notions of “center” and “periphery” and embodying a provocative, ironic, humorous, and omnivorously critical approach. Their work sheds light on the everyday life of Cuban women living on the Island and abroad, gender and racial politics, sexuality and power, and the discourse of global feminism in a post-Soviet context.