Performing Afro–Cuba – Image, Voice, Spectacle in the Making of Race and History - Softcover

Wirtz, Kristina

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022611905X ISBN 13: 9780226119052

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2014

Synopsis

Visitors to Cuba will notice that Afro-Cuban figures and references are everywhere: in popular music and folklore shows, paintings and dolls of Santeria saints in airport shops, and even restaurants with plantation themes. In Performing Afro-Cuba, Kristina Wirtz examines how the animation of Cuba's colonial past and African heritage through such figures and performances not only reflects but also shapes the Cuban experience of Blackness. She also investigates how this process operates at different spatial and temporal scales - from the immediate present to the imagined past, from the barrio to the socialist state. Wirtz analyzes a variety of performances and the ways they construct Cuban racial and historical imaginations. She offers a sophisticated view of performance as enacting diverse revolutionary ideals, religious notions, and racial identity politics, and she outlines how these concepts play out in the ongoing institutionalization of folklore as an official, even state-sponsored, category. Employing Bakhtin's concept of "chronotopes" - the semiotic construction of space-time - she examines the roles of voice, temporality, embodiment, imagery, and memory in the racializing process. The result is a deftly balanced study that marries racial studies, performance studies, anthropology, and semiotics to explore the nature of race as a cultural sign, one that is always in process, always shifting.

About this title

Review:

""Performing Afro-Cuba" is a careful and precise anthropology of history making, a study of the effortful cultural work and highly structured theater of relations out of which the Cuban racial order was and is still, perhaps more forcefully than ever, being made and remade. Compact, well-argued, it is utterly engrossing. It attacks a familiar issue in an original way, and it does so with a strong theoretical frame rendered in an approachable writing style." --Paul Christopher Johnson, University of Michigan

""Performing Afro-Cuba" is a masterful exploration of figurations of race and dialogues of racialization in Cuba. I learned a great deal from this challenging work, especially from Wirtz's productive expansions of the notions of register and chronotope. The book is analytically powerful and richly engaged; Wirtz's own voice is a sensitively reflexive part of the polyphonic dialogues she traces through Cuban history, social life, and cultural performance." --Richard Bauman, Indiana University

""Performing Afro-Cuba" is remarkable achievement. To put Wirtz's argument in a nutshell would be to do a gross injustice to her sophisticated--and often quite elegant--exposition. She is simply the smartest and theoretically most sophisticated anthropologist doing research in Cuba these days. But aside from her contribution to the regionalist literature, the real value of her work is that it speaks to enduring anthropological questions, while raising a number of new ones that are relevant far beyond her specific field site. I enthusiastically recommend it."--Stephan Palmie, author of The Cooking of History: How Not to Study Afro-Cuban Religion"

"Performing Afro-Cuba"is a careful and precise anthropology of history making, a study of the effortful cultural work and highly structured theater of relations out of which the Cuban racial order was and is still, perhaps more forcefully than ever, being made and remade. Compact, well-argued, it is utterly engrossing. It attacks a familiar issue in an original way, and it does so with a strong theoretical frame rendered in an approachable writing style. --Paul Christopher Johnson, University of Michigan"

"Performing Afro-Cuba" is a masterful exploration of figurations of race and dialogues of racialization in Cuba. I learned a great deal from this challenging work, especially from Wirtz s productive expansions of the notions of register and chronotope. The book is analytically powerful and richly engaged; Wirtz s own voice is a sensitively reflexive part of the polyphonic dialogues she traces through Cuban history, social life, and cultural performance. --Richard Bauman, Indiana University"

"Performing Afro-Cuba" is remarkable achievement. To put Wirtz s argument in a nutshell would be to do a gross injustice to her sophisticated and often quite elegant exposition. She is simply the smartest and theoretically most sophisticated anthropologist doing research in Cuba these days. But aside from her contribution to the regionalist literature, the real value of her work is that it speaks to enduring anthropological questions, while raising a number of new ones that are relevant far beyond her specific field site. I enthusiastically recommend it. --Stephan Palmie, author of The Cooking of History: How Not to Study Afro-Cuban Religion"

"Performing Afro-Cuba is remarkable achievement. To put Wirtz's argument in a nutshell would be to do a gross injustice to her sophisticated--and often quite elegant--exposition. She is simply the smartest and theoretically most sophisticated anthropologist doing research in Cuba these days. But aside from her contribution to the regionalist literature, the real value of her work is that it speaks to enduring anthropological questions, while raising a number of new ones that are relevant far beyond her specific field site. I enthusiastically recommend it."--Stephan Palmie, author of The Cooking of History: How Not to Study Afro-Cuban Religion

"Performing Afro-Cuba is a careful and precise anthropology of history making, a study of the effortful cultural work and highly structured theater of relations out of which the Cuban racial order was and is still, perhaps more forcefully than ever, being made and remade. Compact, well-argued, it is utterly engrossing. It attacks a familiar issue in an original way, and it does so with a strong theoretical frame rendered in an approachable writing style." --Paul Christopher Johnson, University of Michigan

"Performing Afro-Cuba is a masterful exploration of figurations of race and dialogues of racialization in Cuba. I learned a great deal from this challenging work, especially from Wirtz's productive expansions of the notions of register and chronotope. The book is analytically powerful and richly engaged; Wirtz's own voice is a sensitively reflexive part of the polyphonic dialogues she traces through Cuban history, social life, and cultural performance." --Richard Bauman, Indiana University

About the Author:

Kristina Wirtz is associate professor of anthropology at Western Michigan University. She is the author of Ritual, Discourse, and Community in Cuban Santeria.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 022611905X
• ISBN 13: 9780226119052
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352