Performing Afro-Cuba: Image, Voice, Spectacle in the Making of Race and History by Kristina Wirtz (review)

Kristina Wirtz offers a provocative and polemical look into the meanings of blackness in contemporary Cuba in Performing Afro-Cuba: Image, Voice, Spectacle in the Making of Race and History (2014). Combining recent theories in cultural linguistics with ethnographic fieldwork in Santiago de Cuba, Wirtz argues that Afro-Cuban invocations of African slave speech, known as Bozal, in folklore and ritual performances are a part of a legacy of “discursive blackface” (274). Afro-Cuban performers and the scholars who study them, she concludes, reinforce negative stereotypes about blackness, even as they try to show what they imagine to be authentic representations of Cuba’s African past. This claim, and indeed the entire book, leaves readers with more questions than answers, perhaps the most basic of which is how Wirtz’s analysis would have been affected by including some of the historically rooted debates among Afro-Cuban artists, scholars, and activists about how to challenge racism. Notably, many of these debates have centered on the issue of representation, providing various perspectives on which aspects of Afro-Cuban culture to highlight and perform. Nevertheless, Wirtz’s unearthing of the racist motivations behind the “enregisterment” of Bozal—“the social processes through which ‘cultural modes of speech’ emerge” (265)—by white Cuban intellectuals in the early twentieth century pushes all scholars of race, racism, and blackness to rethink accepted frameworks and try harder to make apparent the processes that have given and continue to give meaning to racial categories.

Wirtz traces the process through which Cubans constitute ideas about blackness using Bakhtin’s notion of chronotope. The author shows how Cubans relegate blackness to “a timeless past still among us” by examining the ways Afro-Cuban visual art, religious ceremonies, carnival, and folklore performances invoke a set of common narratives about slavery, slave rebellion, and black participation in the island’s nineteenth-century wars of independence (196). But even as these performances repeat and relive particular aspects of Afro-Cuban histories, Wirtz finds that they also implicitly link long-standing stereotypes of primitive, savage, and dangerous African slaves to present-day black bodies.

Wirtz builds her argument about the role Afro-Cuban performances play in constructing the meaning of blackness by comparing the visual and audio components of state-sponsored folklore events with private and semiprivate ceremonies led by local cabildo and religious leaders. She analyzes the African Trilogy performance by Santiago’s Ballet Folklórico and finds that the show’s often overdramatized dance steps, blackface-like costumes, and use of rituals from cabildos “convey Blackness as exotic, superstitious, theatrical and impenetrable” (238). Unfortunately, the book does not provide much insight into how the performers in the Ballet Folklórico understood the character of their show.

Unlike the state-sponsored folklore performances, Wirtz finds that private Regla de Ocha and Regla de Palo ceremonies and semiprivate cabildo events invoke Cuba’s African past as a way of forging community, offering advice, and reminding members of their ancestors’ contributions to the nation. However, for Wirtz, despite their potential as “counterhegemonic spaces for alternative histories” (something I wanted to hear more about), these Afro-Cuban religious ceremonies continue to enregister blackness as existing only in the past and to provide fodder for state-sponsored folklore performances (206). The central link that she draws between the various forms of Afro-Cuban expression under examination lie in those forms’ use of Bozal to represent the speech of African slaves and former slaves. Wirtz disagrees with other linguists who attempt to recover Bozal as an authentic Spanish Creole. Instead, she argues that Bozal was not an actual language; rather, it is what one scholar calls a “frozen stereotype” (263) founded on common conjugation and pronunciation mistakes that any Spanish-language learner might initially make. Tracing the enregisterment of Bozal, Wirtz demonstrates how scholars, including Spanish Golden Age literature authors, Cuban minstrel theater (teatro bufo) playwrights, and well-meaning anthropologists and ethnographers...