Esther Whitfield's most recent book focuses on representations of the Guantánamo naval base in art, literature and law. Her current research addresses the role of animals in the Cuban socialist state, specifilly the recent emergence of an animal welfare movement alongisde human rights advocacy and a new consumer class. She has also worked extensively on Cuban culture of the post-Soviet period and on Welsh writing in the Americas.
Esther Whitfield's book, A New No-Man’s Land: Writing and Art at Guantánamo, Cuba, was published in 2024 with the University of Pittsburgh Press ("Illuminations: Cultural Formations of the Americas" Series). There she 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 isolated corner of Cuba and the rest of the world.
Her earlier book, Cuban Currency: The Dollar and 'Special Period' Fiction (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), explores how the emergence of export markets for Cuban culture is inscribed in contemporary fiction. Based on extensive interviews and archival research in Havana, it takes an integrated approach to the cultural, economic and social changes that have taken place there since the disintegration of the Soviet bloc, from which Cuba derived most of its economic support. It argues that, over the past decade, writers have both challenged and profited from new transnational markets for their work, in a move whose literary and ideological implications are far-reaching.
With Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann, Whitfield translated The Black Arrow (Linkgua Press 2023), by Cuban poet José Ramón Sánchez. She is also co-editor, with Anke Birkenmaier, of Havana Beyond the Ruins: Cultural Mappings After 1989 (Duke University Press, 2011), a collection of essays on post-1989 Havana; and, with Jacqueline Loss, of an anthology of Cuban short fiction in translation, New Short Fiction from Cuba (Northwestern University Press, 2007). She wrote a critical introduction to Antonio José Ponte's Un arte de hacer ruinas (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2005) and has published a number of journal articles and book chapters on contemporary Latin American fiction and Welsh diasporic literature.
