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By exploring the complexities of enslavement in the autobiography of Cuban slave-poet Juan Francisco Manzano (1797–1854), Gerard Aching complicates the universally recognized assumption that a slave's foremost desire is to be freed from bondage. As the only slave narrative in Spanish that has surfaced to date, Manzano's autobiography details the daily grind of the vast majority of slaves who sought relief from the burden of living under slavery. Aching combines historical narrative and literary criticism to take the reader beyond Manzano's text to examine the motivations behind anticolonial and antislavery activism in pre-revolution Cuba, when Cuba's Creole bourgeoisie sought their own form of freedom from the colonial arm of Spain.


Introduction
1. Liberalisms at Odds: Slavery and the Struggle for an Autochthonous Literature.
2. In Spite of Himself: Unconscious Resistance and Melancholy Attachments in Manzano's Autobiography.
3. Being Adequate to the Task: An Abolitionist Translates the Desire to Be Free.
4. Freedom Without Equality: Slave Protagonists, Free Blacks, and Their Bodies.
Epilogue
Appendix
Bibliography
Index

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Date de parution

07 août 2015

Nombre de lectures

0

EAN13

9780253017055

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

1 Mo

F REEDOM FROM L IBERATION
BLACKS IN THE DIASPORA
Herman L. Bennett
Kim D. Butler
Judith A. Byfield
Tracy Sharpley-Whiting
editors
FREEDOM
from
LIBERATION
Slavery, Sentiment, and Literature in Cuba
GERARD ACHING
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2015 by Gerard Aching
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z 39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Portions of chapter 1 have previously appeared as On Colonial Modernity: Civilization versus Sovereignty in Cuba, c. 1840 in International Relations and Non-Western Thought: Imperialism, Colonialism, and Investigations of Global Modernity . Edited by Robbie Shilliam. New York: Routledge, 2011.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Aching, Gerard.
Freedom from liberation : slavery, sentiment, and literature in Cuba / Gerard Aching.
pages cm. - (Blacks in the diaspora)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-01693-5 (cl : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01705-5 (eb) 1. Manzano, Juan Francisco, 1797-1854. Autobiografia. 2. Slaves-Cuba-Biography. 3. Slavery-Cuba-History-19th century. I. Title.
HT 1076. M 2835 015 306.3 6209729109034-dc23
2015006243
1 2 3 4 5 20 19 18 17 16 15
For Miguel ngel
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Liberalisms at Odds: Slavery and the Struggle for an Autochthonous Literature
2 In Spite of Himself: Unconscious Resistance and Melancholy Attachments in Manzano s Autobiography
3 Being Adequate to the Task: An Abolitionist Translates the Desire to Be Free
4 Freedom without Equality: Slave Protagonists, Free Blacks, and Their Bodies
Epilogue
Appendix: My Thirty Years
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book has been long in the coming, and for this reason I would like to express my gratitude to many people for the roles that they played in helping me to elaborate this project. I first began to think about Freedom from Liberation while I was still teaching at New York University, where, in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, I enjoyed the intellectual camaraderie of fellow Caribbeanists Sibylle Fischer and Ana Mar a Dopico. I am grateful for Sylvia Molloy s reading of Juan Francisco Manzano s autobiography, which is nothing short of seminal. I am, moreover, indebted to her mentoring at a time when the research and thinking that I undertook for the book represented an advance in my maturity as a scholar. If there were a conversation and a number of dialogues that I consider pivotal for leading me to the philosophical reflections that inform my understanding of Manzano s paradoxical statements about his enslavement, they would be those that I enjoyed with my NYU colleague and dear friend Gabriela Basterra, whose work continues to be a source of inspiration and whose friendship I value deeply. I would like to thank the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for the fellowship that it awarded me, allowing me to plunge into researching the history and geopolitics of slavery in Cuba in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century, the activities of British abolitionism in and around the island, and the Creole reformist bourgeoisie s struggle to free literary writing from colonial censorship. The fellowship also gave me the opportunity to deepen my knowledge of Hegel s master-slave dialectic and some of its commentators, which I frequently read in conjunction with and against my own readings of Manzano s account of his life.
Even though I had completed most of the book by the time I started teaching at Cornell University, I would still like to thank colleagues in the Departments of Romance Studies and Comparative Literature and at the Africana Studies and Research Center for their welcome, collegiality, and dialogue. Among them, I extend a special thanks to Jonathan Culler, Debra Castillo, Kathleen Perry Long, Richard Klein, Cary Howie, Karen Pinkus, Tracy McNulty, Natalie Melas, Tom s and M nica Bevi , Salah Hassan, Leslie Adelson, Grant Farred, Rich Richardson, Judith Byfield, Kavita Singh, Alex Lenoble, Gustavo Llarull, Cristina Hung, and Valeria Dani. I would also like to thank Caribbeanists and Latin Americanists at other institutions for their enthusiasm about my research for the book, including An bal Gonz lez P rez, Nathalie Bouzaglo, Guillermina de Ferrari, Emily Maguire, Odette Casamayor, Francisco J. Hern ndez Adri n, Lena Burgos, Tom s Urayoan Noel, Khalil Chaar, and Gustavo Furtado. My heartfelt gratitude to George Yudice, Gema P rez S nchez, Pam Hammons, Mona El Sherif, Patricia Saunders, and Donnette Francis for your friendship and support during the roughest of times. I thank my colleagues from the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Miami for their warm welcome and professionalism. I am particularly grateful to Arcadio D az Qui ones for his always intellectually rigorous and gracious engagement with this project and, especially, for his kind words of encouragement just when I needed them. I am grateful to Raina Polivka at Indiana University Press for her acute insights and recommendations and to Darja Malcolm-Clarke and Jenna Whittaker for keeping our publishing schedule on track.
To my dearest friends, both old and new, I express my deep gratitude for your patient listening, your steadfast support and affection, and, most of all, for being family. Thank you Cathy Lenfestey, Dana Cordeiro, Sheila McManus, Fran oise Hayet, Cecelia Lawless, Pierre Sassone, mile Sassone Lawless, Ad le Sassone Lawless, Ardele Lister, Todd Senzon, Gabriela Basterra, Edward Sullivan, Clayton Kirking, Almudena Rodr guez Huertas, Jos Luis Pati o, Pepe Reyes, Marcelo Pacheco, Sonia Vel zquez, Hall Bj rnstad, Claudia Brodsky, and Kerry Quinn. For their friendship and timely questions about the book, I thank Troy Oechsner, Jeff Day, Hal Goodwin, and Carrie LaZarre.
For their unwavering love and support, I am immensely grateful to my parents, William and Ann Aching, my brother, Jeffrey, and my sister, Vanessa; to my other brother and sister, Clif and Cheryl; to my parents-in-law, Seraf n Balsa Carrera and Joaquina Mar n Fern ndez, and my brothers- and sisters-in-law, Tom s, Teresa, Nacho, Queta, Alejandro, and Josu; to my nephews, Ivan, Alejandro, Javier, and Miguel, and my niece, Luc a; to my other nephew, Luis Eduardo; and to my cousins, Coleen, Jenny, and Kimmy.
I dedicate this book to my husband, Miguel ngel Balsa Mar n, who supported my every endeavor with openness, intelligence, candor, and respect. I thank you for choosing to walk by my side through thick and thin, no matter what. You are beautiful through and through, and I am inexpressibly grateful for the time, life, and profound love that we shared.
F REEDOM FROM L IBERATION
Introduction
In choosing Freedom from Liberation for the title of this book, I examine ways in which individuals from the same society reflect on, desire, imagine, and strive for personal and collective freedoms. Because diverse strivings for freedom typically coincide and compete in the same place and time, rival struggles and the individuals who embody and articulate them engage in uneven competitions with one another. The thinking, debates, and literature about slavery that emerged in Cuba in the 1830s and 40s provide sufficient material to make the distinctions between interlocked yet competing struggles for freedom intelligible. This book will demonstrate that there were fundamental differences between how slaves, manumitted slaves, free blacks, masters, abolitionists, and local reformists of slavery thought about bondage and freedom during this period and that certain ways of thinking about freedom were more valued and promulgated than others.
Needless to say, Freedom from Slavery would have been an unequivocal title because it invokes the opposition between masters and slaves with which we are most familiar, but it would reveal only part of the story about freedom and bondage in Cuba at that time. By juxtaposing freedom and liberation in the first place, I aim to foreground the existence of competing notions of freedom as well as claim that enslavement does not represent the only threat to struggles for freedom. Liberation, which refers to the action of being liberated, is not synonymous with the quality of enjoying or striving for freedom. I have chosen the book s title not only because it captures the inflections, nuances, and dynamics that are most relevant for my readings but also because freedom from liberation -that is, the quest to be free from an externally constituted definition, source, or act of liberation-distinguishes between the competing notions of freedom that I explore in this study. In the process of producing a language for subsequent forms of political activism and emancipation, the nineteenth-century history of Anglo-American liberalisms amply documents the extraction and uses of metaphors of bondage from accounts of the lived experiences and eyewitness observations of slavery. By contrast, Cuban reformists, who wa

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