Chapter 13 - Antillean Sovereignty in Pan-Caribbean Writing

Summary

Since the West Indies saw the forced introduction of the most enslaved Africans in all of the Americas, the most written about element of pre-twentieth-century Caribbean writing in contemporary scholarship is without a doubt plantation slavery, including abolition and slave revolt and rebellion. However, even while drawing attention to these concerns, much of nineteenth-century Caribbean writing, in the works of Cuba’s Félix Varela, Haiti’s Émeric Bergeaud, and Puerto Rico’s Ramón Emeterio Betances, for example, also shows distinct concerns with ideas of sovereignty. Rather than illustrating an obsessive concern with racialized revolution or at once idyllic and treacherous scenes of tropical paradise, the Caribbean writers under discussion in this essay demonstrate a clear shift towards trying to determine the meaning of freedom in a life after slavery, and what kinds of new identities the inhabitants of a post-slavery Caribbean might take on.