Sand Dollars (Dólares de Arena) is a 2014 coproduction by Dominican film director Laura Amelia Guzmán and her husband, Mexican film director Israel Cárdenas. This film portrays two main characters: an older French woman, Anne, who is visiting the island as a tourist, and a young black Dominican woman, Noeli. The plot centers on the sexual and emotional relationship that arises between the two women. In this article, I explore the race and class relationship between the black bodies and the white bodies—taking as a point of departure the lesbian relationship—and the ways in which they are represented on screen. To do so, I enter into dialogue with Franz Fanon’s text, Black Skin, White Masks, offering a queer interpretation of this work, in which female bodies are a largely ancillary focus, and female homosexuality is ignored entirely. As such, this article will use Fanonian theory in order to highlight the intersectional nature of cultural taboos in contemporary Dominican Republic, such as sex tourism, blackness, lesbianism (and queernessin general), and to explore the way in which the film navigates these topics.
Review of: Zavattini: Il Neo-Realismo e il Nuovo Cinema Latino-americano Volumi I–II, David Brancaleone (2019)
Vol. I, Parma: Diabasis, 486 pp.,
ISBN 978-8-88103-935-7, p/bk, €24.00
Vol. II, Parma: Diabasis 794 pp.,
ISBN 978-8-88103-937-1, e-book, free
The access to the internet in Cuba marks the beginning of a change and it brings new ways to debate on the socialist ideology reformulating the strategies to operate, dialogue, and accept any form of criticism. This chapter explores the role of the internet in Cuba from the perspective of the conflict in the virtual space and how it reshapes the Cuban revolutionary ideal. Thus, this section investigates the ways in which cyber mambises interact in order to control the digital zone; it examines the social and political implications of these cyber activities, and the conflicts generated from them. Also, this chapter focuses on the methods of control of the digital space and on how control is enacted through a hyper-visible presence in the web. Consequently, it examines how the virtual interactions between the controller and the controlled change the dynamics of control, adding new layers to the dialogue—or lack of dialogue—and conflict between officials and dissidents on the island.
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