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Chapter 2 - Commodification

Black Internationalism and the African Safari of Achy Obejas’s Ruins

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 July 2022

Sarah M. Quesada
Affiliation:
Duke University, North Carolina
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Summary

This chapter looks back at the aftermath of Cuban Black internationalism in Angola, before Cuba’s dire economic depression of the 1990s, termed “the Special Period in Times of Peace.” In this earlier neoliberal era, Ruins is set when Cuba opened its doors to tourism for the first time in fifty years. But amidst economic despair in Havana, the main protagonist takes refuge in his imagined African utopia constructed from a glorification of the Angolan war, to Ernest Hemingway’s safari, to imageries of modernism in Pablo Picasso and Wifredo Lam, to even African heritage tourism. Yet this African safari often includes Badagry, Nigeria along the Slave Route. As I reveal the ways in which Nigerian writers Wole Soyinka and Pius Adesanmi bemoan Badagry’s neoliberal developmentalism, so does Obejas in her novel, as Ruins sets up a comparison by which African commodification as much in Havana as in Badagry leads to Africa’s excision from Cuban identity. As the tourism industry threatens to turn the Revolutionary protagonist toward capitalism despite his fervent Black internationalism, the novel suggests that a genuine Latin-African historicism might rehabilitate his commodified African safari.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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  • Commodification
  • Sarah M. Quesada, Duke University, North Carolina
  • Book: The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature
  • Online publication: 14 July 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009086806.003
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  • Commodification
  • Sarah M. Quesada, Duke University, North Carolina
  • Book: The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature
  • Online publication: 14 July 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009086806.003
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Commodification
  • Sarah M. Quesada, Duke University, North Carolina
  • Book: The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature
  • Online publication: 14 July 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009086806.003
Available formats
×