The decade of the 1840s marks the beginning of Chinese indentured servitude in Cuba. Chinese workers joined African slaves within a trans-national work force that contained indentured servants, slaves, and Iberian free laborers. This talk examines the process in which contemporary visual culture rendered Chinese Cubans visible, preserving the intersection of immigration, slavery, gender, trans-national labor, and the multiple hybrid cultural formations that resulted from this experience. Visual materials considered in this talk include lithographs and photographs produced by Creole Cubans and visitors from Europe and North America to record the transition from colonialism to nationhood.

Gema R. Guevara, Associate Professor (Department of Languages and Literature, University of Utah), she specializes in Caribbean Literature and Latin American Studies. Her work on Afro-Caribbean music, diasporic literature, visual culture and performance studies has been published in Revista de critica latino americana, Cuban Studies, Journal of Popular Music, Bulletin of Spanish Studies and most recently in Hemispheric Cuban Studies: Reflections on Politics, Race and Culture. Currently, she is completing a book manuscript, The Sound and Silence of Race: Contesting Cuba’s Whitening Project (1850-1930).

Free and open to the public.

For more information contact Boreth Ly (bjly@ucsc.edu) or Hrishyekesh Kashyap (hkashyap@ucsc.edu)

This lecture is the second in the series “Visual Representations of the Chinese Diasporas” organized by Boreth Ly (History of Art and Visual Culture) with the assistance of Hrishekesh Kashyap. It is made possible by the Arts Dean’s Research Initiative Fund and co-sponsored by the HAVC Department and Merrill College.