Dear Colleagues,
I trust that this finds everyone well and in good spirits! I am a
sociocultural anthropologist, specializing in [queer] sexualities, race
and gender in the Caribbean, and I look forward toengaging colleagues in
the UK through this listserve! Please also visit my website at
www.jafariallen.com. I am pleased to announce the publication of my new
book /¡Venceremos?: The Erotics of Black Self-making in Cuba/ (Duke
University Press). I hope that you will consider it for classroom
adoption.
Promoting the revolutionary project of equality and dignity for all, the
slogan ¡Venceremos! (We shall overcome!) appears throughout Cuba,
everywhere from newspapers to school murals to nightclubs. Yet the
accomplishments of the Cuban state are belied by the marginalization of
blacks, the prejudice against sexual minorities, and gender inequities.
/¡Venceremos? /is a groundbreaking ethnography on race, desire, and
belonging among blacks in early-twenty-first-century Cuba, as the nation
opens its economy to global capital. Expanding on Audre Lorde's vision
of embodied, even "useful," desire, Jafari S. Allen shows how black
Cubans engage in acts of "erotic self-making," reinterpreting,
transgressing, and potentially transforming racialized and sexualized
interpellations of their identities. He illuminates intimate spaces of
autonomy created by people whose multiply subaltern identities have
rendered them illegible to state functionaries, and to most scholars. In
everyday practices in Havana and Santiago de Cuba---including Santeria
rituals, gay men's parties, hip hop concerts, the tourist-oriented sex
trade, lesbian organizing, HIV education, and just hanging out---Allen
highlights small but significant acts of struggle for autonomy and dignity.
For more information, and to order the book directly from Duke
University Press, please visit
http://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/ViewProduct.php?productid=17776
<http://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/ViewProduct.php?productid=17776><http://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/ViewProduct.php?productid=17776>
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