Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Planet/Cuba
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1975
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://spo.princeton.edu/people/rachel-price * https://humanities.princeton.edu/people/rachel-price/ * http://arts.princeton.edu/events/rachel-price-and-michael-wood-in-conversation-planetcuba-art-culture-and-the-future-of-the-island/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1975.
EDUCATION:Yale University, B.A.; Duke University, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Princeton University, Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages, Princeton, NJ, professor. Formerly taught at Brown University and Stonybrook University, and worked for Program on Latin America, Social Science Research Council, and at Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca, Colombia.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including Crítica de la Acumulación, edited by Elixabete Ansa-Goicoechea, Oscar Ariel Cabezas, and Alessandro Fornazzari, Ediciones del Sur/ILAES (Santigo de Chile, Chile), 2010; Poesía y poéticas digitales/electrónicas/tecnos/New-Media en América Latina: Definiciones y exploraciones, edited by Luis Corre Díaz and Scott Weintraub, Universidad de Bogotá, (Bogotá, Colombia), 2016; Rerouting the Caribbean: Global, Local, and Micro-territorial Readings, edited by José María Rodríguez and Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, University of Notre Dame Press (South Bend, IN). Contributor to professional journals and other periodicals, including Americas Society, Comparative Literature, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, Grey Room, Hispanic Review, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, La Habana Elegante Luso Brazilian Review, Res Publica, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, and Revista de Letras da UNESP, Brazil.
SIDELIGHTS
Princeton University Iberian languages professor Rachel Price “works on Latin American, circum-Atlantic and particularly Cuban literature and culture; media; poetics; empire; and ecocriticism,” wrote the contributor of a brief biography of the author and educator to the Princeton University Department of Spanish and Portuguese Web site. “She is currently working on several projects, including intersections between aesthetics and energy, and a book-length study rethinking communication technologies and literature in the nineteenth-century slaveholding Iberian Atlantic.”
The Object of the Atlantic
Price’s monograph The Object of the Atlantic: Concrete Aesthetics in Cuba, Brazil, and Spain, 1868-1968 examines the ways in which a theory of poetry—and, more generally, a theory of art—emerged in the Spanish-speaking world from Europe through Latin America. “Reading material culture can have multiple and widely varying ends,” Price wrote in her introduction to The Object of the Atlantic. “It may trace the circulation of commodities, question the categories of subject and object, understand how objects ‘mean’ through local anthropologies, or speculate on the ecological future of the planet. Objects clearly take on different meanings in different contexts. What, then, were the specific pressures that shaped a turn to objects in the Iberian Atlantic? And what connects an interest in material culture with an aesthetics of objects and objectivity?”
The volume, the author continued in her introduction, “examines the emergence of a specific body of concrete aesthetics in the late nineteenth century and its dissolution a century later. I begin in the 1869s, when antislavery mobilizations were common to Brazil, Cuba, Spain, and the United States…. Then, in the 1890s, the Atlantic world witnessed a transition from older, territorial empire to less territorial forms of economic hegemony and a more fully global capitalism.” “A general arc from materiality to dematerialization, then,” the author concluded, “transpires in the century covered here.”
Planet/Cuba
In Planet/Cuba: Art, Culture, and the Future of the Island, wrote E. Douglas in Choice, “Price reads contemporary Cuban production in light of the often-paradoxical economic, political, and social processes set in motion” by the end of the Cold War. In particular, “Planet/Cuba,” stated a contributor to the Lewis Center, Princeton University Web site, “examines how art and literature have responded to a new moment, one both more globalized and less exceptional; more concerned with local quotidian worries than international alliances.” The text looks at the ways in which the slow release of tensions between the Caribbean country and its mainland North American neighbor the United States changed Cuba’s art and aesthetic between the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the beginnings of normalization of relations with the United States in 2014. The visual aesthetic of Cuban culture changed as its political and economic focus changed, most recently when Raul Castro replaced his brother, the revolutionary Fidel Castro, as president of the island nation. The volume, declared a Princeton University Humanities Council Web site contributor, “discusses contemporary literature as well as conceptual, digital, and visual art from Cuba.”
Planet/Cuba, the author wrote in her introduction to the book, “focuses on an emerging body of work that reflects on a series of planetary crises: climate change, accelerating capitalism, pervasive surveillance. The works of art and literature that I examine in these pages are both typical of global trends, and singular. They warn of, or work against, a dark future, like much contemporary cultural production. But they do so in the context of a history marked by the fading and contested memories of collective constructions of society, art, and life itself—however fleeting, compromised and usurped, if they were ever a reality.” “This meticulously detailed text,” concluded a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “is a productive exploration of globalized Cuban art and culture.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Price, Rachel, The Object of the Atlantic: Concrete Aesthetics in Cuba, Brazil, and Spain, 1868-1968, Northwestern University Press (Evanston, IL), 2014.
Price, Rachel, Planet/Cuba: Art, Culture, and the Future of the Island, Verso (London, England), 2015.
PERIODICALS
Choice, April, 2016, E. Douglas, review of Planet/Cuba, p. 1158.
Publishers Weekly, December 14, 2016, review of Planet/Cuba.
ONLINE
Lewis Center, Princeton University Web site, http://arts.princeton.edu/ (April 5, 2017), “Rachel Price and Michael Wood in Conversation–Planet/Cuba: Art, Culture, and the Future of the Island.”
Princeton University Department of Spanish and Portuguese Web site, https://spo.princeton.edu/ (April 5, 2017), author profile.
Princeton University Humanities Council Web site, https://humanities.princeton.edu/ (April 5, 2017), author profile.*
Rachel Price and Michael Wood in Conversation — Planet/Cuba: Art, Culture, and the Future of the Island
Please join us for a discussion in honor of Rachel Price’s new book, Planet/Cuba: Art, Culture, and the Future of the Island, about transformations in Cuban art, literature, and culture in the post-Fidel era.
Cuba has been in a state of massive transformation over the past decade, with its historic resumption of diplomatic relations with the United States only the latest development. While the political leadership has changed direction, other forces have taken hold. The environment is under threat, and the culture feels the strain of new forms of consumption.
Planet/Cuba examines how art and literature have responded to a new moment, one both more globalized and less exceptional; more concerned with local quotidian worries than international alliances; more threatened by the depredations of planetary capitalism and climate change than by the vagaries of the nation’s government. The book examines a fascinating array of artists and writers who are tracing a new socio-cultural map of the island.
Rachel Price is a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages at Princeton University. She is the author of The Object of the Atlantic: Concrete Aesthetics in Cuba, Brazil and Spain 1868–1968 and has published several articles and book chapters in various journals, including Frieze, La Habana Elegante, Grey Room, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Review and Americas Society. Michael Wood is one of our most versatile critics, conversant with both modern literature and film in several countries. He is a professor emeritus of comparative literature at Princeton University. Among his many works are The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction, Children of Silence: On Contemporary Fiction, America in the Movies, and Gabriel Garcia Marque: One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Rachel Price
Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures
Phone
(609) 258–7153
Office
360 East Pyne Building
Email
rlprice@princeton.edu
Rachel Price (B.A., Yale; Ph.D., Duke U.), works on Latin American, circum-Atlantic and particularly Cuban literature and culture; media; poetics; empire; and ecocriticism.
Her essays have discussed a range of topics, including digital media, slavery, poetics, and visual art. The Object of the Atlantic: Concrete Aesthetics in Cuba, Brazil and Spain 1868-1968 was published in 2014 by Northwestern University Press. Her second book, entitled Planet/Cuba, forthcoming from Verso Books in 2015, discusses contemporary literature as well as conceptual, digital, and visual art from Cuba that engages questions of environmental crisis, new media, and new forms of labor and leisure.
Before coming to Princeton she taught at Brown University and Stonybrook University, after working at the Social Science Research Council’s Program on Latin America and at the Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca in Colombia.
Professor Price is affiliated with the Program in Media and Modernity and is a core member of the 2012-2015 PIIRS Research Community on Empire.
Rachel Price
rachel_price.jpg
Rachel Price
Associate Professor
Phone:
609-258-7153
Email Address: rlprice@Princeton.EDU Office Location:
360 East Pyne
By appointment
Profile
Rachel Price (B.A., Yale; Ph.D., Duke U.), works on Latin American, circum-Atlantic and particularly Cuban literature and culture; media; poetics; empire; and ecocriticism. Her essays have discussed a range of topics, including digital media, slavery, poetics, and visual art. The Object of the Atlantic: Concrete Aesthetics in Cuba, Brazil and Spain 1868-1968 was published in 2014 by Northwestern University Press. Planet/Cuba: Art, Culture, and the Future of the Island, was published by Verso Books in 2015. Planet/Cuba discusses contemporary literature as well as conceptual, digital, and visual art from Cuba that engages questions of environmental crises, new media, and new forms of labor and leisure. She is currently working on several projects, including intersections between aesthetics and energy, and a book-length study rethinking communication technologies and literature in the nineteenth-century slaveholding Iberian Atlantic.
Before coming to Princeton she taught at Brown University and Stonybrook University, after working at the Social Science Research Council’s Program on Latin America and Working Group on Cuba, and at the Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca in Colombia.
Professor Price is affiliated with the Program in Media and Modernity and the Program in Latin American Studies, and was a core member of the 2012-2015 PIIRS Research Community on Empire (link is external).
Publications
“African Interpreters in the Cuban Courts: The Case of an Uprising on the Cafetal Salvador in Banes, Cuba, 1833,” in Rerouting the Caribbean: Global, Local, and Micro-territorial Readings, ed. José María Rodríguez and Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, forthcoming).
“Books to be Looked At,” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, special dossier on contemporary Cuban literature, (forthcoming 2017).
“Afterword: The Last Universal Commons,” Comparative Literature, Special Forum on Oceanic Studies, 69:1 (forthcoming March 2017)
with Lizabel Mónica Villares, “Poesía digital cubana,” in Poesía y poéticas digitales/electrónicas/tecnos/New-Media en América Latina: Definiciones y exploraciones, eds. Luis Corre Díaz and Scott Weintraub (Bogotá: Universidad de Bogotá) (2016)
“Enemigo suelo: Manzano Rewrites Cuban Romanticism”, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos (Vol. 38 no. 3, Spring 2014)
“Between an Angel’s Cry and a Murmur: The Invention of the Telephone in Colonial Cuba”, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture (Vol. 36 no. 3, 2014“Games and Systems: Digital Art from Cuba” Frieze (March/April 2013)
“Planet/Cuba. On Jorge Enrique Lage’s Carbono 14: Una novela de culto and Vultureffect,” La Habana Elegante(Fall 2012)
“Bare Life, Vidas Secas: or, Como se morre no cinema.” Luso Brazilian Review (Summer 2012)
“Early Brazilian Digital Culture or, The Woman Who Was Not B.B.” Grey Room 47 (Spring 2012)
"From Coney Island to La Isla del Coco.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies (Autumn 2011)
“New Media’s New Literature.” Review, Americas Society 82 Special Issue Cuba Inside and Out (May 2011)
“Arquitectura, destrucción, acontecimiento," in Crítica de la Acumulación, eds. Elixabete Ansa-Goicoechea, Oscar Ariel Cabezas & Alessandro Fornazzari. Santigo de Chile: Ediciones del Sur/ILAES, 2010.
“The Spirit of Martí in the Land of Coaybay.” Hispanic Review (Spring 2009).
“La sombra del imperio.” Res Publica, Murcia, Spain (June 2008).
“Object, non-object, trans-object, relational object: from Concrete Poetry to the nova objetividade.” Revista de Letras da UNESP, Brazil, Vol. 47 Homenagem a Haroldo de Campos: 1 (2007)
Publications List:
The Object of the Atlantic 0810130130
Planet Cuba 178478124X
Price, Rachel. Planet Cuba: art, culture, and the future of the island
E. Douglas
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1158.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
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Full Text:
Price, Rachel. Planet Cuba: art, culture, and the future of the island. Verso, 2015. 246p Index ISBN 9781784781248 cloth, $95.00; ISBN 9781784781217 pbk, $29.95; ISBN 9781784781224 ebook, $29.95
53-3362
NX525
CIP
Price shrewdly surveys art in Cuba over the period since Fidel Castro ceded control of the government to his brother Raul. The book focuses on key themes in the visual arts and literature--agriculture, environmental crisis, and ecological thought in chapters 1 through 4 and play, labor, and surveillance in the digital era in chapters 5 and 6. Price reads contemporary Cuban production in light of the often-paradoxical economic, political, and social processes set in motion on the island by the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of its generous subsidies to the Castro government. At the same time, Price details how this generation of "post-Soviet" Cuban artists engages with global concerns, which, in her analysis, are as intimately tied to the local as the cultural is to the economic and political. Although many artists and artists' collectives featured in Planet Cuba have exhibited and, in some cases, lived outside Cuba, this excellent and welcome study makes clear that they are not known as well or widely as they deserve to be. Summing Up: ** Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.--E. Douglas, University of North Carolina--Chapel Hill
Douglas, E.
Planet/Cuba: Art, Culture, and the Future of the Island
Rachel Price. Verso (Random, dist.), $29.95 (256p) ISBN 978-1-78478-121-7
Planet/Cuba: Art
BUY THIS BOOK
Price (The Object of the Atlantic: Concrete Aesthetics in Cuba, Brazil, and Spain 1868–1968), a professor in Princeton University's department of Spanish and Portuguese languages and cultures, delves into Cuban art, culture, economics, and politics in this fine overview. She astutely discusses the nuances of Cuban visual and literary culture, and describes the art from the island nation as inextricably tied to economy, ecology, and history. Organized around several themes, the comprehensive text describes a culture responding to "climate change, accelerating capitalism" and "pervasive surveillance," and includes musings on literature, film, installation, painting, photography, and poetry. Price describes Cuban culture and art as "both typical of global trends, and singular." Common themes include anxieties concerning rising seas and climate change, shown by Luis Enrique Camejo's eerie paintings of a flooded Havana; the unconquerable invasive weed marabu, often used as a symbol of the failure of state power; and the militarization of culture, as seen in Samuel Riera's magazines, which are printed on empty bags of military-grade cement. This meticulously detailed text is a productive exploration of globalized Cuban art and culture. B&w photos. (Nov.)