Event overview
book launch and discussion with the author
Free, All Welcome
Fully accessible building
To Defend the Revolution Is to Defend Culture: The Cultural Policy of the Cuban Revolution considers the centrality of the arts to the Cuban Revolution. This previously untold story introduces all the main protagonists to the debate and follows the polemical twists and turns that ensued in the volatile atmosphere of the 1960s and ’70s. The picture that emerges is of a struggle for dominance between Soviet-derived approaches and a uniquely Cuban response to the arts under socialism, based on the principles of Marxist humanism. As the latter tendency eventually won out, this book foregrounds emancipatory understandings of culture.
To Defend the Revolution Is to Defend Culture takes its title from a slogan — devised by Cuban artists and writers at a meeting held in October 1960 and adopted by the First National Congress of Writers and Artists the following August — which harnessed the work of creative intellectuals to the pursuit of social justice that inspired the Revolution. Departing from popular top-down conceptions of Cuban policy-formation, this book explores the contribution of Cuba’s artists and writers to the policy and praxis of the Revolution.
As the capitalist world struggles to articulate the value of the arts in anything other than economic terms, To Defend the Revolution Is to Defend Culture provides us with an entirely different way of thinking about culture and the policies underlying it.
Join author Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt as she discusses approaches to culture which explores the relationship between art and ideology, engagement and autonomy, form and content.
Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt has been engaging with the internal dynamics of the cultural field for two decades. In 1995, she wrote a history of the artist-run Transmission Gallery in Glasgow and extended this into a comparative study of artistic self-organisation to accompany the first major survey of the UK cultural scene, held at the Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. In 1998, she cofounded salon3, a polyvalent arts organisation, in London. Two years later, she took up a post as a curator at the Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art in Helsinki, with a responsibility for stimulating art exhibitions, publications and events throughout the Nordic region and, latterly, the UK and Ireland. As the cultural field succumbed to the neoliberal consensus, she dedicated herself to exploring the politico-economic conditions underwriting artistic practice.
Increasingly deploying an investigative approach, Rebecca has scrutinised the devolution of cultural provision from local government to the private sector. As Researcher-in-Residence at the Centre for Contemporary Art Derry~Londonderry, she interrogated claims of culture-led regeneration being made in relation to the first incarnation of UK City of Culture. As Research Associate at Arts for Health, Manchester Metropolitan University, she compiled an international evidence base around the longitudinal relationship between arts engagement and health, which tentatively demonstrated a positive association between attending arts events and longer lives better lived. Her writing has been extensively published in anthologies, monographs, catalogues and journals, a selection of which is available online.
Rebecca began her journey to Cuba in 2008, in search of new ways of thinking about culture. The following year, she spent five months gathering material in the libraries and archives of Havana. Entering the final editing stages of To Defend the Revolution Is to Defend Culture, she set up the Centre for Cultural Change (cambiarcultura.org), an umbrella organisation that enables critical and creative researchers to explore alternatives to the current socio-cultural malaise.
Presented by
The Centre for Cultural Studies
Institute for Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship
Centre for Urban and Community Research
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 21 Oct 2015 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
If you are attending an event and need the College to help with any mobility requirements you may have, please contact the event organiser in advance to ensure we can accommodate your needs.
