EMILIO BEJEL (Spanish, UC-Davis). Discussant.
Bejel, a critic and writer, has published numerous books and articles on Spanish and Spanish American literature (especially Cuban) and Literary Theory. His scholarly publications deal with a variety of authors, including Lezama Lima, Carpentier, Borges, Sarduy, and Arenas; and issues, like ideology, poetics, gender transgressions, and globalization. He is the author, among others, of Literatura de Nuestra America, Jose Lezama Lima, Poet of the Image, and Gay Cuban Nation. He is also the author of several poetry collections and an autobiography entitled The Write Way Home. A Cuban-American Story.

DENISE BLUM (CSU-Fresno). Schooling Cuban Pioneers in the ideals of Che: New meanings.
The Cuban Pioneers, the mass student organization, repeat the slogan , “Pioneers for communism, we will be like Che.” Although the same words have been repeated since 1964, what does this mean to children to be like Che during The Special Period? According to Theodore MacDonald (1985, p. 176), the Pioneers reveal “the degree to which doctrinaire shifts in ideological line can be mediated through the school system.” I describe some of the major activities I observed from 1998-2003 of the Pioneers and the functions and impacts this organization seemed to have on the students. I hope to shed light on the Cuban young people’s understandings of and relations with the official communist ideology, provoking thought about the future of Cuban society. To interpret my findings, I have consulted the work of Russian anthropologist Alexei Yurchak (2003) on late socialism in Russia and Eastern Europe. He proposes a concept of “heteronymous shift,” to emphasize the reproduction of form with the reinterpretation of meanings. As Cuban ideology experienced a transformation toward a new pragmatic model, it was increasingly more important to reproduce precise ideological forms than to adhere to the precise meanings these forms were suppose to convey. The younger generations creatively reinterpreted the meanings of the ideological symbols, de-ideologizing static dogmas and rendering communist values meaningful on their own terms. I use the work of Damian Fernandez (2000) to address which values will become meaningful , due to their affective and pragmatic qualities.

Denise Blum is an assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at California State University at Fresno. She received her Ph.D. in Curriculum Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. Her forthcoming book “Cuban Youth and Revolutionary Values: Allá en la lucha” (University of Texas Press, in press) is based on several years of fieldwork in Cuba during the 1990s.

KEVIN DELGADO (SDSU). Santeria as Spiritual Capital.
This paper examines the ways in which the Santeria religion allows some Cubans (particularly those unconnected with either the tourism industry or the Florida-dominated remittance market) to access the Cuban dollar economy by entering into relationships with foreigners seeking religious knowledge, products, or status. While aspects of Santeria performance (drumming, singing, dancing) have been especially flexible products in the new Cuban market economy, this paper also examines how Cuban Santeros interact with foreigners through the religion itself by providing them with knowledge, divination, consecrated drums, rituals, and initiations into Cuban houses of worship. Imbued with an aura of authenticity and a deep connection to an African past and efficacious present, Santeria is increasingly commodified for foreign cultural, religious, and academic consumers. This paper focuses on this Cuban conversion of spiritual and subcultural capital into financial capital, as well as the impact of this financial exchange upon the practice of Santeria itself.

Kevin Delgado received his M.A. and Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from UCLA, where he wrote a dissertation on Afro-Cuban Iyesá music and culture. Delgado’s primary research focuses on Santeria music, performance, and cultural representation. A bassist and percussionist, Delgado currently serves as Assistant Professor and oordinator of World Music and Ethnomusicology at San Diego State University.

ANA MARIA DOPICO (NYU). Dentro de la Fotografia, Todo: Politics and the Imaginary of Photography in the Special Period
Photography occupies an exceptional signifying function during the Special Period, situated beyond the state's fundamentalist policing of political speech and writing practices.
Photography as visual art offered a productively ambiguous "aesthetic" realm in which critique and experiment could be negotiated; thus photographic work became increasingly important as visual culture replaced literature as the dominant expression of Cuban national culture.
As Cuba was exposed photographically by foreigners for a cultural and tourist market, Cuban visual artists responded to this commodifying photographic fix with their own "photographic boom," strategically recurring to the deceptive immanence of the photographic image, to its "domestic" familiarity and artistic dispensation, to its speaking silence and metaphorical mobility. Artists used the photographic screen to incorporate, displace, and frame the word and its besieged political status. Political imaginaries and meanings thrived under the the sanctions of documentary realism, national themes, private and collective memory, ethnographic symbols, and allusive surrealism.
Reading the work of Jose Figueroa, Marta Maria Perez Bravo, Jose Manuel Fors, Juan Carlos Alom, Carlos Garaicoa, and Eduardo Munoz Ordoqui I will analyze how a generation raised within the revolution reworked Cuba's cultural genealogies, national symbols, and image- repertories to produce potent allusive critiques. Collectively they produced both a new aesthetic language for an "unspeakable" political unconscious and a "revolutionary" breakthrough in representing Cuba to itself in the rich and contradictory terms of the Special Period.

Ana Maria Dopico is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University. She is the author of "Houses Divided: Political Imaginaries and Genealogical Fictions in the Americas," forthcoming in 2006 from Duke University Press. She is the editor of a two volume collection of the work of Jose Marti, "Jose Marti: Politics and Letters," forthcoming in 2006 from Oxford University Press. She is presently at work on "Cubanologies: Altered States of the Nation," an interdisciplinary interpretation of Cuban national culture.

STEVE FAGIN (UCSD). Tropicola (92’).
TROPICOLA was shot in Havana at the height of the Special Period. A provocative glimpse of life in contemporary Cuba, this playful movie with an excellent soundtrack captures the color and rhythm of this vibrant nation while intelligently examining the problems facing Cuba during its current economic restructuring. From young Cuban women running off with tourists, to black market moneymaking schemes, Tropicola stresses the spirit, humor, tenacity and resourcefulness of the Cuban people as they bravely face their changing reality.

Steve Fagin is Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego, and recipient of several NEA grants. He has produced a series of feature length videos including: The Amazing Voyage of Gustave Flaubert and Raymond Roussel, The Machine That Killed Bad People, Oliver Kahn, and TropiCola, shot in Havana in the mid-1990s. His works have featured prominently at museums such as the New York Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art; at international festivals; as well as screened on Bravo International in Latin America, Canal + in Europe and PBS in the United States. Fagin’s work is the subject of a book from Duke University Press, Talkin' With Your Mouth Full: Conversations with the Videos of Steve Fagin. ANTONIO

ELIGIO FERNANDEZ, “Tonel” (UT-Austin). Dialogues on Pedro Alvarez
With this paper, I propose to analyze the pictorial work of Pedro Alvarez (1967-2004), and in particular his production during the 90s. I want to present Alvarez’s work as a singular and outstanding chapter in the evolution of Cuban art during the last two decades of the 20th century. It was at this time when the art of the island gained international recognition and visibility, and the work of Alvarez is an important part of that wide diffusion. We are interested in making a comparison between the work of this artist and the more immediate socio-cultural context from which he projects himself: Cuba during the special period. It is also essential to comment on his paintings, drawings and prints in relation to the sources that nurtured his inclination towards parody and satire; among those sources the work of a 19th century Spanish painter who settled in Cuba, Victor Patricio Landaluze, stands out, as well as the production of artists much closer in time, such as the American Mark Tansey. We depart from a hypothesis that can be succinctly summarized in the following manner: the work of Pedro Alvarez, in his thematic and stylistic evolution during the 90s, increasingly and profoundly approaches questions that concern transformations in the racial, economic and political orders of Cuban society at the end of the 20th century.

Tonel is an artist as well as one of Cuba’s foremost art critics. He holds a degree in art history from the University of Havana. He has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute and at Stanford University, and has been a visiting artist at the Ringling School of Art and Design in Sarasota Florida. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. His articles on contemporary Cuban art have appeared in numerous art catalogues and journals throughout the world.

LAURIE FREDERIK (U Chicago). La Batalla for Cuban Identity: Option Zero Theater.
In Cuba, artists and intellectuals play pivotal roles in the creation of national imagery and the retelling of history. This article investigates the transformation of Cubanía from the perspective of these artists—specifically those working in theater groups of rural Cienfuegos and Guantánamo. It looks at how creative process is interwoven with political structure and socialist ideology, and questions how national images and definitions of cultural authenticity are manipulated and maintained in popular consciousness. New artistic genres are often born when a society is undergoing crisis and traumatic transformation – when desperate times force artistic minds to bend a philosophy, to adapt to the new social, political, or economic situation, and to paint the picture of reality from different angles. A new genre of live performance called “Option Zero Theater” emerged in 1990 as a defensive response to the challenges of the Special Period, and it has since evolved into a new weapon in the battle against imperialism and globalization; against “pseudo-culture” and “anti-culture.” I describe how notions of “crusade,” “rescue,” and also the purity of the Cuban campesino motivated and guided the development of Cuban artists, and how, ultimately, the commercialization of the Special Period’s paucity turned to profit–creating a predicament even the most devout revolutionary artist could not resist.

Laurie A. Frederik is a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago department of anthropology. Her dissertation, to be defended in 2005, is about contemporary rural theater in rural Cienfuegos and Guantánamo, Cuba, where she lived for several years in the late 1990s.

DICK HEBDIGE (Film, UC-Santa Barbara). Discussant.
A cultural critic and theorist, Hebdige has published widely on youth subculture, contemporary music, art and design, and consumer and media culture. His books include: Subculture: The Meaning of Style (Methuen, 1979); Cut 'n' Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music (Methuen, 1987); and Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things (Routledge, Methuen, 1988). He is a professor of film studies and art Studio, and director of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

ARIANA HERNANDEZ-REGUANT. (UCSD). Revolutionary Dissonances: On Radio Taino.
In 1990s downtrodden Havana, the most popular sound was that of dance music and commercial advertising put out by the new Radio Taino, a FM station under the oversight of the Cuban Communist Part. But its new sound was only made possible by the development and feedback of new sectors, like an advertising infrastructure emerging from the political and public service propaganda field, and the foreign world music industry. This paper will focus on the role of these cultural industries -and their employees- in framing capitalist images within socialist ethics, and presenting capitalism as a means to socialism.

Ariana Hernandez-Reguant is a cultural anthropologist and an assistant professor of media studies at the Universtiy of California in San Diego. She has published articles related to contemporary Cuban cultural policy and the arts in Public Culture, the Journal of Latin American Anthropology, and various edited volumes. Her book on the Cuban culture industries during the nineties has been contracted by Duke University Press.

BETTIE-SUE HERTZ (SD Museum of Art). Discussant.
Betti-Sue Hertz is curator of contemporary art at the San Diego Museum of Art since 2000. Recent exhibitions include Past in Reverse: Contemporary Art of East Asia (2004) and Axis Mexico: Common Objects and Cosmopolitan Actions (2002). Before relocating to San Diego, Hertz was a curator and arts activist in New York for over fifteen years. As director of Longwood Arts Project (1992-98) she organized numerous gallery and outdoor sculpture exhibitions. Hertz co-directed 1990s Art from Cuba: A National Residency and Exhibition Program, a cultural- exchange project for five Cuban artists in five U.S. cities (1997-1999). She was curator for Beyond the Borders: Art By Recent Immigrants (1994) and co-curator (with Lydia Yee) of Urban Mythologies: The Bronx Represented Since the 1960s, (1999), both for the Bronx Museum of the Arts.

BERTA JOTTAR (Williams Col). Rumbeando with the Iremes in the Diaspora: Central Park Rumba (A Videopresentation).
Since the late 1960’s, Central Park is the crossroad for Afro-Latinos/as in New York City. Every summer, New York Ricans, Colombians, Dominicans and Cubans –in their respective racial variations- socialized at the rhythm of rumba’s clave. In fact, Central Park’s Rumba is a space where Afrodescendant expressive culture finds its way as an intercultural and inter-racial negotiation between these economic immigrants, political exiles, and working and middle class Latinos/as. This presentation analyzes Central Park’s Rumba as an intersection of circles where a “greater Cuba” is reconfigured via the musical encounters of “marielitos,” balseros, and an Abakua presence. I will pay particular attention to rumba’s aural and kinesthetic relations in order to explore its internal Abakua excercise, and the historical -nevertheless contradictory relations it creates among rumberos.

Berta Jottar is a video artist and scholar from Mexico City. She is an Assistant Professor at Williams College fulfilling an interdisciplinary position between the Latino/a Studies Program, and the Theater and Art Departments. She lives in New York City where she is producing a book and a series of videos about New York City Rumba. She obtained her Ph.D. at the Program of Performance Studies (Tisch School of the Arts, NYU) and her dissertation "Rumba in Exile" got a Cythia Jean Cohen Bull award for academic excellence in dance scholarship.

LISA MAYA KNAUER (U Mass). HAV/NY: Rumba, translocality and publics
This paper traces the evolution of a translocal community of rumberos – performers and enthusiasts of the Afrocuban dance/music complex of rumba – anchored in the New York metropolitan area and Cuba. During the 1990s, an upsurge in U.S. vistors to Cuba -- both “American” cultural tourists and returning Cuban emigres (or “diasporic tourists”) helped fuel Cuba’s folkloric “boom”. Cuban rumberos sought to parlay their enhanced cultural capital into opportunities to travel abroad. My presentation explores how legitimacy and authenticity are established and negotiated between these locales, particularly through the exchange of commercial and home-made media products that I label “audiovisual remittances.” Finally, I explore the utility of public sphere theory – particularly work on the black public sphere and informal publics in the former Soviet bloc – in theorizing the nature of this community. Specifically, I question whether it is possible to conceive of this community – multi-sited, multi- ethnic and multi-generational -- as an alternative public sphere or counterpublic.

Lisa Maya Knauer is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and African/African-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Her dissertation focused on transnational and intercultural exchanges in Afrocuban religion and music in New York and Havana.

JACQUELINE LOSS (U Conn). Wandering in Russian
“Wandering in Russian” investigates the remnants of the Soviet Bloc in Cuban culture today. Through analyses of literature, video and performance emerging in the mid-1990s, I demonstrate that Cuban artists account for the Soviet impact, utilizing interpretive approaches that range from naïve nostalgia to parody. Artists do not commemorate the Soviet Union's policies toward Cuba, but rather, in want for alternative escapes, reinvent their own personal experiences with this intimately exotic sphere. Especially for a generation that came of age in the 1980s, at the height of an apparently less oppressive Revolution, 'things Russian' can easily conjure up an intimate exoticism, not for the nation of institutions and empire, but rather for the dissonance of its language, literature, and foods. Russian, in the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, often functions as an imaginary escape from an increasing polarity between Cuba and the rest of the world. It is an escape, however, that frequently references the complicated history of the Cold War.
With a focus on the writings of Juan Abreu, Jorge Ferrer, Ena Lucía Portela, Ricardo Alberto Pérez, Antonio José Ponte, Fernando Rojas, and Víctor Fowler, the video of Ernesto Reñe Rodríguez, the performance of Pedro González, and artwork by Antonio Eligio Fernández, I ask how memories of the Soviet-Cuban union evolve in a society whose government remains socialist and how these memories nuance our understanding of the present.

Jacqueline Loss is an assistant professor of Latin American Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut. Her manuscript Cosmopolitanisms and Latin America: Against the Destiny of Place is forthcoming from Palgrave. Her articles have appeared in Nepantla:Views from South, New Centennial Review, Mandorla: Nueva Escritura de las Americas, Miradas, and Latino and Latina Writers. She is co-editor of the forthcoming collection "Cubanacán: New Short Fiction from Cuba."

LILLIAN MANZOR (U-Miami). Theater in Two Shores.
This article analyzes Cuba’s theatrical production in the 90s focusing on the various relations between Cuban performances and public and cultural policies in “Greater Cuba,” that is, on the island and in the diaspora. I use Greater Cuba to refer to that “border zone” in which citizenship is reformulated as a result of the encounter between competing national jurisdictions and the global economy. The performances in question have tried to dismantle both the islander/exile and the islander/American-assimilated paradigms within Cuban and U.S. Cuban cultural studies and politics. Those paradigms began to be questioned in 1990 when a long and painful reunification cultural project, eventually becoming a political one, started in the midst of the Special Period. HereI analyze precisely the transformative possibilities of this project by studying the cultural policies that inform it. I will first present an analysis of cultural policy theories focusing on the contrast between the articulation of a cultural citizenship in Greater Cuba and the formation of national modern subjects both in revolutionary Cuba and in exile. I will then study the different moments of this cultural project throughout the 1990s – the encounters and exchanges between performance communities in both shores, which enable the constitution of a Greater Cuba beyond the traditional island/exile dichotomy. By studying the production, circulation and consumption of these performances I examine how they are transforming their communities and their (modern) constructs of Cuban identity.

Lillian Manzor is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Miami, where she teaches Latin American and Latino/a cultures, performance studies, gender studies, literature and the visual arts. Her publications include Borges/Escher, Cobra/CoBrA: Un encuentro posmoderno, and Latinas on Stage. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled Marginality Beyond Return: U.S.-Cuban Performance Politics, and on a web-based Cuban Theater Archive. She is actively involved in developing US-Cuba cultural dialogues through theater and performance.

ERNESTO MENENDEZ (Duke). Cold stridency: kitsch appropriation in Cuban art of the nineties.
The emergence of kitsch images in the artwork of the early eighties, which began as a posture of ambivalence toward the vernacular, became, by the end of the decade, a sharp intervention on the national political crisis. In that sense, the kitsch was linked to the grotesque, the scatological, and the shoddy. During the nineties artists continued drawing from the kitsch repertoire for their social critiques; but the social resonance of such art was rather vain, even though in many cases artist tried to create polemics and scandals. In this article I will analyze the formal features of the appropriation of kitsch in the nineties: the appearance of an art-craft product, a remarkable artificiality, an exaggerated hedonism. I will show how these features were an expression of the deep changes that took place in the artistic field, and as a reflex of the social and ideological transformations in Cuban society in the nineties.

Ernesto Menendez-Conde is a graduate from both the San Alejandro Arts Academy and the University of Havana, in Havana, Cuba, where he developed a career as an art critic. He is currently a PhD candidate in Romance Languages at Duke Universtiy. He has collaborated with art galleries such as Marlborough and Sotheby’s in New York City, and has published in art journals in Cuba, the United States, and Spain.

IVOR MILLER (Columbia College). Abakuá Rhythms for Sale.
In this paper, I review those Abakua recordings made from the 1960s-2000, with attention to how the rise of the tourist industry in the 1990s created a space for Abakua musicians to compose and perform their sacred texts on their own terms (and there's some good examples of this), instead of being recorded by 'ethnomusicologists' in situ, that is (there are examples of this from the 1940s, and 1961). That is, I examine how Abakua musicians used contradictions in the social system that inadvertently gave them spaces, in order to do some very interesting creative work that is unprecedented in the history of Cuba, and one could say of the African diaspora, since they are articulating their own history on their own terms, instead of simply performing on stage for Europeans and Canadians in bikinis color-coded for the Orichas.

Ivor Miller received his PhD in performance studies from Northwestern University. He is a 2005- 2006 Rockefeller Resident Fellow at the Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, Chicago. He has been conducting research in Cuba since 1991, and most recently in Nigeria, on Afro-Cuban religious networks. He has published a book with Wande Abimbola, advisor to the President of Nigeria on cultural affairs, on Yoruba influences in Cuba and the United States, and several articles on Afro-Cuban religion, music and culture, in African Studies Review, Contours: a Journal of the African Diaspora, TDR (The Drama Review), Caminos: Revista Cubana de Pensamiento Socioteológico.

JENNIFER PAZ (QBA Media). I am Cuban, I am Popular The Musical Politics of David Calzado and the Charanga Habanera.
This film follows the story of Cuba's timba band La Charanga Habanera, and documents the popularity experienced by a band that is profoundly close to its followers and the musical genius that generates this special connection. The brains behind Charanga Habanera is the controversial David Calzado. Over the last fifteen years as bandleader of the orchestra he has negotiated complex relationships within the socialist system that nurtured him, and sometimes censored him for his forthright social commentary and his allegedly American-influenced style.

Jennifer Paz is an independent director and producer living in Los Angeles. After working for a decade in the film industry as an Art Director, she obtained her MFA degree from UCLA in 2001. Jennifer has presented her documentaries and installations for the Society for Visual Anthropology, the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC), Cuba’s Casa de las Americas, the UCLA Wight Art Gallery, Trinity College, and the University of Connecticut.

MARC PERRY (U-Illinois). Hip Hop and the Making of New Black Critical Difference
This contribution examines the social contours of the self-defined el movimiento de hip hop cubano as they relate to the critical interplay of race and social transformation in contemporary Cuba. Following the island’s post-1990 economic, this ethnographic investigation centers on the ways young Cubans are utilizing the expressive cultural space of hip hop culture to performatively fashion new kinds of transnationally engaged black identity and a race-based social critique. A new generation of Afro-Cuban youth is positioning itself in strategic response to the free-market transformations of the period. This essay seeks to understand how emergent subjectivities and the social critiques they invoke pose challenges to, as well as contribute to a current reconfiguring of nationally-bounded constructions of race and corresponding ideologies of national non-racialism.
This analysis additionally draws attention to the negotiated relationship between Cuban hip hop as an identity-based phenomenon and a form of social critique, and the Cuban state as it attempts to institutionalize hip hop within a prescriptive, socially homogenizing frame of revolutionary national culture. Cuban rap has become a key actor in an evolving black public sphere predicated on the assertion of black political difference within a previously configured non-racial Cuban national imaginary. The author proposes that Cuban hip hop in this capacity represents a critical manifestation of, as well as an active social agent within the shifting transnational complexities of national racial formation in late socialist Cuba of today.

Marc Perry has a PhD in anthropology by the University of Texas at Austin and is an assistant professor of anthropology and African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign. His doctoral dissertation was an ethnography of rap music-making in Havana, Cuba.

CRISTINA VENEGAS (UCSB). Filmmaking with Extranjeros
This presentation deals with the transformations experienced by the Cuban filmmaking community during the Special Period (roughtly 1991-2001), situating the discussion in the context of the spread of globalization, digital technology and the end of the Cold War binary.
I will examine the role of these processes in transforming Cuba's mediascape, and question what this means for the way nationalism defines media production strategies, including co-productions. Finally, the essay will relate the developing transformation to the surplus of narratives and images produced outside and inside Cuba.

Cristina Venegas is Assistant Professor in Film Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara where she teaches film and media studies with a focus on Latin American, U.S. Latino media and digital technologies. Her essays have appeared in Film Quarterly, Spectator and in Communicare. She is currently completing a book manuscript titled Digital Dilemma: New Media Relations in Contemporary Cuba.

ESTHER WHITFIELD (Brown U.). Truths and Fictions. The Economics of Writing, 1994-1999
This paper discusses the complicities and tensions between Cuban fiction and the international market as they emerged during the special period, and as they have been articulated by critics and writers on the island. The special period saw dramatic shifts in the publishing industry in Cuba, affecting not only how much new fiction was printed but how and for whom it was written. The paper crisis of the early nineties gave way, mid-way through the decade, to what has been described as a new "boom", representing a monumental shift from a domestic market - heavily institutionalized and structured by a cultural policy first implemented in the 1960s - to an international market, with quite different rules of demand and supply. With reference to insistent figures that mark special period literary texts, this paper considers how authors find ways to write and moral room to manoeuvre in the newly global markets in which their work circulates.

Esther Whitfield is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University and a scholar of Cuban literature. She is currently completing a book called Cuban Currency: The Dollar and Special Period Fiction where she addresses representations of money and ruins in contemporary fiction, in the context of new markets for Cuban culture. Her articles on Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, Zoé Valdés and the novísimo writers have appeared in various journals in the U.S. and Cuba.

MAYFAIR YANG (Anthropology, UC-Santa Barbara). Discussant
MayFair Yang is a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of the award winning book Gifts, Favors and Banquets (Cornell University Press) on gift and state economies in socialist China, as well as of numerous articles on the cultural logic of the Chinese state in late modernity, state and transnational economies, and the construction of new transnational forms of subjectivity through transnational movements of media and popular culture, particularly in the China/Taiwan context. She is also the author of two ethnographic/documentary videos, one on the revival of popular religion in rural China, the other on urban women in China.

Additional Collaborators

LUIS JUAN GARZON is the author of the poster for the conference. He is a professor of studio art at the Autonomous University of the Baja California, in Tijuana, Mexico. He is a graduate of Havana’s prestigious Instituto Superior de Arte, and a former art curator at Cuba’s National Library. His work has been exhibited in the United States, Mexico, Cuba, and Italy.

KATE LEVITT is the conference assistant and a graduate student in the Department of Communication at UCSD. Previously, she worked at the Social Science Research Council, in New York City, where she served as project assistant for both the Latin America and the Cuba programs.