Cuba S Racial Crucible

This prize-winning study examines the historical interplay of racial identity, nationality, and family formation in Cuba from the 18th century to today. Since the 19th century, there have been two opposing perspectives on Cuban racial identity: one that frames Cubans as white, and one that sees them as racially mixed based on acceptance of African descent. For the past two centuries, these competing views of have remained in continuous tension, while Cuban women and men make their own racially oriented decisions about choosing partners and family formation. Cuba’s Racial Crucible explores the historical dynamics of Cuban race relations by highlighting the role race has played in reproductive practices and genealogical memories associated with family formation. Karen Y. Morrison reads archival, oral-history, and literary sources to demonstrate the ideological centrality and inseparability of "race," "nation," and "family," in definitions of Cuban identity. Morrison also analyzes the conditions that supported the social advance and decline of notions of white racial superiority, nationalist projections of racial hybridity, and pride in African descent. Winner, NECLAS Marissa Navarro Best Book Prize

As a young militant in the 26th of July Movement, Esteban Morales Domínguez participated in the overthrow of the Batista regime and the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. The revolutionaries, he understood, sought to establish a more just and egalitarian society. But Morales Dominguez, an Afro-Cuban, knew that the complicated question of race could not be ignored, or simply willed away in a post-revolutionary context. Today, he is one of Cuba’s most prominent Afro-Cuban intellectuals and its leading authority on the race question. Available for the first time in English, the essays collected here describe the problem of racial inequality in Cuba, provide evidence of its existence, constructively criticize efforts by the Cuban political leadership to end discrimination, and point to a possible way forward. Morales Dominguez surveys the major advancements in race relations that occurred as a result of the revolution, but does not ignore continuing signs of inequality and discrimination. Instead, he argues that the revolution must be an ongoing process and that to truly transform society it must continue to confront the question of race in Cuba.

Women’s reproduction, including conception, pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and other physical acts of motherhood (as well as the rejection of those roles), played a critical role in the evolution and management of Cuba’s population. While existing scholarship has approached Cuba’s demographic history through the lens of migration, both forced and voluntary, Race and Reproduction in Cuba challenges this male-normative perspective by centering women in the first book-length history of reproduction in Cuba. Bonnie A. Lucero traces women’s reproductive lives, as well as key medical, legal, and institutional interventions influencing them, over four centuries. Her study begins in the early colonial period with the emergence of the island’s first charitable institutions dedicated to relieving poor women and abandoned white infants. The book’s centerpiece is the long nineteenth century, when elite interventions in women’s reproduction hinged not only on race but also legal status. It ends in 1965 when Cuba’s nascent revolutionary government shifted away from enforcing antiabortion laws that had historically targeted impoverished women of color. Questioning how elite demographic desires—specifically white population growth and nonwhite population management—shaped women’s reproduction, Lucero argues that elite men, including judges, physicians, philanthropists, and public officials, intervened in women’s reproductive lives in racially specific ways. Lucero examines how white supremacy shaped tangible differences in the treatment of women and their infants across racial lines and outlines how those reproductive outcomes were crucial in sustaining racial hierarchies through moments of tremendous political, economic, and social change.

Illuminating the activism of Black women during Cuba’s prerevolutionary period Association of Black Women Historians Letitia Woods Brown Book Prize In Black Women, Citizenship, and the Making of Modern Cuba, Takkara Brunson traces how women of African descent battled exclusion on multiple fronts and played an important role in forging a modern democracy. Brunson takes a much-needed intersectional approach to the political history of the era, examining how Black women’s engagement with questions of Cuban citizenship intersected with racial prejudice, gender norms, and sexual politics, incorporating Afro-diasporic and Latin American feminist perspectives. Brunson demonstrates that between the 1886 abolition of slavery in Cuba and the 1959 Revolution, Black women—without formal political power—navigated political movements in their efforts to create a more just society. She examines how women helped build a Black public sphere as they claimed moral respectability and sought racial integration. She reveals how Black women entered into national women’s organizations, labor unions, and political parties to bring about legal reforms. Brunson shows how women of African descent achieved individual victories as part of a collective struggle for social justice; in doing so, she highlights how racism and sexism persisted even as legal definitions of Cuban citizenship evolved.

The American Crucible furnishes a vivid and authoritative history of the rise and fall of slavery in the Americas. For over three centuries enslavement promoted the rise of capitalism in the Atlantic world. The New World became the crucible for a succession of fateful experiments in colonization, silver mining, plantation agriculture, racial enslavement, colonial rebellion, slave witness and slave resistance. Slave produce raised up empires, fostered new cultures of consumption and financed the breakthrough to an industrial order. Not until the stirrings of a revolutionary age in the 1780s was there the first public challenge to the ‘peculiar institution’. An anti-slavery alliance then set the scene for great acts of emancipation in Haiti in 1804, Britain in 1833–8, the United States in the 1860s, and Cuba and Brazil in the 1880s. In The American Crucible, Robin Blackburn argues that the anti-slavery movement forged many of the ideals we live by today. ‘The best treatment of slavery in the western hemisphere I know of. I think it should establish itself as a permanent pillar of the literature.’ Eric Hobsbawm

Bioarchaeology has relied on Darwinian perspectives and biocultural models to communicate information about the lives of past peoples. This book demonstrates how further theoretical expansion—a thoughtful engagement with critical social theorizing—can contribute insightful and more ethical outcomes. To do so, it focuses on social theoretical concepts of pertinence to bioarchaeological studies: habitus, the normal, intersectionality, necropolitics, and bioethos. These concepts can deepen study of plasticity, disease, gender, violence, and race and ethnicity, as well as advance the field’s decolonization efforts. This book also works to overcome the challenges presented by dense social theorizing, which has paid little attention to real bodies. It historicizes, explains, and adapts concepts, as well as discusses archaeological, historic, and contemporary case studies from around the world. Theorizing Bioarchaeology is intended for individuals who may have initially dismissed social theorizing as postmodern but now acknowledge this characterization as oversimplified. It is for readers who foster curiosity about bioarchaeology’s contradictions and common sense. The ideas contained in these pages may also be of use to students who know that it is naive at best and myopic at worst to presume data derived from bodies speak for themselves.

"This handbook is organized by various themes with the study of U.S. Latina/x/o Christianities. Keeping in mind that the Oxford Handbooks are geared toward graduate students and professors, the organization and layout of this handbook provides a thorough examination of interlocking themes within the academic study of Latina/x/o Christian histories, sociologies, and anthropologies. These essays, taken individually and collectively, pay attention to both the diachronic (over time, historical) as well as the synchronic (contemporary). Moreover, the essays cover the major U.S. Latina/x/o ethnic groups as well as major Christian denominations and movements. Finally, essays in the handbook attend to important intersectional realities that include empire, migration, diaspora, hybridities, borderlands, and gender"--

Slavery and the past are interconnected; there is a tension between a former time of human subjugation and the time after when that captivity can still be remembered. In a sense, this volume probes this seeming contradiction, the glory of freedom’s release and the tension with a past when freedom was denied. It also argues that the existence of slavery, in modern forms, today offers continuing evidence of man’s inhumanity to man—and the resulting absence of freedom for millions of people.