Racialized Futures

doi:10.1017/9781009168359.009

8 - Racialized Futures

Slavery, Miscegenation, and Speculative Literature

from Part II - Cuban Literature’s Long Nineteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 August 2024

Gerard Aching

Edited by

Vicky Unruh and

Jacqueline Loss

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Vicky Unruh: Affiliation:
University of Kansas
Jacqueline Loss: Affiliation:
University of Connecticut

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Summary

This chapter examines Cuban fiction about slavery emerging in the 1830s–1840s: Petrona y Rosalía (1838) by Félix Tanco y Bosmeniel; Francisco, el ingenio o las delicias del campo (1838–1839) by Anselmo Suárez y Romero; the short story “Cecilia Valdés” (1839) by Cirilo Villaverde (1812–1894), who later developed it into the novel Cecilia Valdés o La Loma del Ángel (1882); Autobiografía de un esclavo (1840) by Juan Francisco Manzano; and Sab (1841) by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda. The chapter contextualizes the analysis in tensions between the demands for labor and “ad hoc moral alibis” characterizing Plantation America, particularly the improvised concepts of racial differentiation – Blackness and Black-and-white miscegenation – typifying responses to these tensions. The analysis of this literature as speculative writing that looks simultaneously toward the past and future links it to the sometimes improvisational and speculative nature of the new plantation-based societies, which were themselves entangled between speculative finance capital and moral reflections on freedom, and to the intensified anxieties about Cuba’s racialized future generated by the 1841 demographic census.

Keywords

Cuban slavery fiction as speculative writing concepts of racial differentiation moral alibis Petrona y Rosalía (1838)Franciscoel ingenio o las delicias del campo (1838–1839)“Cecilia Valdés” (1839)Autobiografía de un esclavo (1840)Sab (1841)

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature , pp. 142 - 156

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009168359.009 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2024

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