Performing Afro-Cuba in Carnival: Image, Voice, Spectacle in the Making of Race and History

FAIN: FT-59884-12

Kristina Silke Wirtz
Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5200)

The eastern Cuban city of Santiago de Cuba's annual Carnival animates historical figures, traditions, and events of the city and nation's past in mass spectacles that reveal the role of historical imagination in Cuba's current social order. My book project, Performing Afro-Cuba, examines how performing particular stories about Cuba's colonial past and African heritage in carnival competitions, folklore shows, and folk religious ceremonies shapes local and national understandings of Blackness and cultural resistance. I use ethnographic data and field recordings collected from 2006-2011 to explore how voicing, temporal frames, and other semiotic cues of performance contribute to processes of racialization in interaction with other kinds of social identity. I propose to write one chapter on song as a modality of historical memory in two traditional Carabali societies, and another following a Conga ensemble through the Carnival season to explore Santiago's Revolutionary carnivalesque.

Associated Products

Performing Afro-Cuba: Image, Voice, Spectacle in the Making of Race and History (Book)
Title: Performing Afro-Cuba: Image, Voice, Spectacle in the Making of Race and History
Author: Kristina Wirtz
Abstract: Visitors to Cuba will notice that Afro-Cuban figures and references are everywhere: in popular music and folklore shows, paintings and dolls of Santería 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. 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.
Year: 2014
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780226118864
Copy sent to NEH?: No

Prizes

Edward Sapir Book Prize
Date: 12/4/2015
Organization: Society for Linguistic Anthropology
Abstract: The Edward Sapir Book Prize was established in 2001 and is awarded to a book that makes the most significant contribution to our understanding of language in society, or the ways in which language mediates historical or contemporary sociocultural processes. Beginning in 2012, the Sapir Prize has been awarded annually.

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