Self-Making, Solidarity and the Sacred in Black Cuban Choreo/Geographies

Maya J. Berry’s book Defending Rumba in Havana: The Sacred and the Black Corporeal Undercommons brings Black Cubans’ sacred self-making, solidarity, and kinship practices into sharp relief. Her book explores not only how Cuban descendants of the formerly enslaved navigate longstanding and interlocking racial, gendered, and economic inequalities, but also Black Cubans’ aspirations beyond the political apertures of revolutionary statehood. Although rumba – popular depictions of which divorce the social dance event (20) from its religious roots – takes center stage, this is not a book about rumba. Rather, as Berry herself notes in the introduction, her research attends to what rumba as spiritual devotion and creative Black choreography reveals about the moves, struggles, and lifeworlds of its practitioners and those they claim as family.