Defending Rumba in Havana

Maya J. Berry is Assistant Professor of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Preface ix Acknowledgments xvii Introduction 1 1. Black Inclusion, Black Enclosure 47 2. Black Feminist Aptitudes 88 3. Sacred Swagger and Its Social Order 129 4. Moving Labor across Markets 169 5. Underworld Assembly 219 Conclusion 249 Epilogue 259 Notes 267 References 281 Index 299

"It's not often that one gets to read something that builds so beautifully and interdisciplinarily on the theoretical areas with which one has been engaged while also inspiring new directions for thought and action. Defending Rumba in Havana is analytically exciting and methodologically caring, offering new avenues for fruitfully engaging the embodied formulation of life otherwise in the wake of both the plantation and the revolutionary state." - Deborah A. Thomas, author of (Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair) "Meticulously researched and beautifully written, Defending Rumba in Havana is among the best Cuban ethnographies in the Post-Fidel era. Maya J. Berry's work is especially important because of its connections to the religious and spiritual as well as the sort of infrapolitical views of Cuban political-economy in which race and culture are not only imbricated but constitutive and inequitably remunerative. This book will be an enduring and leading work in anthropology, Black studies, gender and feminist studies, and Cuban studies." - Jafari S. Allen, author of (There's a Disco Ball Between Us: A Theory of Black Gay Life)