Circulating Culture

Cubans and their stuff are often in motion. As the book's premise this both makes intuitive sense and points to surprising circuits of trade and exchange. The author traces the circulation of, among other things, human remains, antiques, valuables pawned and borrowed, and digital objects. Through a series of ethnographic episodes drawn from the author's fieldwork in Havana and Miami, Cubans on either side of the Florida Strait who mobilize personal and commercial networks in order to confound bureaucratic and political roadblocks emerge with clarity. Many were born post-1959 and are navigating a world not of their making. The privilege and wealth of prior generations of Cuban migrants has not necessarily been transferred in their direction. They use what they have (kinship ties, knowledge, mobility) and find ways not only to create income but also, Jennifer Cearns argues, to generate and sustain their sense of cubanidad. Cearns presents contradictions and intriguing personal and political journeys throughout. Her attention to the relationships between objects and their people renders this book a valuable contribution to scholarly conversations on identity, which often draw solely on textual analysis.One example of Cubans trying to remain connected to their cubanidad is Pilar, who runs a Cuban memorabilia store in Miami. The items in her store range from touristy souvenir items such as mojito glasses to older everyday items from before the Cuban Revolution, including photographs, school pins, and toys. Although Pilar has not been in Cuba for over 50 years, she identifies very strongly with—and promotes a distinct idea of—prerevolutionary Cuba, with its implicit critique of the revolution. Younger and more recently arrived Cubans find her ideological stance difficult to swallow, but both parties, notes Cearns, feel staunchly Cuban, and the objects prompt and sustain those feelings.While this book creatively follows and interrogates commercial and affective circulations and asks how those constitute or generate particular identities, it might be more accurate to narrow the book's stated geographic focus. The research was conducted in Havana and Miami, and their specificities, as the author states, are not wholly representative of Cubans or Cubanness. Yet the book's frame of reference remains “Cuban.” One wonders what nuances might have been made more apparent had the author leaned into, rather than skirted around, the monumental particularities of Havana and Miami, laden with symbolic, material, and ideological burdens of generations past and present.There are other ways that circuits of exchange and meaning making could have emerged in sharper relief. The author might have allowed readers to sit longer with her subjects and offered more in-depth accounts of their voices, views, and aspirations, rather than relying so heavily on a scholarly apparatus. The text invokes a range of anthropologists or cultural theorists, among them Bronisław Malinowski and Pierre Bourdieu, but few of them directly address the Caribbean or Cuba, and most of them are not scholars from the Caribbean or Cuba. The theoretical framing hence always originates elsewhere, which, disconcertingly, implies a kind of paucity of Caribbean theory. Yet many scholars of and from the Caribbean have addressed issues of mobility, identity, and the circulation of goods. Engagement with the work of Carla Freeman, for example, might have helped to recognize the resonances between Cubans who journey to Guyana to purchase clothing in order to resell it back home and the Barbadian women in Freeman's work, whom she identifies as higglers, who also engage in transnational commercial clothing circuits in the interest of creating and maintaining gender and class identities. Sidney Mintz wrote about market women and their gendered patterns of networking and exchange, noting the ways they drove colonial and postcolonial island economies. Michael Bustamante and Rafael Rojas have written about the politics of memory. Other scholars have written about the relevance of objects and critiqued representation of the Caribbean as a place frozen in time. Some of these scholars have noted the longer-term circulations between Havana and Miami, ongoing since the nineteenth century. To take those into account would have yielded a richer story of both continuity and change. It would have placed this research at the center of ongoing conversations, to the benefit of both

Economic geography · Geography · Political science · Cuban History and Society · Latin American and Latino Studies

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