Join the Spanish Graduate Program for a lecture with guest scholar, Esther Whitfield, for this seminar. The event is co-sponsored by Environmental Humanities.
As the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base enters a new chapter in its history as a detention site, with Cubans among the migrants who have recently been held there, this lecture explores relationships between the base and Cuba that have taken shape over the past three decades. Although separated by a land-mined fence-line that it is both perilous and illegal to cross, and steeped in political hostilities that justify a language of border protection, the base and Cuba occupy common ground. The literature, art and testimony of detainees held at the base and of Cubans living nearby maps Guantánamo not as divided territory but as a borderland region: one that shares a natural environment, a marking of human lives by isolation, and a privileging of compassion as a primary mode of relating to the unknown.
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Esther Whitfield is Carlos Manuel de Céspedes Professor of Comparative Literature and Professor of Hispanic Studies at Brown University. She is author of A New No-Man’s Land: Writing and Art at Guantánamo, Cuba (2024) and Cuban Currency: The Dollar and ‘Special Period’ Fiction (2008); translator, with Katerina González Seligmann, of José Ramón Sánchez’s poetry collection The Black Arrow (2023); and co-editor with Anke Birkenmaier of Havana Beyond the Ruins: Cultural Mapping of the City After 1989 and with Jacqueline Loss of New Short Fiction from Cuba (2007).