Broner, Martina: Travel Grant - 2016-2017

Reinaldo Arenas’ memoir, Antes que anochezca: Autobiografía, narrates a relationship with landscape that is always political. In my project, I will explore the ways in which literature may serve as a medium for memorializing landscape in cases when a physical intervention, such as the construction of a memory site, is not possible. Arenas’ Antes que anochezca can be examined not only as a memoir but also as memory work that is part of a global discourse about Cuba and its history. I will propose a reading of this work as a spatial intervention and investigate how it functions today, in the context of Cuba’s rapidly transforming political, social, and physical landscape.