Esther Whitfield

She has published primarily on literary writing and social change Esther Whitfield is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Hispanic Studies at Brown University.

in post-Soviet Cuba; and on borders, visibility, and surveillance in writing and art about the Guantánamo naval base. Her current book project, “The New No-Man’s Land: Guantánamo’s Literary Life,” proposes reading the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo and the surrounding areas of Eastern Cuba as a borderland region that shares a natural environment, a marking of human lives by isolation, and a body of literature and art privileging survival over political hostility. The project draws on an archive of poetry, art and memoirs by detainees and military personnel at the base and by Cubans nearby, and scholarship in Comparative Literature, Caribbean Studies, History and Law, to trace relationships between literature and other forms of representation, and between this region and the rest of the world.

RESEARCH PROJECT: The New No-Man’s Land: Guantánamo’s Literary Life