Breaking the Chains, Forging the Nation

Breaking the Chains, Forging the Nation, edited by Aisha Finch and Fannie Rushing, is an inspired and inspiring collection of essays in Cuban history and literature that subverts traditional chronologies in order to center Black political subjectivity. Beginning as a workshop in 2012 to commemorate the double anniversaries of the Aponte Rebellion of 1812 and the massacre in 1912 of the Partido Independiente de Color, the first Black political party in the Americas, the volume considers the long arc of Afro-Cuban resistance to both slavery and racism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The collaborators' goal was to capture new perspectives on Black political life and Black political struggle in Cuba and beyond during this time of transition from slavery to postslavery and from colonial to neocolonial rule. By centering Blackness in their analysis, the editors and contributors successfully reconfigure the traditional time line of Cuban independence and construct alternate landscapes of meaning across the Atlantic and around the Greater Caribbean beyond the confines of empire and nation.The unconventional decision to place Black political struggle during the long nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the same frame has major payoffs. By highlighting the continuity between Black oppositional struggles from 1812 to 1912, the chapters resist the impulse to place the emergence of Black political mobilization solely in the independence wars at the time of slavery's formal abolition. Discussions of slave insurgencies take the struggles of the enslaved seriously as a politics fortified by a diverse set of ideologies and belief structures, a politics that would inform another set of strategies used by Afro-Cubans to fight for dignity, sovereignty, and citizenship in the postemancipation period. The collection is also notable for its careful attention to gender and for the way that masculinity, femininity, race, cubanidad, a sense of national belonging, and African diasporic identity all played into Black political struggle and racial organizing in Cuba and beyond.The collection is organized into three sections, each introduced by leading scholars of Cuban history who provide sufficient context to make the text approachable for newcomers to Cuban history. The first section, introduced by Matt Childs, focuses on slavery and resistance in the era of the Aponte Rebellion. It includes a contribution from Manuel Barcia on a series of African-led insurgent movements in western Cuba from 1795 to the mid-1840s. Barcia argues for the importance of West African military experience in what was effectively “a transplantation of West African warfare in the Americas” (p. 48). Renowned Cuban historian Gloria García responds with a more localized approach to the enslaved's resistance strategies, pointing out that slave insurgency often broke out in response to the violation of customary rights and that other resistance strategies could resemble common forms of labor negotiation such as work stoppages.The second section, on “Black political thought and resistance in the age of La Escalera” (1843–44), is introduced by Ada Ferrer. Here Aisha Finch offers the book's most captivating idea: the “repeating rebellion,” a play on Antonio Benítez-Rojo's “repeating island.” She argues for considering collectively the recurrent struggles of afrodescendientes across lines of geography, legal freedom, and time. Finch illustrates a deeper political consciousness that produced these recurrent rebellions, made people of African descent acutely aware of them happening in their midst, and kept their memory alive long afterward. She sees Blacks confined to the plantation as setting the groundwork for subsequent organizing among Afro-Cubans and for a larger political awareness during the republic.The third section, introduced by Aline Helg, considers the question of race and Blackness in postemancipation Cuba via studies of the Partido Independiente de Color, whose political protest triggered the massacre of 3,000 to 6,000 Black protesters by the Cuban and US militaries. This section's essays make excellent use of the Black press in Cuba, at the vanguard of publishing in the Americas, with the first Afro-Cuban newspaper, El Faro, established in 1842 and 25 other publications in print by 1889, including several dedicated to Afro-Cuban women. Chapters by Fannie Rushing, Melina Pappademos, and Takkara Brunson, along with Jacqueline Grant's chapter in the preceding section, draw clear connections between slavery-era associational life (cabildos de nación, sociedades de la raza de color, Abakuá secret societies) and the early republic's Afro-Cuban political parties, clubs, and press. These chapters as well as Michele Reid-Vazquez's also do brilliant work to excavate the gendered ways in which Black political subjectivity was constructed in opposition to white supremacy's specific fears and hatreds of Black women as opposed to men. W. F. Santiago-Valles provides the volume with a compelling afterword, offering a sweeping panorama of “repeating rebellions” and radical Black thought throughout the Greater Caribbean across the time covered by this study.In Breaking the Chains, Forging the Nation, readers will find a diverse set of scholarly voices developing an original and powerful set of ideas about Black political thought and action from the time of slavery to postslavery. The example of Cuba and the methodologies of this volume's contributors are sure to inspire new ways of thinking about the varying forms of Blackness and Black political mobilization throughout the hemisphere

Colonialism · Empire · Ideology · Independence (probability theory) · Political science · Politics · Racism · Sociology · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Cuban History and Society · Gender Studies · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law