More Books

Diversión: Play and Popular Culture in Cuban America. By Albert Sergio Laguna. New York: New York University Press, 2017; 269 pp.; illustrations. $89.00 cloth, $30.00 paper, e-book available.

For Albert Sergio Laguna, it is laughter that shapes diasporic structures of belonging in Cuban Miami-Dade Hialeah. Tracing what he terms momentos de diversión—sonic, gestural, and linguistic moments of collective play in the malleable sense of diasporic Cubanness, i.e., cubanía—Laguna performs a shift in diasporic affect studies. Humor as an object of study moves him from the privileged analytic registers of melancholic exile (anger, loss, and pain) to ways that "ludic sociability" performs Cuban belonging in, against, and sometimes with US-American whiteness, antiblack racism, and heteronormativity. Multiple sites of kinship and identity emerge throughout the book's transdisciplinary pedagogies. Loosely following the migratory waves of Cubans to the United States (from the Cuban Revolution's Freedom Flights [1965–1973] to the balsero [rafter] crisis of 1994), Laguna argues that Cuban-diasporic belonging is itself workable: performatively available for quotidian-collective reshaping through objects of popular culture. Comedic performance facilitates contact and exchange on and off the island, finding shape, velocity, and texture in the shared pleasures of stand-up, morning radio, political satire, comedic theatre, prank phone calls, and comic strips. Throughout, the first wave's stand-up icon Guillermo Álvarez Guedes cedes and indelibly marks popular contemporary public radio; economies of sentiment structuring the Miami festival known as Club Nostalgia touch and warp under population shifts and changing labor economies in Hialeah; and all tangle in the diasporic, where what feels Cuban is playfully rearranged—and shared.

The Art of Civil Action: Political Space and Cultural Dissent. Edited and introduced by Philipp Dietachmair and Pascal Gielen. Amsterdam: Valiz, 2018; 304 pp.; illustrations. $25.00 paper.

The touchstones for Philipp Dietachmair and Pascal Gielen's collection of conversations and essays on the art of civil action are familiar: Occupy Wall Street, the Zapatistas, Pussy Riot, the occupations of Maagdenhuis and the Teatro Valle Occupato, and refugee initiatives in Greece and Germany. And yet the lines of flight drawn primarily from the academic chairs, full professors, researchers, and artists that compose the collection often miss the ways social justice movements refuse the vector of "civility" in contesting state imposition. That slippage—from the civil to the civilizing—becomes the foci of only one essay of note: Max Haiven's "Beyond the Violence of Colonial Civility: Examining the Art of Raven Davis." Taking the performance-based work of this Anishinaabe artist and activist, Haiven describes how notions of "civility" and "civil space" are always already coded as white and available for sanctioning: not simply excluding indigenous and black presence from the "civil," but also policing and surveilling the distinction. To ground one's work in Indigenous studies is to know that civilization is ontologically uncivil: that is, genocidal. If forms of civility beyond the (white) settler colonial are possible, Haiven asks that we...