Breaking the Chains, Forging the Nation, edited by Aisha Finch and Fannie Rushing, is an inspired and inspiring collection of essays in Cuban history and literature that subverts traditional chronologies in order to center Black political subjectivity. Beginning as a workshop in 2012 to commemorate the double anniversaries of the Aponte Rebellion of 1812 and the massacre in 1912 of the Partido Independiente de Color, the first Black political party in the Americas, the volume considers the long arc of Afro-Cuban resistance to both slavery and racism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The collaborators' goal was to capture new perspectives on Black political life and Black political struggle in Cuba and beyond during this time of transition from slavery to postslavery and from colonial to neocolonial rule. By centering Blackness in their analysis, the editors and contributors successfully reconfigure the traditional time line of Cuban independence and...

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