Writing the Special Period: An Introduction

Abstract

It is always a challenge to bracket a time period and categorize it as a historical epoch. The Special Period, not unlike the Cold War, the twentieth century, or the 1960s, is not only a historical convention, or an analytical construct, but also a defining category of experience. For most people, the invocation of these chronological referents is metonymic of a broad range of events, aesthetics, experiences, emotions, acts, and attitudes. Alain Badiou (2007) in The Century attempts precisely to identify the unifying tropes that define the twentieth century, the period’s imagination—its epochal dream-worlds, to use Susan Buck-Morss’s (2000) felicitous expression. There is, no doubt, something powerful about conventional time frames, like a century. Such a time frame, within a specific geographical space, is often identified with a collective type of consciousness—in Badiou’s case, the European West. Badiou’s project is to pin down “how the century thought itself,” that is, the epochal consciousness that key Western intellectuals expressed in their works during that time; how they imagined, or rather abstracted, the time in which they were living as a centurial period and how they represented it. Just as importantly, how they confronted it. In a nutshell, Badiou examined what