REGISTER: https://uci.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_CkDhEnYFQNS-kKh5xX6tsQ 

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Dancing with the Revolution

Power, Politics, and Privilege in Cuba

By Elizabeth B. Schwall, Assistant Professor of History

Northern Arizona University

As esteemed artists, Cuban dancers have often used their art to posit more radical notions of social justice than political leaders were able or willing to implement. After 1959, while generally promoting revolutionary projects like mass education and internationalist solidarity, they also took risks by challenging racial prejudice, gender norms, and censorship, all of which could affect dancers personally. This exciting new book sheds powerful new light on how dance, too often overlooked in histories of Latin America and the Caribbean, provides fresh perspectives on what it means for people, and nations, to move through the world.

Dr. Elizabeth Schwall has taught at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley; she also held a fellowship at New York University's Center for Ballet and the Arts, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University. Her work has appeared in the Hispanic American Historical Review, Cuban Studies, Gender & History, and Dance Chronicle.

Cuban Memory Wars

Retrospective Politics in Revolution and Exile

By Michael J. Bustamante, Associate Professor of History & Chair in Cuban-American Studies

University of Miami

For many Cubans, Fidel Castro’s Revolution represented deliverance from a legacy of inequality and national disappointment. For others—especially those exiled in the United States—Cuba’s turn to socialism made the prerevolutionary period look like paradise lost. Unsettling this familiar schism, this powerful now book excavates Cubans’ contested memories of the Revolution’s roots and results over its first twenty years, revealing how these battles over the past not only defied simple political divisions— but also helped shape the course of modern Cuban history.

Dr. Michael J. Bustamante is co-editor of The Revolution from Within: Cuba, 1959-1980 (Duke, 2019). He has written for the Journal of American Ethnic History, Latino Studies, Cuban Studies, and Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies.

Moderated by Dr. Anita Casavantes Bradford, Associate Professor, Chicano/Latino Studies & History, UC Irvine

Our Moderator, Dr. Anita Casavantes Bradford is the author of The Revolution is for the Children: The Politics of Childhood in Havana and Miami, 1959-1962 (University of North Carolina Press 2014) and of the forthcoming book, Suffer the Little Children: Child Migration and the Geopolitics of Compassion in the United States (University of North Carolina Press 2022). Her work has appeared in Cuban Studies, Latin American Research Review, Journal of American Ethnic History, Diplomatic History, and the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth.