Dr William Rowlandson, Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies in the Department of Modern Languages, is to talk at the Queen Mary University of London on Tuesday 16 February 2016.
The talk, part of a series of Research Seminars in the Department of Iberian and Latin American Studies, is entitled ‘Jean-Paul Sartre, Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution: l’ homme existentiel and the New Man’ and concerns the month-long trip that Jean-Paul Sartre made to Cuba with Simone de Beauvoir in early 1960. They visit at a very particular time of the revolution prior to the Bay of Pigs and the Soviet Alliance and before the revolution was declared socialist. They buzz around Havana with different writers and revolutionaries, they are interviewed for the national media, they meet Che Guevara in the bank offices at midnight, and they tour the island with Fidel Castro. On return to France Sartre wrote up the accounts as successive articles in the magazine France-Soir.
The episode is recorded briefly in Sartre and de Beauvoir biographies and studies, but these works rarely devote more than a couple of pages to it. Similarly, such studies inevitably lack a wider contextual Cuban perspective. That’s to say, when Sartre met a certain group of writers, who were these writers and what was the nature of their strained relationship with the revolutionary authorities? What influence did Sartre have in Cuba prior to his trip? What impact did his published statements about revolution, ideology, colonialism, imperialism, Marxism have? Could he have influenced Castro or Che Guevara in their evolving political philosophy? Why did Sartre not want his articles published in book form? Had he been obliged to report on certain things so as to keep his Cuban hosts happy? Could the articles be considered propaganda? What was the legacy of Sartre in Cuba, especially after his relationship with Castro soured?
In this presentation William will evaluate the France-Soir articles from a wider perspective than simply an episode in Sartre’s life, addressing, for example, his discussion of violence inherent in colonialism and the violence that colonialism engenders, the violence of revolution, the ideologies – or lack of – behind the Cuban Revolution.
Further details of the seminars are available at:
www.ilas.sllf.qmul.ac.uk/iberian-and-latin-american-studies/research/departmental-research-seminar