iVenceremos?

Allen Jafari S. Allen

Description

Promoting the revolutionary socialist project of equality and dignity for all, the slogan !Venceremos! (We shall overcome!) appears throughout Cuba, everywhere from newspapers to school murals to nightclubs. Yet the accomplishments of the Cuban state are belied by the marginalization of blacks, the prejudice against sexual minorities, and gender inequities. !Venceremos? is a groundbreaking ethnography on race, desire, and belonging among blacks in early-twenty-first-century Cuba, as the nation opens its economy to global capital. Expanding on Audre Lorde's vision of embodied, even "useful," desire, Jafari S. Allen shows how black Cubans engage in acts of "erotic self-making," reinterpreting, transgressing, and potentially transforming racialized and sexualized interpellations of their identities. He illuminates intimate spaces of autonomy created by people whose multiply subaltern identities have rendered them illegible to state functionaries, and to most scholars. In everyday practices in Havana and Santiago de Cuba-including Santeria rituals, gay men's parties, hip hop concerts, the tourist-oriented sex trade, lesbian organizing, HIV education, and just hanging out-Allen highlights small but significant acts of struggle for autonomy and dignity.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Cuba
• Gender studies

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 12 août 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822393801
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

¡Venceremos?

Perverse Modernities A series edited by Judith Halberstam and Lisa Lowe

¡Venceremos? The Erotics of Black Selfmaking in Cuba

Jafari S. Allen duke university press durham and london2011

© 2011 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Published with the assistance of the Frederick W. Hilles

Publication Fund of Yale University.

Printed in the United States of America on acidfree paper∞

Designed by Nicole Hayward. Typeset in Scala by Achorn International.

Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data appear on the last

printed page of this book.

Frontispiece: © René Peña,Untitled. From the series Man Made

Materials, 1999. Courtesy of René Peña.

For Nehanda—

with my love and gratitude

1

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction Invoking “a larger freedom” 1

Looking (at) “AfroCuba(n)” 19

2 Sleight of Hand: Discursive Race, Sex, Gender 41

3

Contents

The Erotics and Politics of Selfmaking 74

4  De Cierta Manera . . . Hasta Cierto Punto (One Way or Another . . . Up to a Certain Point) 100

5 129as a Mode of Survival  Friendship

6 un Chen! ¡Hagamos (We Make Change!) 157

Coda:¡VamosaVencer! (We Will Win!) 186

 Notes 195

References 211

 Index 233

Acknowledgments

my private pleasure(and terror) in this text derives from the love and effort of collections of individuals and institutions. First, no one is able to do ethnography without people who share. This book would not be possible without people who opened their hearts and minds and their homes, meetings, social circles, and favor ite haunts. My gratitude goes to those who opened their mouths to tell their own truths and to those who opened doors to archives and to new experiences. I hope this small offering of the faithful reporting of my truth of this experience will be received with the respect and love it is offered. Three roads of Ellegua/Eshu opened the door to Cuba to me. If you want to do ethnographic research, go find someone as knowledgeable and generous as Danny Dawson. Such individuals will introduce you to their equally generous friends like the eminent painter and Cubanista Ben Jones, who will then send you to “the field” with an introduction to someone who knows everyone and everything (and has a pro vocative opinion on it all) such as Tomás Fernández Robaina, the heretical patron saint of black Cuban studies. Thank you to my friends and family who were not sure that Cuba was really a research site, but listened