Description: "Breaking the Chains, Forging a Nation offers a new perspective on black political life in Cuba by analyzing the time between two hallmark Cuban events, the Aponte Rebellion of 1812 and the Race War of 1912. In so doing, it provides fresh insight into the ways in which black freedom and resistance were practiced and understood in Cuba, from the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution to the early years of the Cuban republic. Bringing together an impressive range of scholars from the field of Cuban Studies, the volume is the first to examine the continuities between disparate forms of political struggle and racial organizing during the early years of the nineteenth century and trace them into the early decades of the twentieth. Together, the authors in this collection rethink the ways in which African-descended Cubans battled racial violence, created pathways to citizenship and humanity, and exercised claims on the nation state"--
Review Quotes: A thought-provoking addition to the growing body of work challenging us to reconceptualize Afro-Cuban, and thereby Cuban, history, from the vantage point of the agency and consciousness of the enslaved, notionally freed, and free men and women of color; inciting us to dig deeper into the complexities and transnational scope of antislavery, anticolonial, and antiracist struggles in what was once one of the most technologically advanced plantation economies integrated into the global capitalist market; and, crucially, calling for present-day memorialization.--Jean Stubbs, professor of history, University of London, and codirector of the Commodities of Empire British Academy Research Project