Portable Postsocialisms

New Cuban Mediascapes after the End of History

By Paloma Duong

SERIES: Border Hispanisms

University of Texas Press

A study of Cuban culture and media in the twenty-first century as both a global phenomenon and a local reality, at a time when the declared death of socialism coexists in tension with emerging anticapitalist movements worldwide.

Why does Cuban socialism endure as an object of international political desire, while images of capitalist markets consume Cuba’s national imagination? This bold new study argues that Cuba’s changing media cultures are key to our understanding of the global postsocialist condition and its competing political imaginaries.

Portable Postsocialisms calls on a vast multimedia archive to offer a groundbreaking cultural interpretation of Cuban postsocialism. Paloma Duong examines songs, artworks, advertisements, memes, literature, jokes, and networks that refuse exceptionalist and exoticizing visions of Cuba. Expanding postsocialist critical theory to read this complex mediascape, Duong argues that a materialist critique of Cuba’s revolutionary legacy must account for Cubans’ everyday demands for agency and self-representation. This long overdue reassessment of Cuba’s place in Latin American and post-Marxist studies shows Cuban postsocialism to be an urgent and indispensable referent for core debates on the politics of participatory cultures in new media studies. Portable Postsocialisms performs the crucial task of redefining how we envision imaginaries of social change in Latin America and the Caribbean.

[Duong] critically explores the Cuban people’s experience and relationship to socialism and anti-capitalism through the lens of mediascapes...paying close attention to change and continuity. CHOICE

Duong offers reprieve for Cuba’s overdetermined position by pointing to how Cubans have engaged with digital media to narrate themselves as postsocialist subjects within the capitalist condition of the world. As such, Duong’s book offers rich conceptual analysis from which to build. Popular Culture Studies Journal

An informed cultural critique spiced with considerable theoretical flavour that has much to commend it. Latin American Review of Books

Paloma Duong’s ambitious and provocative study deftly handles a complicated history, sophisticated theoretical critiques, and the analysis of a plethora of media texts to craft a compelling narrative of the Cuban postsocialist context. Portable Postsocialisms will be a game changer for how we understand both our current moment and Cuba’s particular position within it. Emily A. Maguire, Northwestern University, author of Racial Experiments in Cuban Literature and Ethnography

Unrivaled in contemporary Cuban media studies, Paloma Duong’s strikingly original, inventive, and audacious book will be a major boon to scholars of new media in the Caribbean, Latin America, and beyond. As we attempt to navigate the onslaught of online life amidst political chaos, Duong is a uniquely capable guide whose vast knowledge and archive of cultural objects from and about Cuba's postsocialist mediascape have given us a work of real relevance in this historical moment. Tom McEnaney, UC Berkeley, author of Acoustic Properties: Radio, Narrative, and the New Neighborhood of the Americas

Paloma Duong is an associate professor of Latin American and studies in the Comparative Media Studies/Writing Program at MIT.