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  • Queering Exilic Experience
  • Zachary Lamm (bio)
Cultural Erotics in Cuban America. Ricardo L. Ortíz. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. xix + 337 pp.

To exist as queer is, one might argue, to exist in a form of exile: from sexual normativity; from cultural narratives; from the national corpus. Might we not reverse this formulation and ask, is existence as an exile also a form of queer existence? Ricardo Ortíz invokes exactly this question in Cultural Erotics in Cuban America, his study of recent cultural productions by artists living in the Cuban-U.S. diaspora. In his conclusion, he explains that the focus of his work is not intended to be identified strictly as " 'Cuban-American literature,' no matter how comforting all those terms can still be in their particular forms of cultural concretion"; instead, he proclaims the book "a study of 'political and cultural erotics,' " of "the retention of some relationship to a quality of cubanidad that has survived . . . from the heyday of the nation" (274). Ortíz produces a wide-ranging study of texts from within Cuban America that enable readings of the Cuban exilic experience as both exceptional and exemplary, as productive of feelings—and sometimes lived experiences—of queerness, strangely concomitant with the gender and sexual normativity of both U.S. and Cuban cultures. His study exposes how identification with a feminine-identified national fatherland and existence within two dyadically gendered sexual cultures (both of which privilege masculinity) place the subject of Cuban exile in a position of alterity not unlike those assumed by queer subjects. Moreover, those queer subjects who find themselves both inside and outside normative cubanidad are nevertheless unwilling to remit Cuban identity, even as the prospect of return becomes not only an increasingly less viable possibility but also, in many cases, less desirable. [End Page 425]

Work on the relationship between erotic life and national politics—especially on the topic of immigration—will likely be familiar to readers of queer theory through recent texts by such scholars as Eithne Luibhéid, Erica Rand, and Siobhan B. Somerville;1 Ortíz's book complements much of this work by emphasizing the specific context of a Cuban American culture that maintains an intense affective relationship to old-country nationalism through a heteronormative cultural unity increasingly understood and acknowledged as both unsustainable and imagined, which was and is (perhaps not surprisingly) also the case back on the island. The choice to keep the focus of his analysis within the Cuban American context, rather than turn toward a critique of U.S. national culture and government, distinguishes Cultural Erotics from other texts that have attempted to integrate queer theory and diasporic studies, and his notion that the entirety of this culture may in fact be queer in its own self-understanding is enlightening both in the particularity of his objects of study and in the larger context of the formation of national cultures.

Ortíz's work is impressively wide ranging in two important ways: (1) as inclusive of a textual capaciousness that enables him to survey works as different as the prose fiction and nonfiction of Reinaldo Arenas, the cultural theory of Roberto Fernández Retamar, the poetry of Rafael Campo, the novels of Cristina García, and the musical productions and performances of Albita Rodríguez, Celia Cruz, and Gloria Estefan; and (2) as an attempt to (re)describe a hemispheric geography of Cuban American exilic experience that triangulates Miami (and, of course, the island itself) in the south, Montreal in the north, and Los Angeles in the west, and is inclusive of New York City, Boston, Chicago, and even Urbana, Illinois. This decentering of Miami as the exclusive location of Cuban American culture and the source of its productions is significant because it requires acknowledging Cuban communities existing outside South Florida. It also recognizes that feelings of nationalism, citizenship, and other kinds of belonging are not only productive of cultural outsiders still identifying as part of the community (who, in Ortíz's archive, rather than become invisible, serve as representative voices for group experience) but also not enough to maintain locative unity, even among a Cuban American community so often represented...

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