Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier; Illustrated by José Manuel Fernández Lavado.

Routledge, London, 2020

Employing ethno-fictional storytelling combined with beautiful hand-drawn illustrations, Aerial Imagination in Cuba explores the Cuban sky as it relates to Cuban cultural practices and belief systems, infrastructure, and systems of circulation. The sky, it is argued, is both mediator and a culturally embedded space through which we can engage in observations of relational territories of communication, circulation, imagination, and dynamic flows.

Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier demonstrates how Cubans use, refer to, and imagine the sky in day to day conventions and communities of practice through accessibly written and engaging ethnographically informed stories about wi-fi antennas, cactuses, pigeons, lottery, conga, and bees. The stories presented allow a space to consider anthropological concerns regarding broad cultural phenomena as well as local economic, political, and historic content while simultaneously engaging in discussions of media infrastructure, representation, collaboration, and ethnography. All the while, encouraging us to shift our attention and reconsider often taken for granted spaces.