The Audiovisual Body of the Cuban Nation: Mapping “Greater Cuba” through the ENDAC
A talk by Juan Antonio García Borrero, Cuban Film Scholar and Cultural Critic.
February 20th at 1PM in the Greenleaf Conference Room (100a Jones Hall)
The talk will be in Spanish.
In one of her texts, Ana López coined the term “Greater Cuba” and described it as follows: «By Greater Cuba I refer to a “Cuba” that extends beyond national borders and that includes the numerous individuals and communities who are outside of the national territory and who identify as Cubans and who contribute to the production of a “Cuban” cultural discourse.”
The Digital Encyclopedia of Cuban Audiovisuals (ENDAC) has this image as one of its sources of inspiration in that it proposes the construction of an atlas of Cuban audiovisual texts, a collection of maps where one can appreciate the cultural discourse associated with cinema produced in Cuba and by the Cuban diaspora. In Juan Antonio García Borrero’s recently published book, El cuerpo audiovisual de la nación cubana, Editorial Letras Cubanas, 2025, he explores the concept of the “audiovisual body of the Cuban nation” in all of its manifestations. He approaches the Cuban corpus not as a physical space (the island) or as an exclusive entity (the State), but rather as something that is under permanent construction, and that functions as an imagined community that owes as much to the intangible as to the material, to put this in terms of Benedict Anderson’s concept of the nation.
This talk will provide an overview of these two, interrelated projects, which reframe Cuban national cinema and provide new and essential resources for research.
This event is sponsored by the Maurice L. Silverstein fund and the Cuban and Caribbean Studies Institute
