Throughout the decade which I have spent living in the United States, I have often pondered the following: Why is it that the image that Americans seem to have of Cuba is, for the most part, a nostalgic-based one, seemingly fueled by a desire to return to a pre-revolutionary period where the island was seen as a sort of a playground for the American middle-class? Indeed, American media depictions of Cuba often involve the following:

• Old Chevrolet cars which have somehow managed to last more than the Revolution. If you type “Cuba” on Google and go to the image section, about seventy five percent of the first forty images are of cars.

• Forbidden Cuban cigars which can only be mentioned in hushed tones. Remember Tony Montana from Scarface? Google him, too, and you’ll see that the first pictures that show up are of him either smoking or holding a cigar.

• Buildings in a perpetual state of decay, as if signaling how the condition of the island has worsened after the Revolution.

• And last but not least: the melodies of a music from a land which has remained, in many ways and for a lot of people, lost in time. I am thinking here of the tour de force that was the release of the Buena Vista Social Club album in the United States and the world, and the criticism that it received from young Cuban musicians, who felt left out and declared that the album had very little to do with the music that they were currently producing.

I have been thinking about these things for a long time, and the way in which these images get fomented in a manner that has more to do with fantasy than reality. (This is not to say that in Cuba there are not old cars, or decaying buildings, or that people do not smoke cigars or listen to music from older times. That, however, is not all that Cuba is.)

Then I read Arjun Appadurai’s concept of mediascapes in his seminal work, Modernity at Large (1996), and a lot of things became clearer to me.
Appadurai defines mediascapes as “the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information (newspaper, magazines, television stations, and film-production studios)…[and] the images of the world created by these media.” Appaduarai argues that these mediascapes provide “large and complex repertoires of images [and] narratives…to viewers throughout the world, in which the world of commodities and the world of news and politics are profoundly mixed.”

These nostalgia-driven images of Cuba suddenly made a bit more sense, especially after considering who was producing these images, for which audiences, and how closely-related to international politics these representations of Cuba were. Indeed, these images which, as Appadurai states, “help to constitute narratives of the Other”—in this case, of Cubans—serve as a form of constructing an imagined world that downplays, if not outright erases, the blow that the Cuban Revolution of 1959 represented to American interests in Latin America. For the Cuban Revolution showed that Latin America could indeed stand up to the United States and its hypocritical “Good Neighbor” policy, which it had violated time and again through the funding of military coups, its assistance in the creation of guerrilla wars that would destabilize democratic governments, and the support of dictatorships that benefited American interests, as was the case of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. (That the Cuban Revolution took a turn for the worst, as shown by the disenchantment expressed by many Latin American thinkers who had at first supported it, well, that’s a different story which falls outside of the scope of this short reflection.)

By maintaining and disseminating images of Cuba that allude to a pre-revolutionary period, by fomenting the idea of a country whose people are still stuck in the past and have not been able to move beyond what the United States left them with (e.g. cars) and now suffer the consequences of their actions (e.g. decaying old buildings), all the while dissuading the general public, through sanctions on travel to Cuba, from personally experiencing the transformations that have occurred in the island for more than half a century—through all this, Cuba has remained the fantasy land of exotic beaches and dancers, of the mojito and the daiquiri; in other words, it has remained the land of commodities that is was up to 1959 in the eyes of the American public. In 2014, just as it was in 1959, Cuba is anything but.

But Hollywood does not seem to think so, and neither does Google Images.

Appadurai’s concept of mediascapes, therefore, provided me with a starting point for thinking about how to navigate the political and cultural intricacies of these representations, of this “Othering” that does not exclusively pertain to the case of Cuba, for a similar argument could be made for the images that the American public is currently receiving from other countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

On October 29th, Stephen Colbert interviewed Anita Sarkeesian on his show, The Colbert Report, about the Gamergate controversy. Before ending the interview, Colbert asked Sarkeesian the following question: “As a man, am I allowed to be a feminist?” to which Sarkeesian answered with a question of her own: “Do you believe that women should have equal rights to men and we should fight for those rights?” When Stephen answered in the affirmative, Sarkeesian said, “Great, then you are a feminist.”

Is he, though? If equality between men and women was the only premise on which feminism stood, and if Stephen Colbert, adhering to this all-encompassing premise of feminism, were to live in Rwanda, where female representation in parliament is as high as sixty four percent—compared to the sixteen percent female representation in the United States Congress—could he be a feminist there? As an article published in April of this year in The Guardian states, in Rwanda, “gender rights are enshrined in its constitution, and a swath of laws have given women the right to inherit land, share the assets of a marriage and obtain credit.”

So, mission accomplished, right? Feminism wins the day. Women have equal rights to men. By that definition alone, the feminist fight in Rwanda should be over.

But then the aforementioned article goes on to state that, despite these accomplishments, “Domestic violence [in Rwanda] remains common and widely accepted.”

Well, isn’t that something?

What I am trying to say here is not that Sarkeesian is wrong in her definition of feminism, for it concerns a very specific political agenda, but that she is wrong in not clarifying that the parameters through which she is defining feminism are not universal—though the possibility exists that she is assuming they are. At any rate, she could have said: “Great, then as far as the U.S. is concerned, Stephen, you are a feminist” and that would have been a bit closer to the truth.
But in expressing that gender-specific feminism is the only feminism, and by extent the only way to be a feminist, Sarkeesian is partaking in a very American and Eurocentric view of feminism—deemed, seemingly, universal—and discarding the radical differences with which other countries and cultures engage with feminism.

A good example of this is the UN women’s conference in Mexico in 1975, in which Gloria Steinem, an icon of feminism in the United States, drew up a feminist manifesto without consulting women of the southern hemisphere of the globe; that is, women who came from countries which had been former colonies and were considered, based on the country’s development or lack thereof, of the “Third World.” Aili Mari Tripp, in her chapter, “The Evolution of Transnational Feminism” (Global Feminism 2006), in recounting this incident, tells us that: “Women from the South tended to focus on how women’s problems were defined be global inequality, imperialism, and other political concerns that were not seen as gender-specific…[challenging] Northern women to see development issues as women’s concerns” (61).

Indeed, instead of a global feminism, which seems to be, as Grewal and Kaplan state in their article, “Global Identities: Theorizing Transnational Studies of Sexuality,” articulated “primarily by Western or Euro-American second-wave feminists as well as by multinational corporations,” the shift to using the term transnational to talk about feminism could prove more beneficial as it “could signal cultural and national difference” (666). In talking about these differences, we could look at the example of China’s suffrage movement in the early 1900s, which emerged as part of an anti-Qing movement that demanded political rights for women, and not out of a desire to emulate New Zealand or Australia, which had granted suffrage in 1983 and 1902, respectively.

In regards to feminism as a transnational phenomenon which particularizes experience, rather than universalizes it, Tripp further notes that in Africa, for example, specifically in the countries such as Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, and Somalia, the women present during peace negotiations have demands “more oriented toward pragmatic solution to health, education, and other problems, rather than vying for positions of power in a restructured state” (68).

The need to address these different needs, then, becomes paramount for the feminist movement. And the way to really do it is not through a Western-centric perspective on women’s issues which aims to be universal and in the process erases difference of experience, but by acknowledging the very real differences which exist across borders and cultures for women. In other words, by looking at feminism through transnational lenses.

In “Area Studies, Transnationalism, and the Feminist Production of Knowledge,” Ella exhorts us to “reimagine the study of regions and cultures in a way that transcends the conceptual border inherent in the cartography of the cold war” (1271). What is implied here is that the West (U.S., Europe) still perceives culture in terms of imagined “areas” which were mapped strategically during the war (think “Middle East,” for instance), and that what ended up happening because of this was that knowledge about these arbitrarily-defined, and very-much imagined areas, was accumulated without regard for cultural differences.

Here, let me literally drive the point home: imagine that the United States was studied by others with the intention of establishing their superiority over Americans (remember, this all started because of wars). Now imagine that they chose the South as the dumping ground of all things American. Soon, people would think that all Americans are predominantly rural, disproportionately poor, and dim-witted (these stereotypes are all intentional). As you can see, the knowledge that begins to be produced about this “American region” is far from the reality. It does not even begin to encompass the social, economic, gender-based, racial, or geographical complexities that exist in the United States. Only by taking a look beyond these maps which were created to assert superiority may others then start seeing these complexities.

This becomes crucial in a world like ours, which is now becoming more interconnected by mass media, and where we are constantly bombarded with images, sounds, and goods from all over. Faced with all this information, we need to be able to look beyond these outdated maps which validity rests on the stating that someone else is inferior, such as the term “third world,” and take a look at how we are interacting and perceiving each other through these transnational (across borders) interactions which are occurring.

This inexorably makes me think Uma Nayaran’s article, “Cross-Cultural Connections, Border-Crossings, and ‘Death by Culture’” in which she compares dowry murders in India and domestic violence in the United States. As she contends with the topic, Nayaran cites an anecdote from Madhu Kishwar in which she tells how she was asked by western feminists if they had battered-women’s homes in India, and that by asking this it was assumed that not having it would constitute a lower stage of development. Nayaran argues that in the Indian context, organizing around issues such as shelters for battered women requires a certain set of conditions which are not available in the country; but that, on the other hand, women in India do have the resources to publicize cases of dowry-murders and hold public demonstrations and protests, which led to the boycotting of marriages where dowry was involved. In short, the conditions of both places (India and the U.S.) dictated what type of actions were taken to lessen aggression toward women. (In the case of the U.S., murder is not as common when it comes to domestic violence; therefore, advocating for shelter for those affected becomes the more logical course of action.)

I became curious about the dowry-murders, and when I looked it up on Google, one of the first articles that the search showed me was titled “India ‘Dowry Deaths’ Still Rising Despite Modernization.” The interesting thing about this article was that it correlated modernity with having obtained independence (“Despite…strides in modernization since India’s 1947 independence…”); that is, it assumes, as Ong states in his book, Flexible Citizenship, that modernity is the process in which “the rest of the world will eventually be assimilated to an internationalized modernity originating in and determined by the West” (53). Implied in the title of that article is the judgment that India, although striving to the like the western countries (does it?), is still located at a lower stage of development than those countries which it seeks to emulate by becoming “modern.” The author clearly has a very western-centered idea of what modernity is. Yet is it important to mention that, as Ong reminds us, modernity “is a matter of signification” (53), and that, at the end of the day, it really has to do with whom controls that which is signified as “modern.” The need, then, to think in terms of difference, not to ascertain superiority, but as a way to reach an understanding of those with whom we come into contact becomes paramount in this day and age.

In February of this year, the Salvadorian ambassador to the United States, Rubén Zamora, came to the University of Maryland to talk about El Salvador’s current political and economic landscape. He began by explaining the different causes which, over the past forty years, have led thousands of Salvadorians to leave their country and come to the States. Acknowledging the fact that a large portion of Salvadorians now lives abroad, Zamora proceeded to outline the economic strategy which the current Salvadorian political administration is pursuing in order to elicit economic growth within the country: they are encouraging Salvadorians living outside the country, and who are in possession of capital, to invest in El Salvador. Moreover, in order to strengthen the transnational link between the Salvadorian communities within and abroad, for the first time in the history of the country, voting rights are being extended to those Salvadorians living in the United States as well, so that even from without they may still contribute to, and meaningfully impact, the political discourse of El Salvador.

What is happening in El Salvador is not an isolated incident. In a broader explanation of this phenomena, Steven Vertovec explains that “Political parties now often establish offices abroad in order to canvas immigrants”, and adds that “Emigrants increasingly are able to maintain or gain access to health and welfare benefits, property rights, voting rights, or citizenship in more than one country” (11). This, in turn, has led many—including the cited-above Vertovec—to posit that we are at a crucial moment in history, one in which we are faced with the deterritorialization of the nation-state. Indeed, these constant engagements between the people from the “homeland” and those living outside it (call it “diasporas” or “transnational communities;” experts cannot seem to agree) are bringing into question the very notion of the nation-state as an entity affixed to a geographical construct. In short: those black, arbitrary lines you see on maps dividing one country from another, well, they are getting pretty blurry—at least metaphorically-speaking.

This movement toward the transnational, or “sustained cross-border relationships, patterns of exchange, affiliations and social formations spanning nation-states” (Vertovec 2), responds to a very pressing need to account for complex cultural differences in a world where we are seeing these “sustained cross-border relationships” happening more rapidly and at a greater ease than ever before due to the advancements of technology and mass media, and well as the constant migratory movement of people, which the nation-state, in its attempt to homogenize, appears poorly equipped to deal with these phenomena.

Because of its theoretical approach, transnationalism brings into question what it is that constitutes a “national narrative”, if we are to account for different types of discourse, or “national literatures,” if we are to be more specific. National narratives, and specially the literature, have been seen as a space where identity seeks to define itself through the production of homogenous and totalitarian discourse within clearly-defined borders. Yet the concept of national narrative quickly enters into crisis if we take into account of people bridging geographical chasms between themselves and remaining culturally attached to each other or their home countries despite the distance. To this effect, I am reminded of Luis Rafael Sanchez’s short story, “The Flying Bus,” which takes center stage on an airplane flight filled with Puerto Ricans. The story finds it climax and eye-opening epiphany when an older lady tells the narrator that she is Puerto Rican, and when the narrator inquiries from where in Puerto Rico she is from, she responds, very pleased, that she is from New York. The transnational need to account for the cross-border relationships renders the totalities attempted by national narratives obsolete while, at the same time, finds a space for new forms of narrating identity in these deterritorialized places.

More importantly, I think, transnationalism seeks to correct a wrong which began after World War II: the flourishing of area studies as a Western technique of research concerned with providing “a major way to look at strategically significant parts of the developing world” (Appadurai 16). As Appadurai further explains, area studies is “deeply tied up with a strategizing world picture driven by U.S. foreign-policy needs between 1945 and 1989” (16). What became “significant”—to U.S. interests—across cultures also became a way of grouping them together into an unintelligible mass of sameness. Even today one can feel the long-lasting effects of area studies, be it in the laughable suggestion that Mexico is everything south of the—U.S.—border, or the fact that six in ten young Americans cannot identity the exact location of Iraq (CBS News). Therefore, debunking the notion of area studies as a way of exploring cultural differences becomes paramount from a theoretical standpoint which seeks to account for cultural exchanges across national borders in a way that avoids the situational, cultural, economic and sociopolitical baggage it has carried for decades and which has favored American exceptionalism.