iVenceremos?: The Erotics of Black Self-making in Cuba

Perverse Modernities

by Jafari S. Allen

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.

Genres: Queer, Anthropology, Nonfiction, Grad School

241 pages, Paperback

First published July 22, 2011

About the author

Jafari S. Allen is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Global Black Studies at the University of Miami and author of ¡Venceremos? The Erotics of Black Self-making in Cuba, published by Duke University Press.

Reviews

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

An absolute must read for those interested in ethnography,Diaspora, and post modernism.

[Justin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't agree with everything in this book, and the writing can be clunky at times (most sentences could be streamlined, although you won't realize this unless you actively think about it), but it reads well and doesn't pull punches (even if I disagree with some of the punches). Allen says what he wants to say with none of the unnecessary pretense so common to academic writing.

[Ashanti · Rating 4 out of 5]

pics and description available

http://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/Vie...

feliz lectura

[Mills College Library]

305.89607 A4271 2011

[Shannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great ethnographic study of, well, what the title says.