From Harlem to Havana and Back Again: Ruin, the Performative Politics of Survival, and the Ambivalent, State-Sponsored Detective in Chester Himes' Harlem Domestic and Leonardo Padura's Cuatro Estaciones

Abstract

My dissertation puts in conversation a Cuban detective novel series set in Havana in 1989, Leonardo Padura’s Cuatro Estaciones, with Chester Himes’s African-American detective series set in Harlem between 1957 and 1969, Harlem Domestic. My project investigates the setting and the construction of Harlem and Havana as mythical sites of cultural production and cultural history in the Americas. Tracing the long tradition of cultural exchange between the two cities, I ground my study in their shared relationship to a particular kind of social fragmentation which I call the Harlem-Havana Idiosyncratic Nexus. My project takes advantage of this Idiosyncratic Nexus as a key analytical tool of cross-pollination which affords an opportunity to utilize one aesthetic tradition to read the other and vice-versa. My study further explores the manner in which the detective novel form is used to write through the acute socio-economic and spiritualcrises within which the respective series are set and corresponding discourses of disillusionment, dislocation and decadence. I explore the extent to which both series engage in subversive interrogations of State power and neglect vis-a-vis the hard- boiled detective fiction and police procedural forms.

My project is comprised of three chapters. Chapter 1, “’A Dream Deferred?’: Dynamism, Decay and the Harlem-Havana Idiosyncratic Nexus,” lays out the cultural histories and roots of the Harlem-Havana Idiosyncratic Nexus and employs theories of “ruin” and “ruina” to read the construction the Harlem and Havana imaginaries in Harlem Domestic and Cuatro estaciones. Chapter 2, “Why Not the Private Eye?: The Insider as Outsider in Chester Himes’s Blind Man with a Pistol (1969) and Leonardo Padura’s Paisaje de Otoño (1998),” analyzes various theories of the modern State in order to explore discourses of social positionality and select State power relative to the police detective protagonists and the police procedural form in the two novels. Lastly, Chapter 3, “’I Will Survive’: Performance and the Politics of Self-Preservation in Chester Himes’s Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965) and Leonardo Padura’s Máscaras (1997),” deploys theories of performance to analyze various performative modalities as survival strategies—creative responses to fragment and ruin in the two novels.