BOOKS
The Cuban Hustle: Culture, Politics, Everyday Life
A collection of essays looking at how artists and ordinary Cubans have hustled to survive and express themselves in post-Soviet Cuba.
Curated Stories: The Uses and Misuses of Storytelling
An exploration of the perils and promises of storytelling in social movements, from an Afghan womens writing project, to migrant domestic workers and undocumented youth in the US, and Venezuelan barrio groups.
Close to the Edge: In Search of the Global Hip Hop Generation
Sujatha documents her journey across Sydney’s West side to the South side of Chicago and the barrios of Havana and Caracas, exploring hip hop culture and the rage that underlies it.
Who Can Stop the Drums? Urban Social Movements in Chávez’s Venezuela
A vivid ethnography of social movements in the barrios of Caracas during the Chávez era.
Cuba Represent! Cuban Arts, State Power, and the Making of New Revolutionary Cultures
An ethnography of the arts in post-Soviet Cuba, and an exploration of how hip hop culture, film, and visual arts have become vital medium for engaging with vital social issues.
SELECTED ARTICLES
The Domestic Workers Strike: Migrant Women, Social Reproduction, and Contentious Labour Organising (Feminist Review)
Stories and Statecraft: Afghan Women’s Narratives and the Construction of Western Freedoms (Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society)
Out of the home, Into the House: Narratives and Strategies in Domestic Worker Legislative Campaigns (Social Text)
Building Child-Centered Social Movements (Contexts)
Barrio Women and Popular Politics in Chávez’s Venezuela (Latin American Politics and Society)
Recasting Ideology, Recreating Hegemony: Critical Debates about Film in Contemporary Cuba (Ethnography)
Transnationalism and Feminist Activism in Cuba: The Case of Magín (Politics & Gender)
Fear of a Black Nation: Local Rappers, Transnational Crossings and State Power in Contemporary Cuba (Anthropological Quarterly)
PRAISE
On The Cuban Hustle
A fascinating dossier about the challenges and preoccupations of post-Soviet Cuba. From negotiating the fallout from a globalizing economy to new movements in the visual arts, music, film, feminism, and racial consciousness, Sujatha Fernandes brings readers up to date on the inventive, evolving hustle that is Cuba’s survival.
- Cristina García, National Book Award nominee, author of Dreaming in Cuban and Here in Berlin
On Curated Stories
This is a rare work that through its powerful logic and dramatic examples has changed forever how I will listen to stories.
- Gary Alan Fine, James E. Johnson Professor of Sociology, Northwestern University, author of Talking Art: The Culture of Practice and the Practice of Culture in MFA Education
On Close to the Edge
Fernandes brilliantly captures the moment when a global generation curved toward a unifying language and culture and found something that was both much more and much less than what it was searching for. Close to the Edge is a beautifully told tale of the collective and the personal, the cultural and political—a classic of hip hop writing and a poignant tribute to urban youth.
- Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation and Who We Be: The Colorization of America
The beauty of this book about global hip-hop is that you don’t need to be interested in rap to be drawn into Sujatha Fernandes’s journey from Sydney to New York, Chicago, Cuba and Caracas, or caught up in her passion for this art form from the streets.
- Pick of the Week, The Melbourne Age
On Cuba Represent!
Fernandes’s work is a model for ethnographic-based and interdisciplinary approaches to expressive culture.
- David F. García, Ethnomusicology
Fernandes has a wonderful grasp of how people live on the streets of Havana, of the texture of their lives, of their speech and their sense of humor. She brings alive, beautifully, the feeling of living in the chaos that is Cuba, something that few other studies have managed to do.
- Carollee Bengelsdorf, Latin American Perspectives
For more information on my academic work, please go to my academic site