Brunson, Takkara K.Black Women, Citizenship, and the Making of Modern Cuba, University of Florida Press (Gainesville, FL), 2021, xi + 191 pp. $80.00 hbk.

In analyses of pre-revolutionary Cuba, race and gender are frequently dichotomised, obscuring the specific role African descended women have played as political activists and integral participants in the formation of contemporary Cuban identity. In Black Women, Citizenship, and the Making of Modern Cuba, Takkara Brunson offers a distinct approach to Cuban history between 1902 and 1958. Focusing on upwardly mobile and elite Black women, Brunson analyses race and gender as conflicting and complementary forces informing discourses of Cuban identity. With thoughtfulness and detail, she explores the political strategies employed by Cuban women of African descent as they navigated multiple systems of oppression in pursuit of racial rights, gender equity and official citizenship. In seven chapters, Brunson intertwines individual and collective narratives to chart the challenges, achievements, and changes in Afrocuban women's organising. Chapter 1 examines the post-Abolition period and how Black Cuban women contributed to building – and expanding – a vibrant public sphere aimed at integration. Throughout chapter 2, Brunson analyses letters written by Black women across class backgrounds to Black male politicians. These letters highlight how African-descended women used patriarchal rhetoric to help elevate Black male political authority while simultaneously disrupting ideas that a woman's domain was solely domestic. Chapter 3 is an insightful exploration of how portraiture and comportment were used to imagine freedom. Using visual culture to demonstrate compliance with standards of ‘proper’ public conduct, Brunson thoroughly examines how elite and upwardly mobile women of African descent employed patriarchal ideals of femininity to combat racism and ‘radically re-imagine their place in a modernizing nation’ (p. 67). In chapters 4 and 5, Brunson notes shifts in racial and gender dynamics that caused political strategies to change in the early twentieth century. As African descended Cuban women increasingly ‘stood at the intersection of national women's activism and elite Black male activism’, gendered approaches to legal reform progressively shaped activist strategies and Black feminist thought within the women's movement (p. 137). Chapter 6 centres Black educator and activist Ana Echegoyen de Cañizares to illustrate how she (and her contemporaries) continued to navigate race and gender discrimination even as they gained full citizenship. The seventh and final chapter focuses on African descended Cuban women and the communist movement in the 1940s and 1950s. Here, Brunson demonstrates how the Communist Party provided a platform through which African-descended women could broadcast anti-racist feminism and address socio-economic disparities to the nation and beyond. This book has no shortage of strengths, but two aspects stand out. The first is Brunson's attention to previously unanalysed creative sources like letter writing and photographic portraiture. These sources serve as potent counter-archives offering the personal testimonies of African-descended Cuban women largely absent from conventional historiography. In addition to affirming the fact that Black women were agents in their self-fashioning, these sources highlight a crucial need to explore activities outside the national political sphere to expand the narrative of Black feminist history and political activism. The second aspect is Brunson's open engagement with tensions and intersections that repeatedly emerge throughout her analysis. In any writing of political history, it can be easy for binary arguments to arise and accumulate on one side or the other. Brunson avoids this by actively addressing the paradoxes that materialised as upwardly mobile and elite women of African descent sought to assert their dignity. Throughout the book, Brunson highlights that ‘at no time were all Black women of one mind regarding which political philosophy would be most helpful in improving women's social status’ (p. 137). She underscores the complex and ever-shifting socio-cultural dynamics within Cuban political communities during the study period. This includes nuanced observations about how and why elite and upwardly mobile Black women often worked apart from White women's social spaces while forming strategic alliances with them at other moments. It also includes attention to ever-changing expectations of women's public behaviour and the shifting relationship with the labouring poor within contexts of being compelled to racial silence. While Brunson asserts that women's embrace of patriarchy helped sustain their marginalisation from political and institutional leadership, this does not overshadow the indispensable contributions of the African-descended women she centres on or their role in forging a modern Cuban democracy (p. 191). Outstanding in its documentation and analysis, this book is essential for anyone interested in Cuban studies, Black feminism, Caribbean and Latin American feminism, or Caribbean and Latin American studies. Black Women, Citizenship, and the Making of Modern Cuba inserts itself as an important ‘part of a centuries-long, complex trajectory of Black women's social thought, community activism, and cultural production’ that looks to the past to imagine a future ‘that validates [the] full humanity’ of African-descended women (p. 190).

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