Dr. Maya Berry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The AnthroMob network is delighted to announce the 11th lecture in our Moving Mobilities Online (MoMO) series, on March 5th, 2026 at 4:00pm CET.
Researched against the backdrop of the post-Fidel market reforms initiated by the Cuban government to “update” the Revolution for the 21st century and extending into the economic crisis after the COVID-19 pandemic, this talk opens a deeper consideration of what a sector of Black working-class people endeavors to create for themselves and fiercely defend.
By centering those who form and are formed by rumba, a Black popular dance too often undertheorized by its relegation to the realm of folkloric dance and obscured by its nomination as national patrimony, this ethnography strives to account for the embodied spiritual dimensions of Black political imagination in Havana. Rumba practitioners initiated into ritual “families of stone” enact improvisations that are constrained by racialized gender and class, while motioning toward fugitive practices of self-making and mutual aid.
