Anna Cristina Pertierra

En Casa: Women and Households in Post-Soviet Cuba

This paper argues that the household has become a renewed space of significance for Cuban women in the post-Soviet period. It draws from existing scholarship and ethnographic fieldwork conducted with women in the city of Santiago de Cuba to discuss the effect of post-Soviet crisis and reform upon womens domestic practices, the management of domestic economies, and longstanding gender ideals that link women to the domestic sphere. Physical, economic and social factors leading to post-Soviet Cuban womens increased concentration upon the household are argued to be both the result of pre-existing social orientations towards households as a womanly space and a response to specific politico-economic shifts since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

If They Show Prison Break in the United States on a Wednesday, by Thursday It Is Here Mobile Media Networks in Twenty-First-Century Cuba

This article describes practices of informal digital media circulation emerging in urban Cuba between 2005 and 2010, drawing from interviews and ethnographic research in the city of Santiago de Cuba. The Cuban new media landscape is supported by informal networks that blend financial and social exchanges to circulate goods, media, and currency in ways that are often illegal but are largely tolerated. Presenting two case studies of young, educated Cubans who rely on the circulation of film and television content via external hard drives for most of their media consumption, I suggest that the emphasis of much existing literature on the role of state censorship and control in Cuban new media policy overlook the everyday practices through which Cubans are regularly engaged with Latin and U.S. American popular culture. Further, informal economies have been central to everyday life in Cuba both during the height of the Soviet socialist era and in the period since the collapse of the Soviet Union that has seen a juxtaposition of some market reforms alongside centrally planned policies. In the context of nearly two decades of economic crisis, consumer shortages and a dual economy, Cuban people use both informal and state-sanctioned networks to acquire goods ranging from groceries to furnishings and domestic appliances. Understanding the informal media economy of Cuba within this broader context helps to explain how the consumption of commercial American media is largely uncontroversial within Cuban everyday life despite the fraught politics that often dominates discussions of Cuban media policy.

Private pleasures: Watching videos in post-Soviet Cuba

This article traces circuits of distribution and consumption of videocassette recorders (VCRs) and videocassettes in Cuba, which until April 2008 were not available for retail sale, and were usually sourced through black market or informal means. Based upon ethnographic research conducted in 2003/4 with VCR owners and an operator of an informal videocassette rental business, the article argues that understanding the role of video in contemporary Cuba requires a consideration of both the political and economic implications of being a video consumer and the material properties of VCRs as consumer goods. In the context of post-Soviet Cuba, VCRs and videocassettes exemplify the importance of informal practices and economies, and call attention to increased tensions surrounding consumption that have developed since the economic crisis of the 1990s.

Consumer culture in Latin America

This collection brings together 20 original papers demonstrating the rise of scholarly interest in Latin American consumer cultures across the contemporary humanities and social sciences. The collection captures the landscape of recent developments across disciplines to understand how consumption practices and consumer culture is transforming modern Latin America. It highlights connections between previously disparate approaches to Latin American consumption by studying cultural production, state policies, economic structures, environmental factors, domestic life, urban development, tourism and more. [book summary from publisher]

What's become of Australian Cultural Studies: The legacies of Graeme Turner

This article introduces the special issue of Cultural Studies commemorating and evaluating the contribution of Graeme Turner to the field. This article provides a brief introduction to Turner, his key ideas and what resources they offer for cultural studies today and into the future. In particular, we suggest that Turners work and legacies needs are bound up with the trajectories of Australian cultural studies – and its place and circulation in international cultural studies.

Quinceañera : coming of age through digital photography in Cuba

Taking a series of portrait photographs to mark a girl’s fifteenth birthday is a common and highly celebrated practice in Cuba. The fifteenth birthday is considered in Cuba to be the marking point at which girls become women, and producing an album of printed photographs in which the fifteen-year-old, or quinceanera, wears special clothes, hairstyles, and makeup, constitutes the center of Cuban coming of age rituals. Girls’ fifteenth birthday celebrations (commonly referred to as quinces) are widely celebrated in Latin America, especially in Mexico, Central America, the Hispanic Caribbean, and among Latino populations of the United States. In such rituals, which seem to be largely a twentieth century development, the centerpiece of the celebration typically includes a party at which the birthday girl (quinceanera) wears a long full-skirted gown and adornments such as flowers, jewelry, and a tiara. The aesthetics of the celebration are informed by a sense of “tradition” in which features such as candles, floral arrangements, pastel colors, and formal attire are understood to suggest an elegance and exclusivity that marks the celebration as apart from everyday life. But in this chapter, I consider quinces photography portraiture, and not the party, as a definitive moment in marking girls’ fifteenth birthdays in contemporary Cuba.

Understanding consumer culture in Latin America : an introduction

This collection brings together recent work from across the humanities and social sciences on consumption, consumers, and consumer culture in Latin America. It presents original research by sociologists, anthropologists, media and cultural studies scholars, geographers, and historians; contributors range from the most senior scholars working on these topics today, to emerging early career researchers, and includes academics based in Latin American institutions as well as others working in North America, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Although the strength of the volume derives from this diversity of contributors and that of the approaches and topics they cover, it can make understanding the relationship between the various papers, and even understanding what “consumer culture” might be, whether in Latin America or in any other region of the world, a challenge. Chapters in this book consider consumption practices and consumer culture in places as diverse as Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, the Andean region, Brazil, and Chile, covering topics such as media, cultural production and creative industries, household consumption, tourism, shopping, and environmental and economic consequences of globalization among other things. The goal of this introductory chapter, then, is to explain how such varied studies of consumption might be relevant to scholars and students of Latin America, as well as to demonstrate and explain the particular importance occupied by Latin American societies, and the Latin American region as a whole, in the growing world scholarship on consumption and consumers.