Cover of Performing Afro-Cuba
Performing Afro-Cuba Image, Voice, Spectacle in the Making of Race and History
by Kristina Wirtz
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Cloth: 978-0-226-11886-4 | Paper: 978-0-226-11905-2 | Electronic: 978-0-226-11919-9
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226119199.001.0001

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ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

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. She also investigates how this process operates at different spatial and temporal scales—from the immediate present to the imagined past, from the barrio to the socialist state.
           
Wirtz analyzes a variety of performances and the ways they construct Cuban racial and historical imaginations. She offers a sophisticated view of performance as enacting diverse revolutionary ideals, religious notions, and racial identity politics, and she outlines how these concepts play out in the ongoing institutionalization of folklore as an official, even state-sponsored, category. 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.  

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Kristina Wirtz is associate professor of anthropology at Western Michigan University. She is the author of Ritual, Discourse, and Community in Cuban Santería. 

REVIEWS

“Performing Afro-Cuba is remarkable achievement. To put Wirtz’s argument in a nutshell would be to do a gross injustice to her sophisticated—and often quite elegant—exposition. She is simply the smartest and theoretically most sophisticated anthropologist doing research in Cuba these days. But aside from her contribution to the regionalist literature, the real value of her work is that it speaks to enduring anthropological questions, while raising a number of new ones that are relevant far beyond her specific field site. I enthusiastically recommend it.”
— Stephan Palmié, author of The Cooking of History: How Not to Study Afro-Cuban Religion

“Performing Afro-Cuba is a careful and precise anthropology of history making, a study of the effortful cultural work and highly structured theater of relations out of which the Cuban racial order was and is still, perhaps more forcefully than ever, being made and remade. Compact, well-argued, it is utterly engrossing. It attacks a familiar issue in an original way, and it does so with a strong theoretical frame rendered in an approachable writing style.”
 
 
— Paul Christopher Johnson, University of Michigan

“Performing Afro-Cuba is a masterful exploration of figurations of race and dialogues of racialization in Cuba. I learned a great deal from this challenging work, especially from Wirtz’s productive expansions of the notions of register and chronotope. The book is analytically powerful and richly engaged; Wirtz’s own voice is a sensitively reflexive part of the polyphonic dialogues she traces through Cuban history, social life, and cultural performance.”
 
 
— Richard Bauman, Indiana University

“A thoughtful and timely study that locates race in Cuba through performance studies and ethnography. . . . It expands the boundaries of the anthropological study of religion by questioning the very paradigms of inquiry and temporality that locate the ethnographic subject. That is, Wirtz’s study moves us away from the exotic tropes that often create an ethnographic present and into a complexly situated racial terrain. Her focus on Santiago de Cuba is also a welcome gesture away from Havana-oriented studies of Cuban culture, religion, and society. Indeed, the book helps readers to negotiate Cuban pageantry within broader Caribbean and Atlantic traditions that perform race in multi-faceted ways. . . . Wirtz’s work should inspire further investigations of transnational, especially Caribbean and Atlantic, enactments of historical memory and race in carnival. These final considerations are a testament to Wirtz’s substantial achievement in Performing Afro-Cuba where she gets readers to consider race and performance in ways that are expansive, critical, and illuminating.”
 
— Journal of Folklore Research

"Performing Afro-Cuba offers an important read on the semiotic contours of race and folkloric spectacle in eastern Cuba and marks an important contribution to broader folklore studies."
— American Anthropologist

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Agradecimientos

List of Illustrations


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226119199.003.0001
[ethnography, Cuba, Blackness, racial logics, historical consciousness, folklore, performance, performativity, chronotope, enregisterment, African diaspora, slavery, diasporic consciousness, Santiago de Cuba]
This introduction starts by accepting the premises that concepts of race have interconnected but still localized histories, that racial logics require continued cultural effort to be sustained, and that the historical imagination is inextricably entangled with the racial imagination. In this ethnographic investigation of Cuban folklore performances that tie Blackness to a history of transatlantic slavery, we can ask what significance that history has, for whom, and why? The chapter introduces key concepts of chronotope, or spatio-temporal semiosis, African diasporic consciousness as one kind of historical memory, performance, performativity, and enregisterment. The city of Santiago de Cuba is introduced as the field site, a folkloric dance performance is described, and a state-run restaurant serving up plantation slavery nostalgia is examined. (pages 1 - 44)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226119199.003.0002
[race, racialization, Blackness, folklore performance, performativity, shifters, historical subjectivity, representation, Cuban art, dance]
Racialization must be studied as a process in order to address how persistent stereotypes gain their durability. Rather than approaching race as a static classification, it is treated as a shifter and performative. For the case of Blackness in Cuba, this chapter sketches out a broader, historicized view of a Cuban semiotic regime of morality and personhood, in and through which Blackness has gained its associations and social values. Representations of Blackness in (and as) performance are examined in folklore performances and visual arts, detailing some of the visual semiotic configurations that coalesce across repeated performances to overdetermine the primordial character of Blackness as a quintessential source of folklore and historical subjectivity, and as a marker of social danger. (pages 45 - 87)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226119199.003.0003
[Carnival, carnivalesque, embodiment, dance, race and nation, national identity, racial identification, Blackness, Cuba, transculturation, mestizaje, racial exclusion, performance]
How is Blackness constituted as phenotypic attribute and embodied experience, so that racial identifications seem always already to exist? Starting with the dual premises that the body is constituted through social action while providing semiotic resources for social interaction, the chapter suggests an analytic attending to the everyday circulation of ideologies and practices of embodiment. First describing large-scale discourses of race and nation, the analysis then examines the interactional level in which people act and reflect on their commonsense presuppositions about race, then tracks motions and movements of raced bodies with a focus on Carnival as example and as trope. It is through the dynamics of emplacement that bodies and physical spaces are racialized, as people dance along the routes of official and grassroots Carnival. (pages 88 - 144)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226119199.003.0004
[Santería, Reglas de Palo, Lucumí, Bozal, enregisterment, voice, chronotope, Cuba, Blackness, ritual performance, spirit possession, historical imagination]
Distinctive voices have come to index the sound of "folkloric" Blackness in Cuba, through the enregisterment of speech styles associated with African slaves and African-derived folk religious practices. Three such registers are examined in this chapter, and particularly during two ritual performances involving spirit possession. Santería’s ritual register, Lucumí, and the ritual jargon used in the Reglas de Palo are esoteric, high prestige registers, while Bozal is an archaic Cuban sociolect of Spanish identified with African slaves. Each has come to index particular ritual domains and voices of Blackness, as well as distinctive chronotopes of mythic transcendence, historical past, and immanent ritual power in the present. By evoking spatio-temporal frames and categories of persons and relationships, these registers contribute to the historical imagination of Blackness. (pages 145 - 174)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226119199.003.0005
[folklore, performance, slavery, Cuba, historical imagination, racialization, intertextuality, chronotope, racial subjectivities, gender]
This chapter considers performances of Blackness in the Carabalí Cabildos as neighborhood-based domains of Black sociality and "carriers of tradition" charged with cultural preservation. Taking the sentiment of pride as a focal point, Carabalí performances provide an opportunity to understand the workings of chronotope in producing historical and racial subjectivities. Carabalí songs and performances create a distinctive chronotope of Blackness as the "timeless past still among us," a matter of history and folklore rather than an identification within contemporary cultural politics. It is through interdiscursive connections with the colonial past of slavery and rebellion, as well as strategic erasures of more radical political, racial, and gender critique, that the Carabalí cabildos position themselves as sites of quintessentially Cuban Blackness and solidarity. (pages 175 - 218)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226119199.003.0006
[Cuban Revolution, cultural production, spectacle, folklore performance, folklorization, bureaucratization, spirit possession, racialization, race and nation, dance, racial subjectivity, historical subjectivity]
"Folklore" is an official, bureaucratically managed category of cultural production in Cuba. This chapter situates folklore performance in the context of the Cuban Revolution’s history of government bureaucratization of “culture,” which authenticates cultural forms and their practitioners as part of its ideological agenda. To investigate the uptake of folklore into state-sponsored spectacles, two particular performances are analyzed: a dance choreography by a professional folklore ensemble and a folk religious ceremony by a visiting amateur ensemble. The analysis describes how these imagined historical tableaus contribute to the enregisterment of Blackness as folklore and history, inculcating particular racial and historical subject positions for performers and audiences. (pages 219 - 256)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226119199.003.0007
[Bozal, enregisterment, intertextuality, blackface theater, parody, racialization, metaculture, race and nation, Cuban history]
This chapter traces a discourse history of the enregisterment of Bozal, a Cuban speech style indexing the historical persona of the African slave and used during folk religious ceremonies. A deeper “genealogy” destabilizes facile notions of tracing authentic African sources of Bozal: rather than reflect actual speech by African-born slaves, Bozal's enregisterment began with and always involved double-voiced representations of imagined social types—what recent scholarship has described as “Mock” forms disparaging the speech of racialized Others. Bozal appeared in scholarly accounts and was parodied in blackface comic theater in 19th-century Cuba. The lesson for understanding the role of Bozal or any "Africanizing" voice in performance today is to always consider the mediating effects of metacultural practices in shaping the social meaning of speech styles. (pages 257 - 290)

Notes

References Cited

Index

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