Nature, Culture, and Race in Colonial Cuba

“This revisionist, original, and timely work breaks new ground in its linking of science, race, physical spaces, human agents, and socio-cultural practices in nineteenth-century Cuba.”—Paul Niell, Florida State University

“Lee Sessions ably demonstrates how elite whites utilized built space and visual representation to reify and instrumentalize their political, social, and economic power.”—Ray Hernández-Durán, University of New Mexico

“This elegantly written book creates a compelling story of early nineteenth century Cuban art, politics, social history, exhibitions, ecological concerns and more through the lens of class and race studies.”—Edward J. Sullivan, New York University

“Lee Sessions’ Plantationocene narratives delve into the visual and material picturing of colonial power in Cuba that valorized constructions of the natural as the ecological disaster of monoculture sugar agriculture intensified in the nineteenth century.”—Maura Coughlin, coeditor of Ecocriticism and the Anthropocene in Nineteenth-Century Art and Visual Culture

“Featuring an impressive visual catalog, this book explores the late colonial Spanish Caribbean through reevaluating the imperial and racial context in which images and spaces of nature and extraction were produced and instrumentalized.”—Luis Gordo Peláez, California State University