Promoting the revolutionary socialist 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.
Jafari Sinclaire Allen (Ph.D., Columbia University), jointly appointed in the Departments of African American Studies and Anthropology at Yale University, works at the intersections of [queer] sexuality, gender and blackness -- in Cuba, the US, and transnationally. A recipient of fellowships from the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council Sexuality Research Program, and Rockefeller Foundation [Diasporic Racisms Project]; he teaches courses on the cultural politics of race, sexuality and gender in black diasporas; black feminist and queer theory; critical cultural studies; ethnographic methodology and writing; subjectivity, consciousness and resistance; Cuba and the Caribbean.
His current research project, Black Queer Here and There: Sociality and Movement in the Americas turns to the transnational for a comparative understanding of race, sexuality, subjectivity, and resistance in the Americas. Black Queer Here and There will show how black queer political activists, tourists, (im)migrants, writers (and readers), filmmakers (and viewers), imagine and practice here and there. It seeks to answer a nettlesome political problem and a theoretical puzzle: (Where and under what circumstances) can the benefits and recognition of citizenship accrue to the unruly--the homosexual, the transgender person, or the black? And if black queers cannot be full citizens in the neo-liberal sense, can they at least be free?
Please visit Professor Allen's virtual home at www.jafariallen.com
