The Dissidence of Reinaldo Arenas: Queering Literature, Politics, and the Activist Curriculum

Contents

List of Figures vii Acknowledgments ix

Note on Translations and Quotations xiii List of Abbreviations xv

Commonly Cited Acronyms xvii Prologue: The End 1

Introduction 25

1.  Reinaldo Arenas’s Fearless Speech: Mapping the Parrhesiastes’s Discourse as Public Pedagogy 47

2.   “Actitudes Extravagantes” and Queering Identities: The Marginal Sexual Pedagogies of a Dissident Marielito 69

3.   Colonial and Counterrevolutionary Pedagogies: Homosexuality as Activism in El Central and Arturo, la estrella más brillante 105

4.   Reading Arenas through Currere: Autobiographical Lessons in Time-Traveling 139

5.     Comparative Lessons from the Pariah’s Text: Reinaldo Arenas’s

El color del verano and Juan Goytisolo’s Juan sin tierra 172

6.   Testifying to the Mentors’ Deaths: Reinaldo Arenas’s Factual and Fantastical Re-creations of the Passing of José Lezama Lima and Virgilio Piñera 209

Notes 245

Bibliography 253