The Dissidence of Reinaldo Arenas, livre ebook

International Latino Book Awards, Honorable Mention, Best Biography (English)

American Educational Research Association, Division B: Curriculum Studies, Outstanding Book Award

Focusing on the didactic nature of the work of Reinaldo Arenas, this book demonstrates the Cuban writer’s influence as public pedagogue, mentor, and social activist whose teaching on resistance to normative ideologies resonates in societies past, present, and future.

Through a multidisciplinary approach bridging educational, historiographic, and literary perspectives, The Dissidence of Reinaldo Arenas illuminates how Arenas’s work remains a cutting-edge source of inspiration for today’s audiences, particularly LGBTQI readers. It shows how Arenas’s aesthetics contain powerful insights for exploring dissensus whether in the context of Cuba, broader Pan-American and Latinx-U.S. queer movements of social justice, or transnational citizenship politics.

Carefully dissecting Arenas’s themes against the backdrop of his political activity, this book presents the writer’s poetry, novels, and plays as a curriculum of dissidence that provides models for socially engaged intellectual activism.

Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Contents

List of Figures vii Acknowledgments ix

Note on Translations and Quotations xiii List of Abbreviations xv

Commonly Cited Acronyms xvii Prologue: The End 1

Introduction 25

1.Reinaldo Arenas’s Fearless Speech: Mapping the Parrhesiastes’s Discourse as Public Pedagogy47

2.“Actitudes Extravagantes” and Queering Identities: The Marginal Sexual Pedagogies of a Dissident Marielito69

3.Colonial and Counterrevolutionary Pedagogies: Homosexuality as Activism in El Central and Arturo, la estrella más brillante105

4.Reading Arenas through Currere: Autobiographical Lessons in Time-Traveling139

5.Comparative Lessons from the Pariah’s Text: ReinaldoArenas’s

El color del verano and Juan Goytisolo’s Juan sin tierra 172

6.Testifying to the Mentors’ Deaths: Reinaldo Arenas’s Factual and Fantastical Re-creations of the Passing of José Lezama Lima and Virgilio Piñera209

Notes 245

Bibliography 253