Essays on Transculturation and Catalan-Cuban Intellectual History

An extremely timely and compelling study of Cuba and Catalonia, Jerez Columbié’s book casts this rich and underappreciated intellectual relationship in new light via the notion of the counterpoint. Through insightful readings that acknowledge her own positionality, the author builds a multifaceted argument that advances novel ways of understanding both identity formation and cultural community. This book is required reading for scholars of the Caribbean and modern Spain and Catalonia.—Robert Davidson, University of Toronto, Canada
This book examines the cultural production of Catalan intellectuals in Cuba through a reading of texts and journeys that show the contrapuntal relationship between transcultural identities and narratives of nationhood. Both the concept of transculturation and its instrumentalization to tame conflict within nationalist projects are problematic. By uncovering and examining the contradictions between the fluid character of identities in the Cuban context of the first half of the twentieth century and nationalist discourses, within both the Catalanist community of Havana and Cuban society, this book joins wider debates about identities. 

Yairen Jerez Columbié is a postdoctoral researcher at the MaREI Centre of the Environmental Research Institute, at University College Cork, where she explores the sociohistorical and cultural dimensions of environmental challenges and climate action. Her work focuses on marginalised knowledge, cultural exchanges and ecocritical approaches in Latin America, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World.