As we enter the last four weeks of teaching, that means we’re slowly approaching the deadline for our final essays. As such, I’ve spent most of my week working on my 4000-word proposal, which will be centred on the Cuban-Chinese during either the 1945-49 Chinese Civil War, or the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Here’s an update on what I’ve been reading, and some ideas that I’m working with at the moment.
First off, I’ve been reading a lot of secondary sources. This has been the bulk of my research over the past few weeks. These sources are historiographies on Cuba, the Cuban-Chinese, or revolutions in China and Cuba that contextualise the Cuban, Chinese, and/or Cuban-Chinese settings in the 20th century. At the moment, I’m thinking a lot about their limitations and trying to structure these thoughts into a coherent argument. Tentatively, I think I will argue along one of the points Milinda made in our seminar this week, namely that it is insufficient to merely state that actors and networks operate transnationally. Indeed, this is what most of the literature on Chinese-Cubans have done; they’ve sought to deconstruct the idea of the ‘Chinese’ that sticks solely to their own racial group by discussing their involvement in Cuban affairs and, thus, the wider concepts of ‘revolution’ and ‘Communism’. Although these works are useful, I think we can do better by interrogating these transnational links. I want to incorporate theories, like racial triangulation, and the idea of semi-peripheries, and see how these ideas operated in Cuba vis-a-vis the Cubans and the Cuban-Chinese. Hopefully, by approaching it in this way, I can gain a deeper understanding of how power structures and hierarchies are still imbued in the transnational sphere.
In light of this objective, I’ve also been reading lots of methodological theory. I found last week’s readings on Global Intellectual History vital to my project; in fact, looking forward, I think I’ll want to write a Global Intellectual History of the Cuban-Chinese for my final dissertation. To that regard, Milinda’s paper, Kapila’s, and Hunter’s were all vital in informing how I, specifically, should incorporate anthropological and philosophical readings into my historical analysis. To that end, I’ve recently read Claire Jean Kim’s article on racial triangulation to understand how groups of people can be oppressed in one setting and then also be used as – or even become – oppressors in another. Various hierarchies operate in conjunction with each other, and it’s my job to explain which hierarchies are present in the context of the Chinese-Cubans, and also analyse how they impact each other. I also hope to expand on the work I’ve done on Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ Southern Epistemologies to hopefully inform my approach and create a more ‘bottom-up history’ of concepts. It’s not about seeing how universal ideas of revolution and communism were taken into Cuba. It’s more about examining the way specific power structures unique to Cuba, and the Cuban-Chinese there, were transplanted into big concepts, like ‘revolution’ and ‘communism’. It’s through this approach that I hope to construct a more ‘bottom-up’ history that makes sense of global concepts from the perspective of ‘Southern’/non-Western epistemologies. .
So, in terms of context and methodology, I feel quite secure. However, I’m still trying to access primary sources. Inevitably, there are some primary sources that I can’t access at the moment, e.g. specific accounts written by Cuban-Chinese revolutionaries, which exist solely in paperbacks. I’m hoping to work around this small setback by using this time to engage deeply with Chinese and Cuban thinkers from the 19th and 20th centuries. E-copies of Fidel Castro’s speeches exist on the Cuban government website. José Martí was also a big inspiration for Cuban revolutionaries, and I’m sure that copies of his revolutionary poems exist on the internet. On the Chinese side, I hope to examine Sun Yat-Sen’s and Mao Zedong’s writings. After this point, my next step might be to turn to archives in the University of Miami, or any other places that have large Cuban immigrant populations in the US, for any sources written by Cuban and/or Cuban-Chinese revolutionaries.
Overall, then, my research seems to be going alright. I’ve started to flesh out my argument, but am still researching to make it more concrete, or at least as concrete as I possibly can given the inaccessibility of certain sources. Moreover, I think listing out the work that I’ve done in this blog post has helped calm my nerves. I’ll be honest – I didn’t get that much work done over Spring Break because I was struggling to find the motivation to work, and that really scared me. Nevertheless, as I’ve started to get used to the idea of working from home, my mood has picked up again, and so has my research. Despite all my anxieties, researching for my long essay has proven to be a great distraction from all the dangers outside, and its been nice to dedicate all of my energy towards a project that I feel passionate about.