Anxieties of Impotence: Cuban Americas in New York City

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture ISSN 1481-4374 Purdue University Press ©Purdue University Volume 4 (2002) Issue 2 Article 11 Anxieties of Impotence: Cuban Americas in New York City Christina Marie Tourino St. John's University Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, and the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact: <> Recommended Citation Tourino, Christina Marie. "Anxieties of Impotence: Cuban Americas in New York City." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 4.2 (2002): <https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.1158> This text has been double-blind peer reviewed by 2+1 experts in the field. The above text, published by Purdue University Press ©Purdue University, has been downloaded 1308 times as of 11/ 07/19. Note: the download counts of the journal's material are since Issue 9.1 (March 2007), since the journal's format in pdf (instead of in html 1999-2007). This document has been made available through Purdue e-Pubs, a service of the Purdue University Libraries. Please contact for additional information. This is an Open Access journal. This means that it uses a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access. Readers may freely read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of articles. This journal is covered under the CC BY-NC-ND license. UNIVERSITY PRESS <http://www.thepress.purdue.edu> CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture ISSN 1481-4374 <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb> Purdue University Press ©Purdue University CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." In addition to the publication of articles, the journal publishes review articles of scholarly books and publishes research material in its Library Series. Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Langua-ge Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monog-raph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact: <> CLCWeb Volume 4 Issue 2 (June 2002) Article 11 Christina Marie Tourino, "Anxieties of Impotence: Cuban Americas in New York City" <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol4/iss2/11> Contents of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 4.2 (2002) Thematic Issue Comparative Cultural Studies and Latin America Edited by Sophia A. McClennen and Earl E. Fitz <<http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol4/iss2/>> Abstract: In her paper, "Anxieties of Impotence: Cuban Americas in New York City, " Christina Marie Tourino seeks a basis for comparison between Latin American literatures and Latino literatures of the United States. Such groups have rarely been compared in the past because they are considered part of the same literary "family." However, Tourino argues that owing to the flows of capital driven by global pressures, literatures between and among Latin Americans and Latinos hail from such culturally heterogeneous sites and are made over by so many relocations that they do call for comparative projects. Instead of comparing texts across national or ethnic lines, then, Tourino's project attends to texts that spring from related but different sorts of departures, dislocations, languages, and constructions of race, gender, sexuality, and class, then seeks what "family" resemblance still obtains. As a test case, Tourino looks at two texts that descend directly from Cuba and are produced in New York: Oscar Hijuelos's The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989) and Reinaldo Arenas's El asalto (1990). What Tourino discovers is that, despite radical differences in the class, politics, sexuality, language, and political disenfranchisement of the text's protagonists (and even their authors), both of these texts posit a fantasy of excessive masculinity as the source of an all-male family that reproduces itself without women -- a fantasy whose freneticism points to a masculine anxiety over its own emptiness that seems to be performed in related ways in much Latino and Latin American literature. Christina Marie Tourino, "Anxieties of Impotence: Cuban Americas in New York City" page 2 of 12 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 4.2 (2002): <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol4/iss2/11> Christina Marie TOURINO Anxieties of Impotence: Cuban Americas in New York City Industrialization, globalization, and US economic and foreign policy have set unprecedented numbers of bodies in motion across national borders. Along with other dependent nations, tribes, and continents, Latin America has seen many of its citizens migrate, immigrate, and go into exile. As a result of such movements over the last century and a half, Latin Americans are dispersed in such a way that related but different cultural groups spring up in many parts of the world, many of them in the United States. These groups continue to evolve as increasingly complicated flows of subjects and their capital make ceaseless round trips in which "home" and "abroad" become harder and harder to name. For critics of Latin American literatures, this state of affairs irreversibly complicates comparative literature projects. Comparative Literature as a discipline has changed dramatically from its earliest moments in the nineteenth century, when its project was to search for literary influences and universal t (...truncated)