Forms of Disappointment: Cuban and Angolan Narrative after the Cold War

Lanie Millar

ISBN 10: 1438475918 / ISBN 13: 9781438475912

Published by State University of New York Press, 2019

About this Item

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Seller Inventory # B9781438475912

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Forms of Disappointment: Cuban and Angolan Narrative after the Cold War
• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Publication Date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1438475918
• ISBN 13: 9781438475912
• Binding: Hardback
• Condition: New
• Weight: 477 grams

About this title

Synopsis

Analyzes parallel developments in post–Cold War literature and film from Cuba and Angola to trace a shared history of revolutionary enthusiasm, disappointment, and solidarity.

In Forms of Disappointment, Lanie Millar traces the legacies of anti-imperial solidarity in Cuban and Angolan novels and films after 1989. Cuba's intervention in Angola's post-independence civil war from 1976 to 1991 was its longest and most engaged internationalist project and left a profound mark on the culture of both nations. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Millar argues, Cuban and Angolan writers and filmmakers responded to this collective history and adapted to new postsocialist realities in analogous ways, developing what she characterizes as works of disappointment. Revamping and riffing on earlier texts and forms of revolutionary enthusiasm, works of disappointment lay bare the aesthetic and political fragmentation of the public sphere while continuing to register the promise of leftist political projects. Pushing past the binaries that tend to dominate histories of the Cold War and its aftermath, Millar gives priority to the perspectives of artists in the Global South, illuminating networks of anticolonial and racial solidarity and showing how their works not only reflect shared feelings of disappointment but also call for ethical gestures of empathy and reconciliation.

About the Author

Lanie Millar is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Oregon.