In this Book
- iVenceremos?: The Erotics of Black Self-making in Cuba
- Book
- 2011
- Published by: Duke University Press
summary
Promoting the revolutionary socialist project of equality and dignity for all, the slogan ¡Venceremos! (We shall overcome!) appears throughout Cuba, everywhere from newspapers to school murals to nightclubs. Yet the accomplishments of the Cuban state are belied by the marginalization of blacks, the prejudice against sexual minorities, and gender inequities. ¡Venceremos? is a groundbreaking ethnography on race, desire, and belonging among blacks in early-twenty-first-century Cuba, as the nation opens its economy to global capital. Expanding on Audre Lorde’s vision of embodied, even “useful,” desire, Jafari S. Allen shows how black Cubans engage in acts of “erotic self-making,” reinterpreting, transgressing, and potentially transforming racialized and sexualized interpellations of their identities. He illuminates intimate spaces of autonomy created by people whose multiply subaltern identities have rendered them illegible to state functionaries, and to most scholars. In everyday practices in Havana and Santiago de Cuba—including Santeria rituals, gay men’s parties, hip hop concerts, the tourist-oriented sex trade, lesbian organizing, HIV education, and just hanging out—Allen highlights small but significant acts of struggle for autonomy and dignity.
Table of Contents
Download Full Book
- Acknowledgments
- pp. ix-xii
- 1. Looking (at) “Afro-Cuba(n)”
- pp. 19-40
- 5. Friendship as a Mode of Survival
- pp. 129-156
- References
- pp. 211-231
Additional Information
ISBN
9780822393801
Related ISBN(s)
9780822349327, 9780822349501
MARC Record
OCLC
754144154
Pages
254
Launched on MUSE
2012-01-01
Language
English
Open Access
No
Copyright
2011