Mayakovsky in Cuba: a vision of the tropics in My discovery of America, I am Cuba, Tristes Tropiques and Hitler, Third World

Abstract

This article explores the idea of “the exotic” as the space in-between the new and the familiar. It is through such an intermediate place that Vladimir Mayakovsky, in one his poems in My Discovery of America, is able to arrive at the core of the socio-economic problems in Cuba, which Fernando Ortiz would analyze fifteen years later in his Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar. Sergei Urusevsky, I am Cuba’s cinematographer, as well as Claude Lévi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques, both resorted to the exalted artificiality of the images to express the “exotic” of the tropics. Turning to the work of the Brazilian writer and film director, José Agrippino de Paula, the article examines how such ways of representing “the exotic” force the “inhabitants” of the tropics to doubly exoticize and, thus, marginalize, their self- representation to be able to re-create their art and identity through marginal anthropophagy or tropicalism.

Keywords
the exotic; transculturation; space in-between; Russian cinema; marginal cinema