Slave Rebellion and Social Identity in Cuba and the U.S. during the 1840s and 1850s

FAIN: FT-229232-15

David Luis-Brown
Claremont Graduate University (Claremont, CA 91711-5909)

Summer research and writing on American and Latin American Literature, and American Studies.

Blazing at Midnight analyzes the uses of slave rebellion in constructing social identity and charting blueprints of post-emancipation societies at moments of historical crisis in Cuba and the United States in the 1840s and 1850s. I argue that at times of political impasse, a wide range of social groups--nonslaveholding whites, novelists, Cuban exiles, travel writers, and slaves--recalibrated political ideals and ethical priorities by thinking through the significance of the slave rebel as a model for alternative social arrangements. The figure of the slave rebel galvanized U.S. anti-slavery advocates following the Fugitive Slave Act, rural whites in both countries, and renegade Cuban exiles in New York, who began to rethink their racial politics following Narciso Lopez's failed annexationist expedition to Cuba in 1851. All of the chapters in the book examine how debates over the futures of plantation societies revolved around the question of slave rebellion.

Associated Products

The Sun of Jesús del Monte: A Cuban Antislavery Novel (Book)
Title: The Sun of Jesús del Monte: A Cuban Antislavery Novel
Author: David Luis-Brown
Abstract: Andrés Avelino de Orihuela’s The Sun of Jesús del Monte (Paris, 1852), is among the most important novels on race and slavery to come out of nineteenth-century Cuba prior to Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés (1881-1882), joining Francisco (1839) by Anselmo Suárez y Romero and Sab (1841) by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda. It is the only Cuban novel of its time to focus centrally on La Escalera (The Ladder Rebellion, 1843-44), Cuba’s major anticolonial and slave insurrection. It indicts white privilege, racism and even the idea of race itself far more forcefully than any other Cuban novel of its time. The introduction and afterword situate the novel within nineteenth-century Cuban history and transatlantic literary history, explaining how Orihuela built on his experience of translating Harriet Beecher Stowe’s bestselling Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) into Spanish by adapting the sentimental melodrama of Stowe and the genre of costumbrismo, the representation of local customs, to pen an antislavery novel that was uncompromising in its searing critique of white supremacy and was politically committed to giving voice to the grievances of people of color like the celebrated Cuban poet Plácido (Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés), a martyr of La Escalera. This is the first translation of Orihuela's novel into English, and the first critical edition of the book.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/5196
Primary URL Description: The University of Virginia Press site for the book
Secondary URL: https://bookshop.org/books/sun-of-jesus-del-monte-a-cuban-antislavery-novel/9780813946214
Secondary URL Description: The Bookshop.org site for the book
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Type: Edited Volume
Type: Translation
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9780813946214
Translator: David Luis-Brown
Copy sent to NEH?: No

---