As an anthropologist doing research in Cuba, Wirtz noticed that Afro-Cuban cultural forms such as popular music, folklore, shows, and paintings are important semiotic carriers that dynamically reflect and shape the Cuban experience of Blackness. Based on Bakhtin's (1981) concept of chronotopes, this book gives a detailed semiotic and anthropological study of how the cultural representation of Afro-Cuban is dynamically realized in space-time.
This book consists of seven chapters. In chapter 1, Wirtz points out that the way of performing Blackness has gradually and dynamically developed in Cuban temporal and spatial cultural forms such as performance, songs, dancing, stories, and so on. Notions of Blackness, time, Bakhtin's chronotope and memory, place, and historical memory are discussed in detail, followed by an introduction to Wirtz's field research. In the following six chapters, chapter 2 to chapter 7, the shaping of Blackness in different types of cultural forms is discussed. Chapter 2 focuses on the visual imagination of Blackness in Cuban folklore performances. Analysis of several representative images of performances and paintings reveals that the semiotic representation of Blackness in Cuban performances is a dynamic process. Wirtz develops this notion to propose a conception of race being a strategically deployable shifter. Chapter 3 examines how racial identification is embodied in Cubans’ daily life. Motions and movements of Cuban people in carnivals are analyzed, showing that the sense of Blackness has become a bodily fact that can find reflections in places, locations, and people's daily gestures. Chapter 4 discusses songs occurring in Cuban folk religious rituals, implying that Cubans’ historical understanding of Blackness has registered into different semiotic levels of Cuban songs. In chapter 5, songs and performances of Blackness in Carabalí songs and performances are regarded as interactional events that represent historical events using modern genres. It was found that Carabalí songs and performances often employed multiple embodied semiotic materializations of Blackness and Cuban history to give the audience an authentic impression of historical Africans. In contrast to previous chapters, chapter 6 is designed to examine how Blackness is performed as a part of the country's history in state-sponsored folklores. The participation frames and chronotopic work of two particular performances are analyzed, revealing that governmental policy on racism has a strong restricting influence on using denotationally explicit racist speech and critiques of racism. The evolution of Bozal, a Cuban sociolect, is analyzed in chapter 7. Wirtz suggests that modern performances of Bozal interdiscursively derive from both the religious performance of Blackness and Black speech.
This book is a comprehensive exploration of semiotic and multimodal racialization of Blackness in Cuba. It provides us with a quite different understanding of the dynamic realization of race and history in different cultural forms of Cuba, and in Cubans’ daily lives. It is recommended reading for scholars doing research on semiotics, anthropological studies, race studies and art studies, and so on.
