Suspect Freedoms: The Racial and Sexual Politics of Cubanidad

Suspect Freedoms: The Racial and Sexual Politics of Cubanidad in New York, 1823-1957 (Culture, Labor, History, 3)

The largely unexamined and often forgotten history of more than a hundred years of Cuban exile, migration, diaspora, and community formation

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Beginning in the early nineteenth century, Cubans migrated to New York City to organize and protest against Spanish colonial rule.Â While revolutionary wars raged in Cuba, expatriates envisioned, dissected, and redefined meanings of independence and nationhood. An underlying element was the concept of Cubanidad, a shared sense of what it meant to be Cuban. Deeply influenced by discussions of slavery, freedom, masculinity, and United States imperialism, the question of what and who constituted â€œbeing Cubanâ€ remained in flux and often, suspect.Â

Suspect Freedoms is the first book to explore Cuban racial and sexual politics in New York during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nancy Raquel Mirabal delves into the rich cache of primary sources, archival documents, literary texts, club records, newspapers, photographs, and oral histories to write what Michel Rolph Trouillot has termed an â€œunthinkable history.â€ Situating this pivotal era within larger theoretical discussions of potential, future, visibility, and belonging, Mirabal shows how these transformations complicated meanings of territoriality, gender, race, power, and labor. She argues that slavery, nation, and the fear that Cuba would become â€œanother Haitiâ€ were critical in the making of early diasporic Cubanidades, and documents how, by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Afro-Cubans were authors of their own experiences; organizing movements, publishing texts, and establishing important political, revolutionary, and social clubs.Â Meticulously documented and deftly crafted, Suspect Freedoms unravels a nuanced and vital history.
Country USA
Brand NYU Press
Manufacturer NYU Press
Binding Paperback
ReleaseDate 2017-01-10
UnitCount 1
EANs 9780814761120

Country	USA
Brand	NYU Press
Manufacturer	NYU Press
Binding	Paperback
ReleaseDate	2017-01-10
UnitCount	1
EANs	9780814761120

Suspect Freedoms: The Racial and Sexual Politics of Cubanidad in New York, 1823-1957 (Culture, Labor, History, 3)

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