bahareads's Reviews (1.09k)

entertaining. whitty. smooth. funny. falling out pum pum. special cors. taking moth and butterfly. A frickin' great read. Popisho (Poppy Show) is also known as One Sky Day in the UK (Popisho is a wayyy better name). Leone Ross is a fantastic author and narrator. Some people are writers and some people are storytellers. Ross was born to tell a story. I was enthralled. I couldn't stop listening to the audiobook.

From the accent to the cadence to the sharp and meaningful prose. The POVs were everything. I enjoyed every single one. I loved the connections as the story unfolded. You can feel every single emotion of the characters. This is how you do 'magical realism.' Ross tackles different themes: political corruption, homophobia, sexism, sex worker rights, and colonialism. Every issue one could conceive countries in the Caribbean deal with is in this book. All of them are addressed in an obvious but subtle way. My words can't do this book justice. I would love to read it again in a physical version. A delightful tale.

A history of black civic and political activists in the republic who struggled for resources despite complex mechanisms of racial subordination. Pappademos offers a reconfiguration of questions on how Black Cuban activism has been understood, looking at political machinations. She reconstructs social and political heterogeneity by showing motivation in complex circumstances.

She uses the Cuban case to help move the theory of racial politics beyond racial binaries and historical dimensions of black experience and discourse. Gender constructs, the role of class, ethnicity and cultural practices intersectionality are undertheorized and Pappademos helps theorize them. Black experiences are silenced by polarizing nationalist narratives that ignore micro/local level engagement.

Scholars have conflated studies of Cuban race relations with black politics with black daily experiences with universal racial consciousness. Pappademos builds on De la Fuente and Helg's books by decentering nationalism as a primary frame for understanding racial politics and black activism by looking at how social and political communities worked within a larger system. She moves beyond nationalist and race relations histories (black/white dichotomy) etc for which state policies serve as its principal muse. She expands concepts of African diaspora consciousness and activism, by saying they are influenced centrally but partially by race.

Pappademos examines the range and meaning of formal and informal political participation to see culture, sociability and political engagement. She historicizes the process that Black politicians and clubmen built political authority and resources. She maps the experiences of Blacks and shows how it was shaped in its contexts. The book destabilizes race as a static category by looking at the ways Cuban activism challenges the misrepresentation of Black life. Pappademos argues Black activism should consider Black political machinations and reject universal race consciousness. Blacks were not the only people to rally around race in Cuba.

Pappademos suggested the absence of a national mass-based civil rights movement can be attributed to the local experience which trumped black engagement. She recovers part of the history of the Black Cuban struggle for resources. Arguing that Black leaders' negotiation for power intersects with racial discourse and mass Black experience. The Black population in republican Cuba were nuanced.

Roth presents a feminist history of reproduction that centres the lives and deaths of women in the understanding of the past tracing multiple reasons behind women's reproductive decisions over time. She historicizes the legal, medical and personal trajectory of reproduction in Brazil. Roth also traces how legal thought and medical knowledge became cemented into law and policy, how those prescriptions were implemented in the police precincts and hospital rooms (of Rio de Janeiro), and how women experienced and negotiated those institutional constraints on a daily basis.

She shows that Brazilian reproductive negotiations are part of a larger global history of modern state formation. The nature of reproductive health with fertility control is under-explored, and Roth is helping explore it. Roth departs from other legal studies of gender and sexuality because of Brazil's laws. She adds herself to the scholars who keep fertility control from the influence of poverty on pregnancy and motherhood.

Analyzing the medical, legal, social and political to understand women's reproductive experiences Roth shows women's reproductive lives on a continuum. She defines reproductive health as a range of events and practices. Roth approaches women's reproduction from three angles: law, medicine, and women's experiences. The book does not extend to child raising and kinship influences on childrearing beyond biological reproduction; only to pregnancy, childbirth, and fertility control. She uses reproductive practices or events to refer to biological reproduction (pregnancy, miscarriage, stillbirth, childbirth, and abortion).

Roth argues that infanticide investigations highlight the centrality of women's reproduction to Brazil's expanding state apparatus and political agenda in the 20th century. Medical and legal prescriptions on childbirth and fertility control alongside embodied experiences of gendered laws and inequality reveal an expanding interventionist Brazilian state. The centrality of women's reproduction in transitional political regimes resonates in and out of Brazil. The state allocates unequal citizenship through women's bodies and women's reproductive experiences is the key to understanding institutionalization of inequality in Brazil. Roth examines the connection between bodily experiences, state policy (from many angles) and scales of inquiry (home, community, nation).

Roth's book was great. There were some graphic stories and photos within the book, but it all adds to the argument. Roth's conclusion is women's reproductive lives were a focus of an expanding state after abolition, the beginning of republicanism and the strengthening of the federal government. The state restricted access to citizenship by reinforcing gender and racial hierarchies.

Lucero presents a counter-narrative to to male-normative perspective that dominates Cuban demographic history by centering women and women's reproduction in island politics. She shows how the twin demographic goals of white population growth and non-white population management shaped reproduction from colonialization to the Cuban revolution. She claims to employ the lens of reproduction to examine pregnancy and childbearing within a broad range. She uses a broader conceptual and chronological frame to reveal attitudes towards abortion were complex and changed over time. Lucero seeks to give readers access to the voices, perspectives, and experiences of women.

Cuban slave scholars focus on family formation and midwifery and less on reproduction solely. The desire for whiteness remained a constant in Cuban history. Honour and status shaped women's reproduction. The centrepiece of the book is 1780-1880, though she spans up to 1956. This book recognizes women who attempted to disaggregate womanhood from motherhood.

The biggest problem with this book is Lucero's definition of a non-white population is solely Black. The brief mentions of the Indigenous and Chinese in the book were not enough. To employ a solely black-and-white dynamic on Cuba de-complicates the historical circumstances of what's actually going on here. PLUS she flip-flops on pieces of her argument throughout the book; sometimes the State's close attention to White people is a good thing and other times it's a bad thing.

My professor (who is a Latin Americanist) had a lot of issues with Lucero's approach to the book and some of her conclusions; all of which make complete sense. Another issue is that 1920-1956 is smooshed into one chapter and covers a lot of ground. You miss a lot of historical context.

The preface of the book was very emotional. You can tell that these topics are very near and dear to Lucero, which I appreciate. The book concludes that the state lay claim to fertility because of population. The interest in pregnancy hinged on race, class and legal status. The Cuban elite feared free Blacks' fertility. Fertility was rooted in the Malthusian perspective of overpopulation and poverty.

Ruth YOU SLY DOG. I didn't realise that the characters were named after the author and her husband. I listened to this book so my experience will be different than those that read the novel. This book is depressing and hopeful. It's scary and joyful. It's frustrating and satisfying.

I was very mad at times regarding the characters' actions. The ending reminds me of the current MCU universe. The scientific and time change thing blew my mind at the end (not necessarily in a good way). I liked both POVs. They were very different. At the beginning, I wasn't into Ruth's but as the book progressed I liked that they were different speeds, and so intertwined.

McGillivray argues that the independent Cuban state and the development of the Cuban middle class resulted from and contributed to transformations in the sugar economy. This book is a part of scholarship that looks at populism more diversely, taking a more positive view of it. McGillivray uses regional case studies to see how revolutionary caudillos claim national power in regional networks. She watches human relationships to see patterns within larger intuitions. She uses the term ‘compact’ rather than ‘contract’ because there were no stated agreements on how to keep the peace in day-to-day life.

McGillivray offers a broader time frame and scope by contrasting two Cuban communities from colonialism to the 1950s. She steps away from looking at US versus Cuban sugar mill dynamics and looks at a larger ignored social group which are cane farmers (colonos). Mexican history inspired her to approach through regional case studies and see caudillos claim to national power in regional networks.

She argues more research needs to be done in the Cold War period before the dominant version of 1959 can be accepted. Another argument is that Cuba moved through three systems of negotiation between state, capitalists, and popular classes. McGillivray traces lower and middle sectors of society that overlooked their differences to join together and define themselves as a class.

Burned cane was used to create jobs. It was a sign of internal labour negotiations during times of peace and a dominant form of political civil warfare during the revolutions and rebellions of the 19th century. The larger aim of McGillivray is to offer a synopsis of the development of social classes that linked sugar to the formation and transformation of the Cuban state.

The stories of workers, colonos, and mill owners traced in the book prove that we can only understand how systems of rule are created and adjusted by paying attention to the actions of popular groups that the system seeks to incorporate.

McGillivray's goal was to tell the story of Cuban history in a way that newcomers to the field could grasp. I don't think she did that well. She covers a large swath of history and it is hard to trace all the outside influences going on that affect the actions of historical figures in this book. I did enjoy the different chapters here A LOT. I don't have enough expertise in the field to say whether her arguments really really are good but they convinced me.

Abercrombie aims to reveal Don Antonio's story in all its complexity, placing it fully into its historical and cultural context. He provides a portrait and analysis of Antonio drawing from documents from judicial procedures and also prior to his life as Maria. Part of Abercrombie's argument is the doctors who examined Antonio after the accusation left enough ambiguity for him to argue through about his identity.

Abercromie's method aims to use the terms of historical contemporaries and to distinguish the social actions that they would have recognised. He does not classify Maria/Antonio with the modern terms of LGBTQIA. He does not ground the concept of identity and does not separate sex and gender when talking about Antonio/Maria. It is easier to see Don Antonio's life because he has an account of his own life and his mother's account too, to make a biographical sketch.

Abercrombie uses ‘passing’ in the context because there is no possibility of remaining un-stigmatized by Antonio’s bodily sex and because it contradicts his enactments of maleness. He wants to immerse the reader in late 18th-century ways of knowing.

Abercrombie uses ideas of theatre and performance. He talks about gender performance and speculates about conflicting accounts. It was fascinating. I enjoyed this book a lot. It shows scholars there are many ways to do a micro-history and connect it to the broader world.

The book's thesis is the rural slaves of African descent helped to organize and lead one of Cuba's most memorable resistance struggles. The movement of 1844 cannot be understood apart from the revolts of 1843 or separated from the political architecture of West and Central Africa. In the broadest sense she seeks to understand what happened in rural Black communities during the years leading up to 1844 repression She traces the outlines of Black political culture in rural plantation work that produced insurgent struggle and transcended its limitations.

Finch is countering previous ideas that the Spanish colonial government made up the Black rebel movement to persecute and dismantle the upwardly mobile free people of colour in the particular region. Few scholars have developed into the landscape of Black political life in Western Cuba after 1844 and before 1868. Recent historical debates have shifted to highlight links between 1844 and international debates over the slave trade and colonial rule. Few scholars have examined the centrality of Black historical actors in the project of nation-making in Cuba.

Finch places women at the center of the narrative opening up new theoretical possibilities for the entity known as slave rebellion. She uses a pedagogy of state terror and believes the lives of the enslaved (political subjectivities, social and community formations, and gendered identities) offer important ways to understand the making of this and other slave movements.

The IMPORTANCE of this book lies in its contention that a group of slave dissidents shaped Cuba's largest anticolonial endeavours before the opening of independence in 1868. Finch seeks to excavate a longer narrative for the Black political struggle that has been obscured by the state. She wants to muddy categories of slave struggle by showing slave women in a different light, and she wants scholars to think more expansively about how slave insurgencies and other liberation struggles are brought to life.

Finch's archival approach was interesting. The reading practice employed questions an approach to the archive first and last as a diagnostic of colonial pathos, fear, and fantasy It is suggested that the attempt to acknowledge the violence of the archive can sometimes produce other kinds of violence in the way we remember our histories. She weaves a path through the archive's epistemological violence by reading state documents as an index of colonial power and self-fashioning & texts with multiple authors. Most importantly she considers the silences as texts with gendered implications.

The significance of this book is Finch moves rural Black people's stories to the forefront by exploring visions of resistance that developed in rural Cuba 1841-44. She calls attention to the majority organizing collectives and individuals in the movement: slave women and non-elite men.
It contains two strands of knowledge: the lengths the colonial state would go to contain its threats and endless possibilities for black degradation under slavery.

The (my fav) methodology Finch uses in her book is her expanding upon Stephanie Camp's idea of rival geographies. "Use of plantation space was highly contested and planters sought to exert spatial and temporal control over black bodies, yet these bodies pushed back creating rival geographies." + "Mapping out public and liminal spaces where enslaved reclaimed their bodies, time, and relationships will enable us to understand how Black Cubans created their own rival geographies."

A lot to be said but this book is fantastic

"therefore centers pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing practices as zones of conflict, in which abolitionists, slaveholders, doctors, the imperial and Jamaican governments, and enslaved people competed to control and regulate biological reproduction and determine who benefited from its rewards."

Turner explores how abolitionists perceived and represented young black female bodies and how they legitimized and sought to extend colonial rule and the benefits it generated to the metropole by controlling women's reproductive lives. Turner's theory is the physical body can be used to examine many aspects of nature, society, etc.

I loved that she used the body as a conceptual frame for the thesis. A body approach does 4 things.
1. The Body approach allows representations and competing meanings given to the body and its capacities, social relations, cultural ideals and expressions, body's abilities and disabilities.
2. The body approach explores prescriptions made about the body and its functions, treatment, care etc. Recognizes that the material body is an entity susceptible to illness, infertility and death.
3. The body approach is concerned with understanding ideas about how the body determines people's lived experiences.
4. The body is useful in challenging generalizations about the sexual division of labour > and requires scholars to examine the organization of lives and labour according to bodily functions and meanings given to them.

Originally I thought this was going to be more of a 'bottom-up" book. It is not. BUT it is still a fantastic book. Turner looks at the actions of both the enslaved and the slaveholder/abolitionist/colonial official. The focus on abolitionists made me re-think the classic narrative that abolitionists wanted slavery gone for moral reasons ((which was not always (probably not even the majority of the reason) true). Turner examines the abolitionist paradox of saving hapless victims of the slave trade while ensuring the sugar plantations had their productivity.

The study is also concerned with how enslaved people contested medical, gendered, and parental ideals foisted upon them. By controlling childbearing practices enslaved women had brief access to power that temporarily dominated gender order. Turner illustrates how central pregnancy, childbirth, and child-rearing were to the abolition of slavery, reorganizing plantation work, discipline and care of slaves, and fashioning of resistance, social life, and culture among the enslaved. I think THAT was the most fascinating aspect of it all for me. How the abolition of slavery caused a shift in regards to reproduction. It went from importing workers to needing to cultivate new workers to wanting to create good little citizens. Planters reformed plantation life according to the capital's needs and White power. Chef's kiss to Turner's work!!

I have been a listener of Lecrae for a long time. I enjoyed this book - listened to it as an audiobook. The trauma (emotional, SA, etc) was really hard to hear. Child SA always ALWAYS makes me tear up and cry. I enjoyed his commentary on the evangelical church and how he had to relearn his faith. The emphasis on a DIVERSE church is one of the most important things in here.