Cuba's Racial Crucible The Sexual Economy of Social Identities, 1750-2000 [Paperback]

Since the 19th century, assertions of a common, racially-mixed Cuban identity based on acceptance of African descent have challenged the view of Cubans as racially white. For the past two centuries, these competing views of Cuban racial identity have remained in continuous tension, while Cuban women and men make their own racially oriented choices in family formation. Cubas Racial Crucible explores the historical dynamics of Cuban race relations by highlighting the racially selective 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 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.

Examining the historical process of family formation among Afro-Cubans as an entry point into an exploration of the sexual economy of race, Karen Morrison argues that to achieve a more complete understanding of the tensions, shifts, and turns in the public discourses of race in Cuba, we first need to trace the material human relations upon which those discourses and subsequent socio-cultural and political practices are built. The constitution of these intimate worlds is both a primary process as well as a main site for the production of racial meaning. . . . Her analysis shows that various peoples from all over the Cuban social landscape transgressed racialized boundaries in their desire to recognize and legitimize their family formations, challenged the racialized hierarchies, [and by doing so] transformed the actual meanings of the categories of race.Winner, NECLAS Marissa Navarro Best Book Prize

Race in Cuba: Essays on the Revolution and Racial Inequality by Esteban Morales Dom?nguez. Edited and translated blC¤