Performing Afro-Cuba: Image, Voice, Spectacle in the Making of Race and History is a thoughtful and timely study that locates race in Cuba through performance studies and ethnography. The book joins the ranks of Todd Ramón Ochoa’s Society of the Dead (2010); J. Lorand Matory’s Black Atlantic Religion (2005); Stephen Palmié’s The Cooking of History (2013) ; and Aisha Beliso-De Jesús’s Electric Santería (2015) in that it expands the boundaries of the anthropological study of religion by questioning the very paradigms of inquiry and temporality that locate the ethnographic subject. That is, Wirtz’s study moves us away from the exotic tropes that often create an ethnographic present and into a complexly situated racial terrain. Her focus on Santiago de Cuba is also a welcome gesture away from Havana-oriented studies of Cuban culture, religion, and society. Indeed, the book helps readers to negotiate Cuban pageantry within broader Caribbean and Atlantic traditions that perform race in multi-faceted ways.

Wirtz deftly approaches theories of performance from various historical, linguistic, and discursive avenues. In chapter 1, “Semiotics of Race and History,” Wirtz outlines the book’s ongoing engagement with Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope as a way of navigating temporality, place, and the performance of race. In her consideration of the “time-spaces” that chronotopes suggest, Wirtz adds the elements of the historical imagination as helping to perform specifically located and raced bodies in Cuba. This situates her understanding of subjectivity away from “universal, empty, neutral space-time,” towards “intertwined localities-histories-persons” (10). This chapter also illustrates Wirtz’s deep engagement with discourse and language in relation to thinking through performance. In it she investigates how theories of language, performance, and power by Butler, Bauman, Derrida, Foucault, and Austin can also help to contextualize the importance of utterances to the study of race in Cuba. This kind of attention to language is crucial in any study of race, culture, and religion in Cuba because of the myriad ways that Blackness is performed on the island. Here, Wirtz speaks directly to her readers, not shying away from the polemical issues that the ethics of an ethnography of race and racing, written by a North American anthropologist, may conjure (12-13, 44). Her earnest consideration in the text of her place in the lives of the Cubans she interacts with persuades readers to listen to her cultural analysis. In addition, this first chapter gives us a walking tour of Santiago that does not flatten, as topography sometimes does, but rather rounds out contested terrains and imagined pasts that are marked and performed. One such site is the upscale restaurant, El Barracón, where Wirtz confronts and is confronted by slave pasts outlandishly re-packaged for consumption.

Chapter 2, “Image-inations of Blackness,” delves into “folkloric” representations of Blackness in Cuba that are tied to historical and religious caricatures: slaves, maroons, brujos (sorcerers), and so on. Wirtz theorizes Blackness as a shifter, a sign that is theatrically produced in public and private spheres. She looks in particular at dance, music, and material culture of the popular and governmentally sanctioned folklore troupes, like el Ballet Folklórico del Oriente, that perform historical Blackness in distinct ways. In referencing Afro-Cuban religious ritual and embodiment, these ensembles choreograph the folkloric as Blackness in ways that rely on what Wirtz calls the “semiotics of phenotype” (62). In portraying figures like el ganguluero (Palo priest) under spirit possession, troupe members must index a historically imagined kind of Blackness onto their own raced, gendered, and socially placed bodies. Wirtz argues that racialization as performance can subvert, extend, and reaffirm valences of Blackness simultaneously, especially in Cuban folkloric theatre. She cleverly ends the chapter by looking at how visual arts perform Blackness, especially in the works of Luis “El Estudiante” Joaquín Rodríguez Ricardo and Suitberto Goire Castilla. Wirtz illustrates how the visual arts demonstrate similar semiotics as the other performances she explores in the text. She sees in many of these cultural productions a reaffirmation of a range of celebratory, stereotyping, and historically imagined performances that frame tradition as a kind of blackface (87).

Wirtz addresses dance and the embodiment of race in the more vernacular performances of carnival in Santiago in chapter 3, “Bodies in Motion: Routes of Blackness in the Carnivalesque.” She locates how embodiment is already registered in a myriad of social relations in any performance. However, she speaks to the language of origins, “in the blood,” used to make sense of embodied performances that seem natural, traditional, racialized. As an illustration, her analysis of the carnival dance movement known as arrollándose, or “to roll along,” reveals ways that foreignness, Whiteness, and Blackness all interact in a complex web of being marked through the performance of the dance. Wirtz also introduces us to the official and grassroots routes of Santiago’s carnival and how race and history play off each other topographically. This chapter also necessarily explores the politics of race in the Cuban revolution’s own rhetoric of creating a new society and a new man. National rhetoric about Santiago’s connection to maroonage and slave revolt creates a kind of national remembering that racializes the province and Blackness as rebellion. Especially interesting in this discussion is how young black Cubans adopt Hip Hop and Reggaetón as modes of expression that connects them to the Caribbean and North America aesthetically (103). Wirtz addresses the work, rehearsal, and lifetime effort it takes to create performances of carnival that seem to be essentialized in “the blood.” Her analysis of the Children’s Conga de los Hoyos provides one example of the institutionalization of the ideal of carnival through performance and artistry—as well as the socialization of embodying race.

In chapter 4, “Voices: Chronotopic Registers and Historical Imagination in Cuban Folk Religious Rituals,” Wirtz returns to ritual, albeit in terms of language performed in religious ceremonies. In particular, Wirtz looks at Lucumí (Cuban Yoruba dialect), lengua Conga (Congo speech), and Bozal (“Black” Cuban socio-dialect of Spanish). These are complex registers that interact in various kinds of religious rituals. Wirtz thinks through how these performances of language mark Blackness, ethnicity, and social status in a historical continuum that imagines a heterodoxy of spiritual interaction. The material she offers readers is rich and dense, including direct communication with beings, like María del Congo (166-69) and songs performed in spiritual masses. Her masterful close readings of language performed in ritual reveal a linguistically complex indexing. These indexes speak to history as performing Black languages that are marked and read through meta-discourses that show that race, past and present, matters in Cuban religious work.

Wirtz explores Black carnival performances of royalty and freedom in chapter 5, “Pride: Singing Black History in the Carabalí Cabildos.” Cabildos are fraternal societies where Black populations foster cultural and religious traditions, especially at carnival. Like fraternal societies in places like New Orleans, the Carabalí Cabildos perform their own unique versions of history, create a vernacular kinship structure, and make up an important part of Santiago’s public culture. Wirtz investigates performances of Blackness in the Carabalí Cabildos of Olugo and Isuama. Contested meanings of liberty and royalty are central to the cabildos’ performance of nineteenth-century struggles of Cuban independence from Spain. Wirtz illustrates how performances of African, Cuban, and Black pasts in carnival are intertwined in social and historical mosaics. She enriches these considerations of carnival performances of race by locating cross-dressing (179-80) and Carabalí songs (210-12) in a process she calls interdiscursivity. The mingling of discourses, Wirtz argues, allows for the re-contextualization of Carabalí songs through embodied performances.

There are resonances of chapter 6, “Performance: State-Sponsored Folklore Spectacles of Blackness as History,” and chapter 7, “Brutology: The Enregisterment of Bozal, from ‘Blackface’ Theater to Spirit Possession,” in the introductory chapters of Performing Afro-Cuba. These two chapters follow through in more detail Wirtz’s initial arguments about Cuban public folklore performances and the roots of theatrical blackface in Cuban ritual performance. Wirtz contextualizes state supported folklore performances in regards to the Cuban revolution. Thinking through Goffman’s frames, Wirtz theorizes how audiences co-produce performances of Afro-Cuban culture in a range of genres and contexts. Governmental sponsorship and bureaucracy also shape the form of the performances and their reception. Groups like Cutumba and Folklórico de Oriente have dealt with official and vernacular expectations, limitations, and political changes (like the Special Period after the fall of the Soviet Union), in constructing their performances. Wirtz’s consideration of public ceremonies, including bemebés, and ceremonies for Yemayá, and for La Caridad del Cobre (Our Lady of Charity), includes descriptions of vernacular and official religious mixing that reveals the complexity of separating realms of performance. Wirtz returns in her final chapter to where she had left off by connecting Cuban theatre tradition to religious ritual work as two forms of racialization that have informed each other. By focusing on Bozal, Wirtz connects el teatro bufo to the enregisterment of speech during ritual possession. She articulates that an interdiscursive web of Bozal (284), much of it as linguistic blackface, is performed in Cuban theatre, anthropology, and ritual. Wirtz’s conclusion is as reflexive as her introduction in indicating that her own inter-discursive observations as an ethnographer of performance and as an anthropologist of history are embedded in larger contexts of racializations and power that do not leave her unmarked. Compellingly, she urges us to take semiotics seriously and to hear the voices of the Afro-Cuban dead that haunt Cuba’s historical memory.

Overall, Performing Afro-Cuba leaves us with a wonderfully rich starting point for making further connections between performance, carnival, and race. If paired with the work of Afro-Cuban theatre scholar Inés María Martiatú, we can see multiple forms of interdiscursive performances of race where Asian, Native, and Rom are placed on stage and in ritual in Cuba. Another important parallel in regards to blackface and Black carnival that Wirtz’s work provokes are the satirical performances of the African American Zulu Krewe in New Orleans Mardi Gras traditions. As filmmaker Royce Osborn shows in his film All on a Mardi Gras Day (2003), there may also be a strategic and ironic use of blackface that works as a form of dis-identification from racist stereotypes. In this regard, Wirtz’s work should inspire further investigations of transnational, especially Caribbean and Atlantic, enactments of historical memory and race in carnival. These final considerations are a testament to Wirtz’s substantial achievement in Performing Afro-Cuba where she gets readers to consider race and performance in ways that are expansive, critical, and illuminating.

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[Review length: 1737 words • Review posted on January 20, 2016]