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Michele Reid-Vazquez reveals the untold story of the strategies of negotiation used by free blacks in the aftermath of the “Year of the Lash”—a wave of repression in Cuba that had great implications for the Atlantic World in the next two decades. At dawn on June 29, 1844, a firing squad in Havana executed ten accused ringleaders of the Conspiracy of La Escalera, an alleged plot to abolish slavery and colonial rule in Cuba. The condemned men represented prominent members of Cuba's free community of African descent, including the acclaimed poet Plácido (Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés). In an effort to foster a white majority and curtail black rebellion, Spanish colonial authorities...
Examines the full range of humanities and social science scholarship on people of African descent in Latin America.
Africans to Spanish America expands the diaspora framework to include Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, and Cuba, exploring the connections and disjunctures between colonial Latin America and the African diaspora in the Spanish empires. Analysis of the regions of Mexico and the Andes opens up new questions of community formation that incorporated Spanish legal strategies in secular and ecclesiastical institutions as well as articulations of multiple African identities. The volume is arranged around three sub-themes: identity construction in the Americas; the struggle by enslaved and free people to present themselves as civilized, Christian, and resistant to slavery; and issues of cultural exclusion and inclusion. Contributors are Joan Cameron Bristol, Nancy E. van Deusen, Leo Garafalo, Herbert S. Klein, Charles Beatty Medina, Karen Y. Morrison, Rachel Sarah O'Toole, Frank "Trey" Proctor, and Michele B. Reid.
Breaking the Chains, Forging the Nation offers a new perspective on black political life in Cuba by analyzing the time between two hallmark Cuban events, the Aponte Rebellion of 1812 and the Race War of 1912. In so doing, this anthology provides fresh insight into the ways in which Cubans practiced and understood black freedom and resistance, from the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution to the early years of the Cuban republic. Bringing together an impressive range of scholars from the field of Cuban studies, the volume examines, for the first time, the continuities between disparate forms of political struggle and racial organizing during the early years of the nineteenth century and traces...
The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery shows how, at a moment of crisis after the Age of Revolutions, ambitious planters in the Upper US South, Cuba, and Brazil forged a new set of relationships with one another to sidestep the financial dominance of Great Britain and the northeastern United States. They hired a transnational group of chemists, engineers, and other "plantation experts" to assist them in adapting the technologies of the Industrial Revolution to suit "tropical" needs and maintain profitability. These experts depended on the know-how of slaves alongside whom they worked. Bondspeople with industrial craft skills played key roles in the development of new production technologies lik...
This book argues that contemporary Haitian literature historicizes the political and environmental problems raised by the 2010 earthquake by building on texts of earlier generations. It contends that this literary "eco-archive" challenges universalizing narratives of the Anthropocene with depictions of migration and refuge within Haiti and around the Americas.
In Show Thyself a Man, Gregory Mixon explores the ways African Americans in postbellum Georgia used the militia as a vehicle to secure full citizenship, respect, and a more stable place in society. As citizen-soldiers, black men were empowered to get involved in politics, secure their own financial independence, and publicly commemorate black freedom with celebrations such as Emancipation Day. White Georgians, however, used the militia as a different symbol of freedom--to ensure the postwar white right to rule. This book is a forty-year history of black militia service in Georgia and the determined disbandment process that whites undertook to destroy it, connecting this chapter of the post-emancipation South to the larger history of militia participation by African-descendant people through the Western hemisphere and Latin America.
This book deepens our understanding of race and the implications of racial mixture by examining the history of caste in colonial Mexico.
"This project examines childhood and slavery in Jamaica from 1750, when abolitionist sentiment began to take hold in England, to 1838, when slavery finally ended on the island. By focusing specifically on the changing nature of slave childhood in Jamaica, Vasconcellos examines how childhood and slavery influenced and changed each other throughout this period of study, with the abolitionist movement standing as the main catalyst for change. With each chapter focusing on a different aspect of the slave experience, this monograph explores a childhood that was defined by planter opinion and manipulation, but one that was increasingly affected by the complex processes of slavery, abolition, and eventually emancipation. In doing so, this study reveals a great deal about slave family and childhood from the inside, shining new light on the experiences of slave children and slave families in Jamaica"--Provided by publisher.
A rich, pathbreaking study on nineteenth-century rural Cuba, and how Afro-descendant peasants forged freedom through litigation and land occupation.