Contact
Further Information
Fellow during the summer term 2019
Project: Slenderness and Adulthood. The Cuban Frontier and the US-Spanish Conflict for its Possession (1850-1898)
This project compares the informal North American power and the formal Spanish dominion in 19th-century Cuba by focusing on food, race and body discourse. It explores the connections between the ways in which diet, masculine and feminine bodies and their related attitudes were perceived and discussed by North Americans and Spaniards, and evaluates the differences in their discourses on food. More specifically, it analyzes how the encounters of United States and Spain in the Cuban colony were part of a wider process through which USA were trying to acquire the political control of the island claiming that Spain was an incompetent power to rule over Cuba that, on its side, deserved a more modern empire to rule over them. It analyzes the building, maintenance, and destruction of Empires by focusing on such fundamental issues as the construction of gendered identities, nationalism and imperialism, asymmetries of power, and mutual influences.