Cuba's Racial Crucible

"Morrison's book opens up several new avenues for research on sexuality and family formation in Cuba, and she does so with a masterful grasp on colonial sources and raises critical questions for the twentieth century. While most scholars accept the primacy of race and sexuality in Cuban history, Morrison succeeds at excavating these questions on a micro-level, providing new insights into the choices and family formations forged by both enslaved and free Cubans over time.
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~Cuban Studies

"This thought-provoking book will appeal to specialists and should be quite useful in graduate seminars dealing with race, nation, and Latin American history."

~Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism

"What is most striking about Cuba's Racial Crucible is the manner in which it records why enslaved individuals labored to document paternity, maternity, and racial ascendency for social mobility, love, and individual stability. Those social actors are the highlight of Morrison's research."

~American Quarterly

"This rigorous yet accessible monograph covers an extensive period of Cuban history from a unique and innovative intersectional perspective. For these reasons, it would make an excellent addition to undergraduate collections in African and African American studies, Latin American studies, women's and gender studies, and history. . . . Highly recommended."

~Choice

"One of only a few works on Cuban history that critically examines the intersection of gender, race, and nation . . . [and] offers a unique perspective considering changes in race making and family formation over the long term."

~Marc McLeod, Seattle University

"Examining the historical process of family formation among Afro-Cubans as an entry point into an exploration of the sexual economy of race, Karen Morrison argues that to achieve a more complete understanding of the tensions, shifts, and turns in the public discourses of race in Cuba, we first need to trace the material human relations upon which those discourses and subsequent socio-cultural and political practices are built. The constitution of these intimate worlds is both a primary process as well as a main site for the production of racial meaning. . . . Her analysis shows that various peoples from all over the Cuban social landscape transgressed racialized boundaries in their desire to recognize and legitimize their family formations, challenged the racialized hierarchies, [and by doing so] transformed the actual meanings of the categories of race."

~Ileana M. Rodriquez-Silva, University of Washington