Liminal Visitors to an Island on the Edge: Sartre and Ginsberg in Revolutionary Cuba

Stephen Fay

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    Abstract

    The Cuban revolution drastically altered the country’s socio-cultural calibration and from 1959 pleasure-seeking tourists made way for intellectual travellers keen to contribute to the revolutionary process. Jean-Paul Sartre arrived on the island in 1960, Allen Ginsberg followed in 1965; their experiences and observations couldn’t have been more different. Although explanation for this discrepancy could be sought in the ideological idiosyncrasies of the two writers, this essay argues that the island visited was not the same. Using a liminal ontology inherited from anthropology to explore the Cuban revolution as a rite of national passage, this essay hopes to illuminate some of the key contours of the island’s shifting socio-cultural topography over five critical years of consolidation. Through the lenses offered by these two travelling writers, internal and external forces appear to propel revolutionary Cuba beyond a liminal period of archipelagic flux towards a more determinedly insular and strictly structured archetype by the mid- 1960s.
    Original languageEnglish
    Article number5
    Pages (from-to)407-425
    Number of pages18
    JournalStudies in Travel Writing
    Volume15
    Issue number4
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 20 Oct 2011

    Keywords

    • Jean-Paul Sartre; Allen Ginsberg; rite of passage; limen; archipelago; insularity; social structure; communitas

    Fingerprint

    Dive into the research topics of 'Liminal Visitors to an Island on the Edge: Sartre and Ginsberg in Revolutionary Cuba'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

    Cite this