Laura-Zoe Humphreys

Introduction to Fidel between the Lines: Paranoia and Ambivalence in Late Socialist Cuban Cinema, out now through Duke UP. https://www.dukeupress.edu/fidel-between-the-lines. Book description below:

Through a study of Cuban cinema (1985-2017), Fidel between the Lines demonstrates how allegory can both enable and constrain public debate. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Cuban state strategically relaxed censorship, attempting to contain dissent by giving it an outlet in the arts. Along with this shift, foreign funding and digital technologies gave filmmakers more freedom to criticize the state than ever before, yet these openings also exacerbated the political paranoia that has long shaped the Cuban public sphere. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork, textual analysis, and archival research, Humphreys shows how Cuban filmmakers have historically turned to allegory to communicate an ambivalent relationship to the Revolution, and how such efforts came up against new forms of suspicion in the 1990s and the twenty-first century. In making these arguments, Fidel between the Lines advances a new approach to the study of allegory. Scholars have argued against depth models of interpretation--known as paranoid or symptomatic readings--contending that such allegorical interpretations simply discover meanings predetermined by analysts. Fidel between the Lines instead demonstrates how, in a context shaped by censorship, artists and audiences themselves "read between the lines" in paranoid fashion, with polarizing consequences for public debate and imaginable political futures. Fidel between the Lines was selected as a 2020 Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Title.

Invited paper on gender and digital media piracy, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Havana, Cuba. Available in English and Spanish. Escrito sobre el género y la piratería digital, basado en una investigación etnografico en la Habana, Cuba. Disponible en inglés y español. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/the-gender-of-media-piracy?fbclid=IwAR1xlP5utSIPWuTFJlRx4hTwddI9-4hyAU4DhYQOkCaIjWQQ3bKCjQsWhNQ

Taking Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s canonical Cuban comedy, Death of a Bureaucrat (1966), as its starting point, this article identifies and analyzes a film genre that played a crucial ideological role in socialist cinemas—the bureaucrat comedy. While analysts have noted the presence of bureaucracy as theme and character type in numerous socialist films, “Death to Bureaucrats!” is the first to broach a systematic description and theorization of the genre. At the heart of many bureaucrat comedies, this article shows, are conflicts between rule-bound or corrupt office workers and protagonists who function as innocent naifs or as activist new men and women struggling to restore society's collective effervescence. This core conflict explains the traction of the genre in state socialism. The goal of socialism was to do away with the state and bureaucracy, to create a society in which collective demands would be immanent to individual desires and behaviors. Yet everyday reality quickly fell short of such utopian aspirations. Bureaucrat comedies contained this tension by deflecting complaints from top political leaders to low- or mid-level bureaucrats while also, in some instances, risking far-reaching criticisms of socialist society and even condemnations of authoritarianism. To demonstrate this argument and identify the primary characteristics of the genre, the article analyzes Death of a Bureaucrat in relation to criticism of the bureaucracy in Soviet and Cuban political discourse and five Soviet films—Don Diego and Pelageia (Iakov Protazanov, 1928), My Grandmother (Kote Mikaberidze, 1929), Volga-Volga (Grigorii Aleksandrov, 1938), Carnival Night (Eldar Riazanov, 1956), and Welcome! or No Trespassing (Elem Klimov, 1964).

Available here: https://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article/49/1/231/294856/Utopia-in-a-Package-Digital-Media-Piracy-and-the?guestAccessKey=000e01a6-bb04-4845-a230-99af5c3dc4a1

Abstract: Following the 1959 revolution, the Cuban state nationalized media outlets on the island and has controlled them ever since. Since 2010, however, this monopoly has been threatened by the paquete (package), one terabyte of pirated digital media collected by independent Cuban entrepreneurs and circulated through informal distribution networks across the island using flash drives and hard drives. Combining archival and textual analysis with ethnographic research, this article analyzes how the legacy of state socialism gave distinctive shape to experiences and perceptions of digital media piracy as well as the influx of global entertainment genres and the rise of new forms of domestic cultural production, especially advertising, that the paquete enabled” to “this article analyzes how the legacy of state socialism gave distinctive shape to experiences and perceptions of digital media piracy. I show how the state’s history of contravening international copyright provided justification for piracy and how cultural producers and consumers worked to reconcile revolutionary aspirations for socialist art with the influx of global entertainment and the rise of new forms of local cultural production, especially advertising, enabled by the paquete.

A short, public-facing analysis of this research was previously published online through Cultural Anthropology's Fieldsights; available here: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/utopia-in-a-package-digital-media-piracy-and-the-politics-of-entertainment-in-cuba

In the 2010s, new forms of hand-to-hand digital media piracy displaced state control over media distribution in Cuba and facilitated the influx of global media, including K-Pop, just as Cuban socialism came under renewed pressure through economic reform. In this context, this article contends, Cuban youth turned to K-Pop to reimagine the self, sociality, and Cuba’s place in the world. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this article shows how K-Pop appealed to fans by fostering fantasies of becoming enterprising individuals through neoliberal solidarity. These aspirations were reinforced by the industry’s pursuit of immediation, or its use of digital media to produce intimate and immediate connections that denied the mediations on which they depended. Ultimately, this article demonstrates how desires for and anxieties about immediacy motivate K-Pop fandom and its geo-political imaginaries and how a global capitalist culture industry can appeal to fans by offering relief from the neoliberal capitalism it reproduces.

This is the accepted version. The published version can be found at the following link (warning paywall): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13678779211024665?fbclid=IwAR3GV8tQMRrDE_Cd9yMnsgUZYaGsTgubgPOzfxwB4KS3W-b-nXlEwSm3qt8. Email me at lhumphreys@tulane.edu and I will be happy to send you the published version.

In the first of a series of global reports on COVID-19, Laura-Zoë Humphreys shows how the disruption of person-to-person media distribution networks has affected urban sociality in Havana, Cuba. https://www.mediapolisjournal.com/2020/06/copying-and-covid-19-havana/

This article examines the changing dynamics of censorship and social criticism in revolutionary Cuban cinema in order to make a case for studying allegory not as a mode whose meanings analysts should (or should not) reveal but, rather, as a contested social process. From the 1960s on, Cuban filmmakers turned to allegory as a means of resisting the reduction of art to propaganda and articulating more ambivalent takes on the Cuban Revolution. Yet spectators steeped in the political binaries of the Cold War often reduced films to arguments for or against socialism. Such paranoid readings have only grown more complex in the post-Soviet era, as changing strategies of state power, a growing orientation toward the global market, and the increasing availability of digital technologies enable more open criticism of the state in art and render criticism itself suspect. Drawing on this case study, this article argues that both depth models of interpretation and debates about “paranoid” or “symptomatic readings” fail to account for the social and political dynamics of texts. To understand how allegory and paranoid readings shape public debate and representation, we must examine how artists and audiences themselves mobilize the mode. This is especially true for Global South, state socialist, and authoritarian contexts, where traditions of political engagement through art, practices of skirting censorship through aesthetic indirection, and demands for depictions of the nation imposed by international art worlds foster practices of reading between the lines for hidden meanings in ways that sometimes cooperate with and sometimes work against artists’ aesthetic and political goals.

A new and improved version of this article's analysis of digital technologies, paranoia, and public debate in and about Cuba can be found in chapter 1 of my book, Fidel between the Lines, out now through Duke UP: https://www.dukeupress.edu/fidel-between-the-lines. Abstract: Chapter 1 shows how new openings facilitated by digital technologies and the state's strategic relaxation of censorship exacerbated the political paranoia that has long shaped public debate in Cuba. It takes as its case study what was commonly referred to as the "email war;' a 2007 debate about censorship that took place among Cuban intellectuals on and off the island shortly after Fidel Castro first fell ill and retired from public office. To many of those involved, this debate seemed to showcase the potential of digital technologies to enable a public sphere free of state control and open to all Cubans, regardless of geographic or political affiliation. Yet such hopes quickly ran aground on political paranoia as participants in the debate struggled to discern the contours of state powers or exile agendas that they suspected were operating just behind the scenes. In recounting this debate and the history that led up to it, the chapter also shows how, in the early years of the Revolution, Cuban intellectuals worked to establish an alternative public sphere that took political commitment as its foundation, and how new aspirations to autonomy in the post-Soviet era went hand in hand with suspicion.

From the city symphonies of early silent cinema to the navigation of cities and urban social relations through mobile phones and social media, new media technologies have been integral to how urban life is both imagined and experienced. Urban infrastructures and technologies themselves, meanwhile, also have important mediating qualities, as skyscrapers through electrical grids, roads, and vehicles become contested signs of modernity, opportunities for the enactment of power, and sites of struggle. Drawing on interdisciplinary readings and methods, this course examines how media construed broadly has historically represented, shaped, and transformed cities and rights to the city with unequal consequences across race, class, gender, sexuality, and Global North/Global South divides. Taking seriously Friedrich Kittler's provocative suggestion that the city should be thought of as a medium, we also reflect on what media is in the context of the urban, examining how more traditionally conceived notions of media-film, photography, sound recordings, and mobile phones-intersect with urban infrastructure and technologies, which also take on signifying qualities.

From transformations in work and intimate relationships to panics over media piracy, in the 21st century, digital media has come to play an ever more important role in politics, economics, and identities. Ethnography – a methodology based on long-term immersion in the lives of the people who the ethnographer is interested in studying – is particularly useful as a means of understanding lived experiences and effects of digital media. Ethnography has also been central in highlighting the operations of digital media outside of the Global North, which all too often dominates popular and scholarly discussions. But digital media also confronts ethnography with new challenges as researchers must devise ways of studying social dynamics over both online and offline contexts and between geographically distant locations. In this course, we consider how ethnographers have adapted to these new methodological challenges and how ethnography can shed light on a range of pressing topics in media studies, including the politics of infrastructure, labor and the information economy, media piracy, fan cultures, journalism and disinformation, and contemporary social movements. As part of the course, students also conduct their own ethnographic research project on a digital media topic of their choosing. This course, then, will at once introduce you to debates within digital media ethnography; expand your understanding of how digital media reinforces or challenges difference and power in locations around the world; and teach you how to design and carry out your own ethnographic research project from data collection through writing up results in an engaging manner. This course meets the Writing Intensive SLA Tier-2 requirement.

From the 1980s on, ethnography rapidly became central to the study of media both in one of the method’s foundational disciplines—socio-cultural anthropology—and in communication and media studies. Anthropologists discovered that paying closer attention to media technologies and texts shed new light on questions of difference, identity, and power, while also opening up challenges to the concept of culture that had long been integral to the discipline. Scholars working across the humanities, meanwhile, discovered that ethnography—including immersive and long-term fieldwork, participant observation, and in-depth and contextualized interviews—provides essential tools for understanding how media affects people’s everyday and lived experiences in diverse socio-cultural contexts. Ethnography has also been integral to expanding the study of media outside of the focus on the Global North that still predominates in popular and scholarly conversation in the United States. Taking this interdisciplinary background as our starting point, in this course we examine how ethnography sheds light on two growing areas of research that are essential to contemporary media studies: media technologies and space and textual circulation and reception. As part of the course, students will complete two ethnographic exercises culminating in a final research paper on media spaces and technologies or the reception of a media text. This course, then, will at once introduce you to the history and uses of media ethnography across a range of social science and humanities disciplines; expand your understanding of how media reinforce or challenge identity, difference, and power around the world; and teach you how to apply ethnographic methods in your own research.