Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898 - Softcover

Ferrer, Professor Ada

Softcover

ISBN 10: 9766400806 ISBN 13: 9789766400804

Publisher: University of the West Indies Press, 2014

Synopsis

In the late nineteenth century, in an age of ascendant racism and imperial expansion, there emerged in Cuba a movement that unified black, mulatto, and white men in an attack on Europe's oldest empire, with the goal of creating a nation explicitly defined as antiracist. This book tells the story of the thirty-year unfolding and undoing of that movement.Ada Ferrer examines the participation of black and mulatto Cubans in nationalist insurgency from 1868, when a slaveholder began the revolution by freeing his slaves, until the intervention of racially segregated American forces in 1898. In so doing, she uncovers the struggles over the boundaries of citizenship and nationality that their participation brought to the fore, and she shows that even as black participation helped sustain the movement ideologically and militarily, it simultaneously prompted accusations of race war and fed the forces of counterinsurgency. Carefully examining the tensions between racism and antiracism contained within Cuban nationalism, Ferrer paints a dynamic portrait of a movement built upon the coexistence of an ideology of racial fraternity and the persistence of presumptions of hierarchy.

About this title

Review:

An admirable book; Ada Ferrer has attentively examined the dynamics between the racial groups involved in Cuba's struggle towards independence. ("Times Literary Supplement)

About the Author:

Ada Ferrer teaches Latin American and Caribbean history at New York University.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of the West Indies Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 9766400806
• ISBN 13: 9789766400804
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 284