"Performing Afro-Cuba offers an important read on the semiotic contours of race and folkloric spectacle in eastern Cuba and marks an important contribution to broader folklore studies."

American Anthropologist

“A thoughtful and timely study that locates race in Cuba through performance studies and ethnography. . . . It expands the boundaries of the anthropological study of religion by questioning the very paradigms of inquiry and temporality that locate the ethnographic subject. That is, Wirtz’s study moves us away from the exotic tropes that often create an ethnographic present and into a complexly situated racial terrain. Her focus on Santiago de Cuba is also a welcome gesture away from Havana-oriented studies of Cuban culture, religion, and society. Indeed, the book helps readers to negotiate Cuban pageantry within broader Caribbean and Atlantic traditions that perform race in multi-faceted ways. . . . Wirtz’s work should inspire further investigations of transnational, especially Caribbean and Atlantic, enactments of historical memory and race in carnival. These final considerations are a testament to Wirtz’s substantial achievement in Performing Afro-Cuba where she gets readers to consider race and performance in ways that are expansive, critical, and illuminating.”
 

Journal of Folklore Research

“Performing Afro-Cuba is a masterful exploration of figurations of race and dialogues of racialization in Cuba. I learned a great deal from this challenging work, especially from Wirtz’s productive expansions of the notions of register and chronotope. The book is analytically powerful and richly engaged; Wirtz’s own voice is a sensitively reflexive part of the polyphonic dialogues she traces through Cuban history, social life, and cultural performance.”

 

 

Richard Bauman, Indiana University

“Performing Afro-Cuba is a careful and precise anthropology of history making, a study of the effortful cultural work and highly structured theater of relations out of which the Cuban racial order was and is still, perhaps more forcefully than ever, being made and remade. Compact, well-argued, it is utterly engrossing. It attacks a familiar issue in an original way, and it does so with a strong theoretical frame rendered in an approachable writing style.”

 

 

Paul Christopher Johnson, University of Michigan

“Performing Afro-Cuba is remarkable achievement. To put Wirtz’s argument in a nutshell would be to do a gross injustice to her sophisticated—and often quite elegant—exposition. She is simply the smartest and theoretically most sophisticated anthropologist doing research in Cuba these days. But aside from her contribution to the regionalist literature, the real value of her work is that it speaks to enduring anthropological questions, while raising a number of new ones that are relevant far beyond her specific field site. I enthusiastically recommend it.”

Stephan Palmié, author of The Cooking of History: How Not to Study Afro-Cuban Religion