Suspect freedoms : the racial and sexual politics of Cubanidad in New York, 1823-1957 / Nancy Raquel Mirabal.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Mirabal, Nancy Raquel, 1966- author.

Series:

Culture, labor, history

Culture, labor, history series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

National Book Committee.

Cubans--New York (State)--New York--History--19th century.

Cubans.

Cubans--New York (State)--New York--History--20th century.

Immigrants--New York (State)--New York--History.

Immigrants.

Exiles--New York (State)--New York--History.

Exiles.

Cubans--New York (State)--New York--Ethnic identity--History.

Black people--Race identity--New York (State)--New York--History.

Black people.

Race--Political aspects--New York (State)--New York--History.

Race.

Sex--Political aspects--New York (State)--New York--History.

Sex.

Race relations.

History.

Ethnic relations.

Sex--Political aspects.

Race--Political aspects.

Black people--Race identity.

Ethnicity.

New York (N.Y.)--Ethnic relations--History.

New York (N.Y.).

New York (N.Y.)--Race relations--History.

Cubans--Ethnic identity.

New York (State)--New York.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

xiii, 311 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

New York : New York University Press, [2017]

Summary:

"Beginning in the early nineteenth century, Cubans migrated to New York City to organize and protest against Spanish colonial rule. While revolutionary wars raged in Cuba, expatriates envisioned, dissected, and redefined meanings of independence and nationhood. An underlying element was the concept of Cubanidad, a shared sense of what it meant to be Cuban. Deeply influenced by discussions of slavery, freedom, masculinity, and United States imperialism, the question of what and who constituted 'being Cuban' remained in flux and often, suspect. The first book to explore Cuban racial and sexual politics in New York during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Suspect Freedoms chronicles the largely unexamined and often forgotten history of more than a hundred years of Cuban exile, migration, diaspora, and community formation. Nancy Raquel Mirabal delves into the rich cache of primary sources, archival documents, literary texts, club records, newspapers, photographs, and oral histories to write what Michel Rolph Trouillot has termed an 'unthinkable history.' Situating this pivotal era within larger theoretical discussions of potential, future, visibility, and belonging, Mirabal shows how these transformations complicated meanings of territoriality, gender, race, power, and labor. She argues that slavery, nation, and the fear that Cuba would become 'another Haiti' were critical in the making of early diasporic Cubanidades, and documents how, by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Afro-Cubans were authors of their own experiences; organizing movements, publishing texts, and establishing important political, revolutionary, and social clubs. Meticulously documented and deftly crafted, Suspect Freedoms unravels a nuanced and vital history"--Publisher's website.

Contents:

Introduction: Diasporic histories and archival hauntings

Rhetorical geographies : annexation, fear, and the impossibility of Cuban diasporic whiteness, 1840-1868

"With painful interest" : the Ten Years' War, masculinity, and the politics of revolutionary Blackness, 1865-1898

In darkest anonymity : labor, revolution, and the uneasy visibility of Afro-Cubans in New York, 1880-1901

Orphan politics : race, migration, and the trouble with "new" colonialisms, 1898-1945

Monumental desires and defiant tributes : Antonio Maceo and the early history of El Club Cubano Inter-Americano, 1945-1957

Epilogue.

Notes:

"Also available as an ebook"--Title page verso.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780814761113

0814761119

9780814761120

0814761127

OCLC:

968173601