How and why has Cuba's national identity been cast in terms of a cross-cultural synthesis called mestizaje, and what roles have race, gender, sexuality, and class played in the construction of that synthesis? What specific cultural, political, and economic interests does mestizaje represent? Exploring these and other questions, Vera Kutzinski focuses on images of the mulata in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Cuban poetry, fiction, and visual arts. These images, she argues, are at the heart of Cuba's peculiar form of multiculturalism.

In 1799, Alexander von Humboldt and Aime Bonpland set out to determine whether the Orinoco River connected with the Amazon. But what started as a trip to investigate a relatively minor geographical controversy became the basis of a five-year exploration throughout South America, Mexico, and Cuba. The discoveries amassed by Humboldt and Bonpland were staggering, and much of today's knowledge of tropical zoology, botany, geography, and geology can be traced back to Humboldt's numerous records of these expeditions. One of these accounts, Views of the Cordilleras and Monuments of the...