Black Women, Citizenship, and the Making of Modern Cuba

Takkara K. Brunson

• Publisher: University of Florida Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781683403739, 9781683402084
• eBook ISBN: 9781683403852
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

Illuminating the activism of Black women during Cuba’s prerevolutionary period

Association of Black Women Historians Letitia Woods Brown Book Prize

In Black Women, Citizenship, and the Making of Modern Cuba, Takkara Brunson traces how women of African descent battled exclusion on multiple fronts and played an important role in forging a modern democracy. Brunson takes a much-needed intersectional approach to the political history of the era, examining how Black women’s engagement with questions of Cuban citizenship intersected with racial prejudice, gender norms, and sexual politics, incorporating Afro-diasporic and Latin American feminist perspectives.

Brunson demonstrates that between the 1886 abolition of slavery in Cuba and the 1959 Revolution, Black women—without formal political power—navigated political movements in their efforts to create a more just society. She examines how women helped build a Black public sphere as they claimed moral respectability and sought racial integration. She reveals how Black women entered into national women’s organizations, labor unions, and political parties to bring about legal reforms. Brunson shows how women of African descent achieved individual victories as part of a collective struggle for social justice; in doing so, she highlights how racism and sexism persisted even as legal definitions of Cuban citizenship evolved.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Enacting Citizenship between Abolition and the 1959 Revolution
• 1. “Look for Progress in Our Moral Perfection”: Racial Regeneration and the Post-Zanjón Black Public Sphere
• 2. Writing Black Political Networks during the Early Republic
• 3. Leadership of Recognized Character: Comportment and the Politics of Elite Black Social Life
• 4. Feminism and the Transformation of Black Women’s Social Thought
• 5. Racial Politics in the National Women’s Movement
• 6. The Limits of Democratic Citizenship in the New Constitutional Era
• 7. “A Heroic and Revolutionary Undertaking”: African-Descended Women of the Communist Movement
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author