A01=Kristina Wirtz
academic
african
Author_Kristina Wirtz
black experience
blackness
Category=JHMC
colonial
colonialism
cuban
cultural
culture
dance
decolonized
dolls
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
folklore
gifts
heritage
historical
history
identity
image
imagination
music
performance
plantation
political
politics
popular
race
racial
racism
racist
research
revolutionary
santeria
scholarly
socialist
spectacle
tourist
visitor
voice
Product details
- ISBN 9780226119052
- Weight: 510g
- Dimensions: 16 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 05 Jun 2014
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Visitors to Cuba will notice that Afro-Cuban figures and references are everywhere: in popular music and folklore shows, paintings and dolls of Santeria 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.
Kristina Wirtz is associate professor of anthropology at Western Michigan University. She is the author of Ritual, Discourse, and Community in Cuban Santeria.
