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Summary

The premise of this chapter is that an examination of the Cuban son provides important insights into Cuban history and society, into Caribbean race relations, and ongoing processes of cultural fusion involving Afro-descendant and Euro-descendant practices, among others. The chapter focuses primarily on early son history, its antecedent forms, the African-influenced aesthetic sense that gave rise to it, and the popularization of the music and dance in the early twentieth century. Later it briefly considers changes to son music in the 1930s and beyond.

Rumba guaguancó, a sub-genre of Afro-Cuban popular dance, has been widely defined as a dance of courtship, characterized as a male pursuit of a woman's sex. The article analyzes alternative meanings of the sub-genre articulated in the pedagogical practices of black women rumba dancers. Insights were gleaned from the author's own dance training in Havana while conducting original ethnographic research between 2009 and 2018. What the author terms “a black feminist choreographic aptitude” taught by rumberas (women rumba dancers) speaks to the pointedly gendered valances of worsening racialized class inequality in contemporary Cuba. Building on Blanco Borelli's theory of “hip(g)nosis,” the article interrogates the racialized and gendered discourses historically reproduced through dominant definitions of rumba, limiting women of African descent to sexual objects. The study argues for increased critical attention to pedagogy as a hermeneutical tool, centering those subjects historically marginalized from the production of knowledge about their bodies.

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2 - Race and Transculturation

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Black Feminist Rumba Pedagogies

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2 results

2 - Race and Transculturation

Summary

Black Feminist Rumba Pedagogies