Adapting Cecilia, Cuba’s Iconic Mulatta

This project explores the expanding corpus of texts and artifacts inspired by Cirilo Villaverde’s most well-known literary character, Cecilia Valdés. Drawing on adaptation studies and related transmedia approaches, the book examines how and why this iconographic complex, centered on the mytheme of a disaffected mulatta striving for a better life, has generated such a remarkably persistent proliferation of multi-media instantiations. Chapters address topics and themes central to the interests of Villaverde scholars as well as to Cubanists and Latin Americanists, more broadly, such as gender and sexual roles, race and hybridity, cultural and national identity, and, in general, colonial and post-colonial social contexts in Cuba.

Lucy Harney is Professor of Spanish in the Department of World Languages & Literatures at Texas State University, USA. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Texas at Austin. Her primary research interests and publications focus on nineteenth and twentieth-century fiction, musical theater, and cultural studies in Spain and Latin America. She studies modes such as costumbrismo, carnival, and urban pastoral in various music theater forms including Spanish género chico, sainete, and tonadilla escénica, as well as in Spanish and Cuban zarzuela.