Press Clipping and Puppet Making as Transcultural Material Practices in the Cuban Magazine Ultra (1936–47)

This chapter presents a study of Ultra. Cultura Contemporánea. Revista de Revistas (1936–47) and the use that this Cuban magazine made of translated articles taken from the North American magazine Popular Science in the years prior to World War II (1936–39). In particular, we focus on the effects of transposing these articles from one magazine to another, the appearance of puppets in one of them and the relationship between puppets and clipping. We propose that both puppets and clippings represent practices of transculturation whose performativities serve to question the divide between the animate and the inanimate, the line between nature and culture, the predominantly visual regimes of perception and the scales used to measure cultural phenomena. An understanding of puppet making and press clipping as material performance and transcultural practices allows us to appreciate how trans-embodied techniques reveal an interconnectedness among bodies: a singular notion that is key to discerning the ways in which this Cuban magazine defined culture and life during the pre-war period.