The Dissidence of Reinaldo Arenas
eBook - PDF

The Dissidence of Reinaldo Arenas

Queering Literature, Politics, and the Activist Curriculum

  1. 292 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

The Dissidence of Reinaldo Arenas

Queering Literature, Politics, and the Activist Curriculum

About this book

International Latino Book Awards, Honorable Mention, Best Biography (English)


American Educational Research Association, Division B: Curriculum Studies, Outstanding Book Award


Focusing on the didactic nature of the work of Reinaldo Arenas, this book demonstrates the Cuban writer’s influence as public pedagogue, mentor, and social activist whose teaching on resistance to normative ideologies resonates in societies past, present, and future.


Through a multidisciplinary approach bridging educational, historiographic, and literary perspectives, The Dissidence of Reinaldo Arenas illuminates how Arenas’s work remains a cutting-edge source of inspiration for today’s audiences, particularly LGBTQI readers. It shows how Arenas’s aesthetics contain powerful insights for exploring dissensus whether in the context of Cuba, broader Pan-American and Latinx-U.S. queer movements of social justice, or transnational citizenship politics.


Carefully dissecting Arenas’s themes against the backdrop of his political activity, this book presents the writer’s poetry, novels, and plays as a curriculum of dissidence that provides models for socially engaged intellectual activism.



Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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Yes, you can access The Dissidence of Reinaldo Arenas by Sandro R. Barros,Rafael Ocasio,Angela L. Willis in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Latin American & Caribbean History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Half Title
  3. Title
  4. Copyright
  5. Contents
  6. List of Figures
  7. Acknowledgments
  8. Note on Translations and Quotations
  9. List of Abbreviations
  10. Commonly Cited Acronyms
  11. Prologue: The End
  12. Introduction
  13. 1. Reinaldo Arenas’s Fearless Speech: Mapping the Parrhesiastes’s Discourse as Public Pedagogy
  14. 2. “Actitudes Extravagantes” and Queering Identities: The Marginal Sexual Pedagogies of a Dissident Marielito
  15. 3. Colonial and Counterrevolutionary Pedagogies: Homosexuality as Activism in El Central and Arturo, la estrella mĂĄs brillante
  16. 4. Reading Arenas through Currere: Autobiographical Lesso ns in Time-Traveling
  17. 5. Comparative Lessons from the Pariah’s Text: Reinaldo Arenas’s El color del verano and Juan Goytisolo’s Juan sin tierra
  18. 6. Testifying to the Mentors’ Deaths: Reinaldo Arenas’s Factual and Fantastical Re-creations of the Passing of JosĂ© Lezama Lima and Virgilio Piñera
  19. Notes
  20. Bibliography
  21. Index