Negro Soy Yo: Hip Hop and Raced Citizenship in Neoliberal Cuba by Marc D. Perry (review)

Marc Perry's Negro Soy Yo: Hip Hop and Raced Citizenship in Neoliberal Cuba is both a critical history and an ethnography of the emergence of the Cuban hip-hop movement against the backdrop of the country's post-Soviet transition to market liberalization. This account of cultural production and black self-making that emerged in the 1990s from Cuba's Special Period of economic crisis is a necessary guide for understanding the present and future of racialized social stratification on the island. The historical scope manages to address the most recent scandals involving Cuban hip-hop artists and intellectuals, placing them within the longue durée of the Cuban revolutionary struggle and black liberation struggles across the hemisphere.

Before delving into hip-hop, Perry first meticulously traces the roots of black political identification in Cuba to the colonial period. This strengthens his discussion of the racialized trafficking and consumption trends from which hip-hop emerged. In this history, Perry positions hip-hop as a counterpoint to the dominant cultural production of blackness as national folklore. This contextualization decenters the formal aspects of the music. Musical analysis is exchanged for accessible and elegant writing that can be appreciated by nonspecialist audiences.

The author invokes W. E. B. DuBois's theory of double consciousness to describe how a youth subculture reconciled lived racial difference in a context where the social fact of blackness runs against the grain of the hegemonic narrative of racially transcendent revolutionary confraternity. Employing an approach based in the work of Stuart Hall to understanding race as both a being and a practice signified through representation, Mark Anderson's (2009) work on the Garifuna in Honduras is a useful point of comparison for how hip-hop aesthetics are remixed throughout the diaspora to articulate local experiences of struggle. Although beginning as autonomous voices of protest from the periphery, the process of gaining institutional sponsorship put Cuban hip-hop actors in increased entanglement with state interests. Rather than depict the state in simplistic, monolithic terms as a wholly adversarial force, in his account both individuals and institutions capitalize on the exchange value of "Cuban blackness" in the global market. Racial entrepreneurialism is the framework Perry puts forth for situating hip-hop as a field of strategic maneuvering between raced exclusion and raced consumption. Accordingly, his ethnography manages to put a clear emphasis on agency while contending with the ideological limitations of Cuban nationalism and the structural constraints imposed by political economic reforms during the economic crisis.

The protagonists of Perry's study are twenty- to thirtysomething Afro-Cuban raperos (rappers), producers, DJs, and hip-hop cultural promoters whose song lyrics, stylized body practices (e.g., hair, clothes), and self-conscious claims to black belonging beyond the nation constitute their black political self-fashioning. One of the book's many strengths is the ability to vividly convey change over time, a result of Perry's more than fifteen years of ethnographic engagement in the local hip-hop scene. Entire chapters are dedicated to the personal and professional evolution of a handful of key figures, whose intimate self-reflections are contextualized alongside shifts at the national level. Perry's rigorous attention to the way in which racial formation intersects with nationhood and gender, as performative enunciations rather than naturalized givens, makes the study a welcome addition to the current body of scholarship in Cuban studies and the anthropology of the African diaspora. The author's commitment to unpacking how racism, racial performativity, and racial entrepreneurialism are gendered and sexualized displays a strong black feminist analytics. This is acutely pronounced in the author's identification of the centrality of black heteromasculine repertoires in Cuban raperos' embodiment of hip-hop and his inclusion of rich debates about feminism among women in the movement.

Overall, the work would have been strengthened by a deeper discussion of neoliberalism in the introduction and...