Nature, Culture, and Race in Colonial Cuba
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Product details
- ISBN 9780300267945
- Dimensions: 156 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 13 Aug 2024
- Publisher: Yale University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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A new and necessary examination of how nineteenth-century Cuban white elites viewed the natural world, material culture, and political power as intertwined
In the decades before the Cuban wars of independence, white elites exploited the island’s natural history and culture to redefine racial identity and reassert authority. These practices occurred in the face of challenges to their political power from Cubans of mixed race and as Cuba’s dependence on sugar led to ecological and economic precarity.
Lee Sessions uses close visual analysis to investigate how white elites wielded power by manipulating material culture, placing in conversation for the first time the natural history museums, botanical gardens, and thousands of paintings, drawings, and prints produced in and about Cuba from 1820 to 1860. This important and novel book explores how groups used material culture to imagine their own future at a moment when racial and political dynamics were changing rapidly, while facing an ecological disaster of unimaginable scale.
In the decades before the Cuban wars of independence, white elites exploited the island’s natural history and culture to redefine racial identity and reassert authority. These practices occurred in the face of challenges to their political power from Cubans of mixed race and as Cuba’s dependence on sugar led to ecological and economic precarity.
Lee Sessions uses close visual analysis to investigate how white elites wielded power by manipulating material culture, placing in conversation for the first time the natural history museums, botanical gardens, and thousands of paintings, drawings, and prints produced in and about Cuba from 1820 to 1860. This important and novel book explores how groups used material culture to imagine their own future at a moment when racial and political dynamics were changing rapidly, while facing an ecological disaster of unimaginable scale.
Lee Sessions is an art historian and permanent collections associate curator at El Museo del Barrio. He previously held positions at the Yale Center for British Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Lohin Geduld Gallery. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
