Defending Rumba in Havana

The Sacred and the Black Corporeal Undercommons

Häftad, Engelska, 2025

Av Maya J. Berry

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In Defending Rumba in Havana, anthropologist and dancer Maya J. Berry examines rumba as a way of knowing the embodied and spiritual dimensions of Black political imagination in post-Fidel Cuba. Historically a Black working-class popular dance, rumba, Berry contends, is a method of Black Cuban struggle that provides the community, accountability, sustenance, and dignity that neither the state nor the expanding private market can. Berry’s feminist theorization builds on the notion of the undercommons to show how rumba creates a space in which its practitioners enact deeply felt and dedicatedly defended choreographies of reciprocity, refusal, sovereignty, devotion, and pleasure, both on stage and in their daily lives. Berry demonstrates that this Black corporeal undercommons emphasizes mutual aid and refuses neoliberal development logics, favoring instead a collective self-determination rooted in African diasporic spiritual practices through which material compensation and gendered power dynamics are negotiated. By centering rumba to analyze how poor Black Cubans navigate gendered and racialized life, Berry helps readers better understand the constraints and yearnings that move diasporic Black struggles to seek refuge beyond the bounds of the nation-state.Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2025-01-07
Mått152 x 229 x 21 mm
Vikt476 g
FormatHäftad
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor336
FörlagDuke University Press
ISBN9781478031338

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“It’s not often that one gets to read something that builds so beautifully and interdisciplinarily on the theoretical areas with which one has been engaged while also inspiring new directions for thought and action. Defending Rumba in Havana is analytically exciting and methodologically caring, offering new avenues for fruitfully engaging the embodied formulation of life otherwise in the wake of both the plantation and the revolutionary state.” - Deborah A. Thomas, author of (Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair) “Meticulously researched and beautifully written, Defending Rumba in Havana is among the best Cuban ethnographies in the Post-Fidel era. Maya J. Berry’s work is especially important because of its connections to the religious and spiritual as well as the sort of infrapolitical views of Cuban political-economy in which race and culture are not only imbricated but constitutive and inequitably remunerative. This book will be an enduring and leading work in anthropology, Black studies, gender and feminist studies, and Cuban studies.” - Jafari S. Allen, author of (There's a Disco Ball Between Us: A Theory of Black Gay Life)