ABSTRACT

Originally published in 2003, The Light Inside is a ground-breaking study of an Afro-Cuban secret society, its sacred arts, and their role in modern Cuban cultural history. Enslaved Africans and creoles developed the Abakuá Society, a system of men’s fraternal lodges, in urban Cuba beginnings in 1836. Drawing on years of fieldwork in the country, the book’s novel approach builds on close readings of dazzling Abakuá altars, chalk-drawn signs, and hooded masquerades. It looks at the art history of Abakuá altars, not only tracing changing styles but also how they evolve through cycles of tradition and renovation. The Light Inside reflects the essence of the artists’ creativity and experience: through adornment, altars project the powerful spirituality of Abakuá practice, an aesthetic strategy. The book also traces a biography of Abakuá objects – their shifting forms and meanings – as they participated in successive periods of Cuban cultural history. The book constructs close rhetorical and visual analyses of changing representations of the Abakuá, spanning nineteenth-century arts and letters, modern ethnographic texts, museum displays, paintings, and late twentieth century commercial kitsch. This interdisciplinary work combines art history, African Diaspora, cultural studies and cultural anthropology with Latin American.

part 1|126 pages

“The Light Inside” Abakuá Society Arts and Modern Cuban Cultural History

chapter 1|6 pages

Introduction

Meanings, Methods, and the Cultural Biography of Things Abakuá

chapter 4|11 pages

Cloth and Signs

West African Ukara and the Iconography of Regla's Efori Eñongo

chapter 5|34 pages

Altars, Offices, and Multiple Meanings

chapter 6|21 pages

“Symbolic Drums”

Innovations and Inventions

chapter 7|12 pages

The Íremes and Their Sacos

part 2|116 pages

El Ñáñigo “Graduates”

chapter 8|20 pages

Pictures, Performances, and the Police

Changing Contexts for Costumbrista Arts

chapter 9|19 pages

Struggle over Possession of the Secret

The Museuming of the Ñáñigos' "Most Sacred Effects"

chapter 10|23 pages

From Atavism to Modern Primitivism

chapter 11|8 pages

From Primitivism to Folklore

chapter 12|12 pages

We Were Teaching How to Ask the Black Man about Very Private, Personal Things

Afrocubana, the Triumph of the Revolution, and Socialist Folklore

chapter 14|6 pages

Conclusion

The Abakuá Society and the National Narrative