Negro Soy Yo: Hip Hop and Raced Citizenship in Neoliberal Cuba (Refiguring American Music) - Softcover

Perry, Marc D.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822358859 ISBN 13: 9780822358855

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2015

Synopsis

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 reggaetón, 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. 

About this title

About the Author:

Marc D. Perry is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and African and African Diaspora Studies at Tulane University.

Review:

"In this much anticipated book, Marc D. Perry provides a nuanced and compelling analysis of how Cuban raperos are crafting new understandings of black selfhood and citizenship in the wake of the collapse of the USSR and Cuba’s ambivalent embrace of neoliberal capitalism. Boldly reflexive, Perry’s intensive, long-term ethnographic research yields a theoretically nuanced and historically attuned perspective on the politics and poetics of racialization both within Cuba’s rapidly changing political imaginary, and across diasporic fields of black cultural production.  By all measures, Negro Soy Yo is a masterful contribution to the literature and an ethnographic tour de force." -- Steven Gregory, author of, The Devil behind the Mirror: Globalization and Politics in the Dominican Republic

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0822358859
• ISBN 13: 9780822358855
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 296