In Negro Soy Yo Marc D. Perry explores Cuba’s hip hop movement as a window into the racial complexities of the island’s ongoing transition from revolutionary socialism toward free-market capitalism. Centering on the music and lives of black-identified raperos (rappers), Perry examines the ways these young artists craft notions of black Cuban identity and racial citizenship, along with calls for racial justice, at the fraught confluence of growing Afro-Cuban marginalization and long held perceptions of Cuba as a non-racial nation. Situating hip hop within a long history of Cuban racial politics, Perry discusses the artistic and cultural exchanges between raperos and North American rappers and activists, and their relationships with older Afro-Cuban intellectuals and African American political exiles. He also examines critiques of Cuban patriarchy by female raperos, the competing rise of reggaeton, as well as state efforts to incorporate hip hop into its cultural institutions. At this pivotal moment of Cuban-U.S. relations, Perry's analysis illuminates the evolving dynamics of race, agency, and neoliberal transformation amid a Cuba in historic flux.

Negro Soy Yo: Hip Hop and Raced Citizenship in Neoliberal Cuba

iHip hop, RevoluciÓn! Nationalizing rap in Cuba

This paper analyses recent debates on race and racism in Cuba in the context of changing economic and social conditions in the island. Since the early 1990s, and largely in response to the negative effects that the so-called Special Period had on race relations, a group of artists and intellectuals began denouncing the persistence of racist practices and stereotypes in Cuban society. Although they are not organised around a single program or institution, these musicians, visual artists, writers, academics and activists share common grievances about racism and its social effects. It is in this sense that they constitute a new Afro-Cuban cultural movement. It is too early to fully assess the impact of this movement, but these artists and intellectuals have been largely successful in raising awareness about this problem and bringing it to the attention of authorities and the Cuban public.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/F549CACAD20CC05F9AC25D5BB1F114DC/S0022216X08004720a.pdf/div-class-title-the-new-afro-cuban-cultural-movement-and-the-debate-on-race-in-contemporary-cuba-div.pdf

The New Afro-Cuban Cultural Movement and the Debate on Race in Contemporary Cuba

This article explores the ways in which transnational feminist analysis can be deployed to reconfigure new gendered and racialized cartographies of the African Diaspora in Europe. First, I position contemporary film representations of trafficked Nigerian sex workers in Italy in dialogical relation to 19th century discourses of black sexuality—in particular, Sharpley-Whiting's (1999) reinscribed ‘Black Venus Master Narrative’—and assess historical and geographical (dis)continuities in their modes of signification. Second, by linking endemic factors feeding the supply of Nigerian women for the purposes of (in)voluntary participation in the Italian sex industry, such as the localized feminization of poverty and regionally specific perceptions of sex work as a temporary economic strategy, I engage with broader feminist debates on victimization and agency in global sex work and migration literatures. In doing so, this dialectical think piece highlights the gendered complexities of new African diasporic formations and the ways in which their growth is facilitated by broader illegal networks that shape and are shaped by vicissitudes in glocalized economies.

Alan West‐Durán

Papers

Rap's Diasporic Dialogues: Cuba's Redefinition of Blackness

Canon a la Cañona

A Resonant Rum for the Ears: Afro-Cuban Music*