Performing Afro-Cuba : image, voice, spectacle in the making of race and history / Kristina Wirtz.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Wirtz, Kristina, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Black people--Race identity--Cuba.

Black people.

Black people--Cuba--Social life and customs.

Black people--Cuba--Social conditions.

Folklore--Cuba--History.

Folklore.

History.

Social conditions.

Manners and customs.

Black people--Race identity.

Cuba.

Physical Description:

xiii, 329 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

Chicago ; London : University of Chicago Press, 2014.

Summary:

Visitors to Cuba will notice that Afro-Cuban figures and references are everywhere: in popular music and folklore shows, paintings and dolls of Santería saints in airport shops, and even restaurants with plantation themes. In Performing Afro-Cuba, Kristina Wirtz examines how the animation of Cuba's colonial past and African heritage through such figures and performances not only reflects but also shapes the Cuban experience of Blackness. Employing Bakhtin's concept of "chronotopes"-the semiotic construction of space-time-she examines the roles of voice, temporality, embodiment, imagery, and memory in the racializing process. The result is a deftly balanced study that marries racial studies, performance studies, anthropology, and semiotics to explore the nature of race as a cultural sign, one that is always in process, always shifting. Book jacket.

Contents:

Semiotics of race and history

Image-inations of blackness

Bodies in motion : routes of blackness in the Carnivalesque

Voices : chronotopic registers and historical imagination in Cuban folk religious rituals

Pride : singing black history in the Carabalí cabildos

Performance : state-sponsored folklore spectacles of blackness as history

Brutology : the enregisterment of bozal, from "blackface" theater to spirit.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780226118864

022611886X

9780226119052

022611905X

OCLC:

859446808