{"title":"The Cuban Rafter Crisis on Stage: Humanizing the Experience of Refugees in María Irene Fornés’ Manual for a Desperate Crossing","authors":"Araceli González Crespán","doi":"10.2478/abcsj-2022-0019","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The Cuban-born playwright María Irene Fornés (1930-2018) repeatedly dealt with migration in several plays throughout her long career in theater, sometimes presenting characters who were immigrants living in New York (Sarita) or resorting to correspondence between distant relatives separated in different countries (La Viuda, Letters from Cuba). Manual for a Desperate Crossing was her response to the Cuban Rafter Crisis of the mid-1990s. The article analyzes how the playwright makes use of a combination of objective and subjective strategies to counteract the dehumanizing effect of media coverage, shifting the focus to the individuals who risked their lives in the perilous crossing of the Caribbean Sea in rickety rafts from Cuba to the Florida shores. The emphasis on the transit as a theme and the mixture of instructional, technical discourses with highly stylized stage design and different audiovisual media forces us to look in a different, immersive way that generates empathy towards the refugees.","PeriodicalId":37404,"journal":{"name":"American, British and Canadian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1000,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"American, British and Canadian Studies","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.2478/abcsj-2022-0019","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"N/A","JCRName":"LITERARY THEORY & CRITICISM","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Abstract The Cuban-born playwright María Irene Fornés (1930-2018) repeatedly dealt with migration in several plays throughout her long career in theater, sometimes presenting characters who were immigrants living in New York (Sarita) or resorting to correspondence between distant relatives separated in different countries (La Viuda, Letters from Cuba). Manual for a Desperate Crossing was her response to the Cuban Rafter Crisis of the mid-1990s. The article analyzes how the playwright makes use of a combination of objective and subjective strategies to counteract the dehumanizing effect of media coverage, shifting the focus to the individuals who risked their lives in the perilous crossing of the Caribbean Sea in rickety rafts from Cuba to the Florida shores. The emphasis on the transit as a theme and the mixture of instructional, technical discourses with highly stylized stage design and different audiovisual media forces us to look in a different, immersive way that generates empathy towards the refugees.
期刊介绍：
Founded in 1999, American, British and Canadian Studies, the journal of the Academic Anglophone Society of Romania, is currently published by Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu. Re-launched in refashioned, biannual format, American, British and Canadian Studies is an international, peer-reviewed journal that sets out to explore disciplinary developments in Anglophone Studies in the changing environment forged by the intersections of culture, technology and electronic information. Our primary goal is to bring together in productive dialogue scholars conducting advanced research in the theoretical humanities. As well as offering innovative approaches to influential crosscurrents in contemporary thinking, the journal seeks to contribute fresh angles to the academic subject of English and promote shape-changing research across conventional boundaries. By virtue of its dynamic and varied profile and of the intercultural dialogue that it caters for, ABC Studies aims to fill a gap in the Romanian academic arena, and function as the first publication to approach Anglophone studies in a multi-disciplinary perspective. Within the proposed range of diversity, our major scope is to provide close examinations and lucid analyses of the role and future of the academic institutions at the cutting edge of high-tech. With this end in view, we especially invite contributions in the fields of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Theory, Area Studies, Cultural Anthropology, Language and Linguistics, Multimedia and Digital Arts, Translation Studies and related subjects. With its wide subject range, American, British and Canadian Studies aims to become one of the academic community’s premium scholarly resources.
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
分享
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：
扫码关注我们
