Cuban Underground Hip Hop: Black Thoughts, Black Revolution, Black Modernity by Tanya L. Saunders (review)

In Cuban Underground Hip Hop, sociologist Tanya Saunders combines an abundance of information about the heyday of an Afro-descendant arts-based social movement in the Americas with a political urgency that centers on the decolonization of the hemisphere. She tells the story of the Cuban underground hip-hop movement (CUHHM) from 1998 to 2006, a group of DJs, MCs, and graffiti artists that leveled a "transnational Afro-diasporic challenge to the coloniality of American culture" (8). Through participant observation, interviews, and analysis of song lyrics and Cuban legal documents, Saunders gives an exhaustive and heterogeneous account of the movement, acknowledging its importance to Cuban cultural politics while also highlighting its shortcomings, not least in certain artists' inability to make adequate room for feminist criticism.

In her introduction, Saunders characterizes the CUHHM as a response to colonial histories of racialization in the Americas. Dividing her attention between race and cultural production in Latin America, hip-hop studies, and black feminist and queer-of-color critique, she situates the CUHHM in larger transnational currents of black consciousness in the hemisphere.

Over the following two chapters, Saunders specifies the relationship between the CUHHM and black cultural movements in Cuba and the Americas. In chapter 2, Saunders gives an overview of the history of arts-based movements in Cuba since the Revolution, particularly those that used music as their primary medium, as Saunders asserts these have been understudied. In relation to her project, she describes Cuba's politicized cultural sphere as emerging from generations of negotiations between cultural workers and the Cuban state. Saunders broadens her scope in the third chapter to consider the relationship between the CUHHM and transnational black anticolonial movements. Reviewing existing literature on race and cultural production in Cuba, Saunders asserts the mutuality of black consciousness in Cuba and the United States and points out formative similarities between the respective birthplaces of hip-hop in the two countries: the Bronx in the 1970s and 1980s and Havana during the Special Period.

In her fourth chapter, Saunders gives an intersectional account of racial formations in Cuba since the Revolution and during the Special Period with an emphasis on the meanings of whiteness, mulat@ness, and blackness within the CUHHM. She makes a significant contribution to the study of race in Latin America through her thoughtful discussion of competing understandings of racial fluidity in the United States and Latin America and the Caribbean. Saunders argues that scholars have focused too much on the language of race and racism and not enough on what people do locally with that material. She suggests that to deny the salience of race in the region because of its supposed fluidity is to "truncate the ability of marginalized populations to … make sense of their particular experiences with race and racialization" (164).

Saunders analyzes the lyrical content of the music of CUHHM "artivists" (Saunders's description of these artist-activists) in chapter 5, specifically their use of the terms revolution and revolutionary, activism and activists, poverty and marginalization, and underground and commercial. Through this final pairing, Saunders describes instances in which the Cuban state censored the movement by classifying its artists as amateur enthusiasts. This was addressed partially through the eventual creation of the Agencia Cubana de Rap (ACR) in 2002, which received ambivalent support from CUHHM artists.

In chapters 6 and 7, Saunders examines the feminist and queer dimensions of the movement. She explores the meaning of feminist identity for members of the CUHHM in chapter 6, emphasizing its tension with the Cuban government's insistence on revolutionary-citizen discourse since 1959. Saunders gives a thorough account of Magia MC's time as the head of the ACR and critiques the lack of women-only spaces within the CUHHM and in Cuba's political structures more generally. In chapter 7, Saunders tells the story of Las Krudas CUBENSI—which she describes as Cuba's first out lesbian group—from the group's...