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For a recording of this event in English, click here. For a recording of this event in Spanish, click here.
Speaker: Daylet Domínguez, Wilbur Martin Visiting Scholar at Harvard University; Associate Professor at the Spanish and Portuguese Department of UC Berkeley
Discussant: Marial Iglesias Utset, Visiting Research Scholar at the Afro-Latin American Research Institute, Working Group on Comparative Slavery Leader at Harvard University
Presented by: Tania Bruguera, Senior Lecturer In Media & Performance, Theater, Dance & Media, Affiliate Of Art, Film, And Visual Studies and the Interim Chair of the Cuba Studies Program at Harvard University
In her talk, Professor Domínguez will focus on the ways in which Cuban annexationists and U.S expansionists turned to each other and imagined themselves as part of the same front, united by republicanism, American identity, and belonging to the white race, in the decades preceding the U.S. Civil War. In particular, she will discuss how Jane McManus Storm Cazneau (Cora Montgomery), the most important U.S female journalist in the first half of the 19th century and the editor of La Verdad, began to envision these new geopolitical cartographies through diplomacy, written press, and filibustering. Cazneau formed part of a transnational community that resided between Cuba and the U.S; she comfortably communicated in both languages and aspired to merge both spaces into one political domain. By discussing Cazneau’s works, Professor Domínguez visibilizes her place within La Verdad and argues that Cazneau offers possible projects of incorporation, presenting new hemispheric alliances that went beyond established cultural, linguistic, and political links.
Daylet Domínguez (PhD Princeton University) is an Associate Professor at the Spanish and Portuguese Department of UC Berkeley. She is a scholar of modern Caribbean, and her work focuses on travel cultures and costumbrismo; empire, nation and revolution; slavery, race and colonialism, among other topics. Her book, Ficciones etnográficas: literatura, ciencias sociales y proyectos nacionales en el Caribe hispano del siglo XIX (Iberoamericana 2021), studies the interplay of literature and science in nineteenthcentury Hispanic Caribbean. It particularly emphasizes the importance of literature (travel writing, costumbrista sketches and the realist novel) for the establishment of the social sciences in the region. Domínguez is also the co-editor of a special issue entitled Slavery, Mobility and Networks in nineteenth-century Cuba in the journal of Atlantic Studies (2021). She is currently working on her second monograph, Caribbean Empire: Writing, Filibustering and Annexation in the Age of the Second Slavery, which focuses on the ways in which Cuban and southern U.S slaveholders turned to each other and imagined themselves as part of the same front, united by chattel bondage, in the decades preceding the U.S. Civil War. It studies how writers, travelers, and planters from both regions began to envision these new geopolitical cartographies through diplomacy, written press, and filibustering. Their commitment to the future of slavery enabled them to transcend colonial and national circuits and challenge existing geopolitical borders. Her articles have been published in Revista Hispánica Moderna, Hispanic Review, Cuban Studies, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Iberoamericana, among others.
Marial Iglesias Utset was Professor of Philosophy and History at the University of Havana for 25 years. She earned her PhD in Historical Sciences at the University of Havana and her M. Phil. and her BA at Moscow State University. Her research fields include Culture and Race in Cuba, Atlantic Slavery, and African Diaspora Studies. Her book Las metáforas del cambio en la vida cotidiana, a history of everyday life in Cuba during the US military occupation (1898-1902), has received several prizes, including the Clarence H. Haring Prize, which is a quinquennial prize awarded by the American Historical Association to the Latin American author who has published the most outstanding book on Latin American history during the previous five years. The book has been recently translated into English and published by the University of North Carolina Press under the title A Cultural History of Cuba during the US Occupation, 1898-1902. She has recently been a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan and a Long-term Research Fellow at the John Carter Brown Library.
Tania Bruguera is a Cuban artist and activist whose performances and installations examine political power structures and their effect on society's most vulnerable people. Her long-term projects have been intensive interventions on the institutional structure of collective memory, education and politics. Bruguera has received many honours such as the Velazquez Prize, the Robert Rauschenberg Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Prince Claus Fund Laureate Her work has been extensively exhibited around the world, including the Tate Turbine Hall Commission and Documenta 11. Her work is in the collection of the Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, the Van Abbemuseum, Tate Modern and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana. Bruguera holds an M.F.A. in Performance from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), as well as degrees from the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) and the Escuela de Artes Plásticas San Alejandro in Havana, Cuba. She has been awarded a Doctor Honoris Causa at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and from her alma mater The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).
In collaboration with the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Berkeley