iVenceremos?

“¡Venceremos? is an important and engaging book. Jafari S. Allen uses critical ethnography to reveal a changing landscape of race, gender, sex, and nation in Cuba today. The evolving meanings of these categories are propelled by people’s everyday actions toward what Allen calls a larger freedom. It is through his examination of ‘the everyday,’ especially the erotic, that the reader is made to see the creative tension between state-imposed and lived understandings of race, sex, and gender.” - Cathy J. Cohen, author of Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics

“A subtle ethnography that looks at the intersection of sexuality and race in contemporary Cuba through deeply felt experiences and stories. Honoring Audre Lorde’s assertation that ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,’ Jafari S. Allen offers major new insights into the meaning of black sexual liberation in a rapidly changing revolutionary society.” - Ruth Behar, author of An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba

“This extremely engaging and original ethnography portrays the dreams, political aspirations, cultural politics, and intimate practices of black Cubans in a rapidly changing socialist society. Jafari S. Allen carefully parses the particularities of black Cuban self-making through a magnificently layered account of Cuba’s history and culture and a very queer account of Cuban intimacies—in the home and the street, between men, between women, and between men and women. His careful attention to the socialist context for queer desire in Cuba leads him to insist on an understanding of queer identity that departs from the Euro-American preoccupation with the individual in its focus on communal bonds and modes of belonging. ¡Venceremos? conveys hope for the transformative potential of collective forms of self-making and the various ways that people desire, resist, create, and imagine.” - Judith Halberstam, author of The Queer Art of Failure

“[A]meticulously researched and exquisitely theorized ethnography that begins with a queer speculation of the revolutionary inevitable…. But what’s truly magnificent about this study is the auto-ethnographic impulse Allen endows… as well the many reverberations that his fieldwork in Cuba holds for thinking about and working through the politics and the political struggles of African Americans in the U.S.” - Vershawn Young, New Books in African-American Studies

“[T]he brilliance of ¡Venceremos? is that it so powerfully presents the lived — and rapidly changing — realities of individual Afro-Cuban subjects. . . . ¡Venceremos? is an engrossing, important piece of scholarship that constructively bridges multiple disciplines and should be of interest to readers both inside and outside the academy.” - Lauren J. Gantz, GLQ

“In this ambitious ethnography Allen tackles some of the most complicated but compelling issues in contemporary Cuba…. The book makes an important theoretical contribution to advancing debates on these issues…. ¡Venceremos? leaves us with the question, “Will we overcome?” but Allen has certainly moved us closer to an answer with this artful ethnography.” - Nadine T. Fernandez, Journal of Anthropological Research

“Jafari Allen’s new ethnography… provides a timely consideration of desires for freedom and possibilities for social equality under the Cuban Revolution…. His is an important intervention for Cubanists, Caribbeanists, and all those interested in understanding the nexus of desire and liberation in processes of racialization, gendering, and sexuality.” - Kristina Wirtz, American Ethnologist

"¿Venceremos? is ... a beautifully written in-depth ethnography on contemporary Cuba." - Heidi Härkönen, Suomen Antropologi

"Allen demonstrates the pertinence of race and sexuality to exercising Cuban citizenship rights, and to (re)formations of Cuban identities, individual and collective." - Ethel Hazard, Transforming Anthropology