Solimar Otero’s Afro-Cuban Diasporas in the Atlantic World is a welcome addition to the increasing number of studies focusing on the history of African individuals and peoples within the Atlantic world context. The book is written using a combination of anthropological, ethnographic, and historical analytical tools aimed at recovering the history and legacy of a group of Africans and their descendants in both Cuba and Nigeria. Although Otero’s study is not the first to focus on this particular group (the first was Rodolfo Sarracino’s Los que volvieron a Africa [Havana: Ciencias Sociales, 1988]), it is the first to do so using updated methodological and theoretical tools and also the first to do so in English.
Otero lets us know her objectives from the onset. She identifies herself as a “folklorist interested in how history, memory, and culture operate in the social imagination over time” (p. 2). Throughout the following 200...
