Intimations of Modernity: Civil Culture in Nineteenth-Century Cuba by Louis A. Pérez Jr. (review)

Intimations of Modernity: Civil Culture in Nineteenth-Century Cuba joins a growing number of studies of nineteenth-century Cuban history and culture that focus not on epic struggles for abolition or national sovereignty, but instead on more every day practices. Pérez is particularly interested in middle-class women's changing culture: how they turned to penning literature, adapting European fashion, riding bicycles, or engaging in flirtation and dance. Perez's claim is that market culture spurred changes in mores (he writes of morals) in nineteenth-century Cuba—changes that, while not ostensibly political themselves, contributed to a nascent national culture that sought to challenge Spanish rule. Intimations of Modernity can thus be understood as a kind of prequel to the author's On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture (1999), which argued that (mainly U.S.) consumer goods and material culture in late nineteenth-century Cuba contributed to anti-Spanish, anti-colonial positions.

Intimations of Modernity sets out to document the emergence of an "urban Creole middle class" in Cuba. Pérez argues that market forces drove social change and a questioning of prior economic and moral systems. As A. Ricardo López and Barbara Weinstein's The Making of the Middle Class: A Transnational History (2012) makes clear, middle class in multi-racial societies often was understood to be synonymous with whiteness, and, although Pérez does not state so explicitly, many of the cultural practices Pérez ascribes to a Creole or criollo class seem largely available to white Cubans. A capacious term, "middle class" has also often connoted notions of modernity, a concept central to the period Pérez documents, and which he argues encompassed a range of developments: technology, trade, finance, changing fashions and sexual codes.

Chapter One, "To Diffuse the Light of Civilization," stresses how the post-Haitian Revolution sugar boom in Cuba propelled the island into a more central position in a global economy and led to changes that Cubans associated with modernity: electricity, street-lights, telecommunications technology, railroads, as well as conspicuous consumption, philharmonics, literary circles, and theaters. Chapter Two, "To Advance the Course of Progress Forward," further explores a whiggish Cuban discourse that opposed modernity to Spanish culture and rule, the latter understood to be "backward." Pérez examines period consumer culture—luxury imports as well as humbler domestic goods (furniture, chinaware, silverware)—fashion, the growth of advertising, and women's role in an emerging retail economy, and offers compelling readings of little-known fashion magazines and advertisements. These readings complement recent studies on the topic, such as literary historian Víctor Goldgel Carballo's exploration of fashion in nineteenth-century Cuba (Cuando lo nuevo conquistó América. Prensa, moda y literatura en el siglo xix.)

Chapter Three, "The Perfection of Acting," focuses on the role of the fan (abanico) in new, gendered social protocols. Chapter Four, "Mellow Effulgence," continues to explore criollas' lives, noting the multiplication of women authors in the latter half of the nineteenth-century, the explosion of leisure reading, the development of accessible urban spaces, and still more extended uses of the fan. The final chapter, "Prologue to Perdition," reiterates Pérez's claim that consumption and goods drove new morals and changing gender norms, which allowed some women greater agency and queer men greater visibility, but also prompted a backlash of misogyny and homophobia. Particularly interesting is the chapter's attention to dance spaces, uniquely open to both sexes and to interracial relationships.

Intimations of Modernity doesn't gloss in detail what the market's moral universe might be, but Pérez argues that capitalism's emphasis on choice facilitated new forms of subjectivity, an argument Sophia Rosenfeld is similarly researching with respect to the Franco-Anglo transatlantic world. In any slim volume entire realms of experience must necessarily be excepted, and Pérez has understandably restricted his study to a certain social class. Still...