Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar

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Description

First published in 1940 and long out of print, Fernando Ortiz’s classic work, Cuban Counterpoint is recognized as one of the crucial important books of Latin American and Caribbean intellectual history. Ortiz’s examination of the affect of sugar and tobacco on Cuban society is unquestionably the cornerstone of Cuban studies and a key source for work on Caribbean culture usually. Though written over fifty years ago, Ortiz’s study of the formation of a national culture in this region has significant implications for recent postcolonial studies.
Ortiz presents his understanding of Cuban history in two complementary sections written in contrasting styles: a playful allegorical tale narrated as a counterpoint between tobacco and sugar and a historical analysis of their development as the central agricultural products of the Cuban economy. Treating tobacco and sugar both as agricultural commodities and as social characters in a historical process, he examines changes in their roles as the results of transculturation. His work shows how transculturation, a critical category Ortiz developed to grab the complex transformation of cultures brought together in the crucible of colonial and imperial histories, can be utilized to light up not only the history of Cuba, but, more usually, that of The us as well.
This new edition includes an introductory essay by Fernando Coronil that provides a contrapuntal reading of the relationship between Ortiz’s book and its original introduction by the renowned anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. Arguing for a distinction between theory production and canon formation, Coronil demonstrates the value of Ortiz’s book for anthropology in addition to Cuban, Caribbean, and Latin American studies, and shows Ortiz to be newly relevant to recent debates about modernity, postmodernism, and postcoloniality.

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