Abstract
Cuba, the largest island in the Caribbean, has long played an important role in the literary imagination of the Western world. Viewed by many as the locus of authentic blackness, it gave rise to Afro-Cubanism, a movement in Caribbean arts and letters that stemmed from a rediscovery of the region’s African heritage during the 1920s and to some extent paralleled the Harlem Renaissance in the United States.1 There has been a cultural dialog between the United States and Cuba for centuries. A significant part of this interchange has related to questions of racial identity rooted in a long-standing tradition of cultural exchange, specifically focusing on African-based traditions. In contrast to Latin American debates on race, which have been profoundly influenced by conceptual paradigms of cultural identity anchored in myths of racial harmony and syncretism, polemics in the more racially polarized United States have produced a more forceful and open discussion of race.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See Edward J. Mullen, Afro-Cuban Literature: Critical Junctures ( Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998 ).
See William W. Megenney, “The Black in Hispanic-Caribbean and Brazilian Poetry: A Comparative Perspective,” Revista Interamericana Review 5 (1975): 47–66.
Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade (A Census) ( Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969 ), 46.
José Juan Arrom, “La poesi a afrocubana,” Revista Iberoamericana 4 (1942): 379–411.
Cited in Lorna Williams, The Representation of Slavery in Cuban Fiction ( Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994 ), 9.
William Luis, Literary Bondage: Slavery in Cuban Narrative ( Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990 ), 27.
See Jerome Branche, “Mulato entre negros (y blancos): Writing, Race, the Antislavery Question, and Juan Francisco Manzano’s Autobiografía,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 20.1 (2001): 63–87, which questions the tradition of ascribing benevolence to the abolitionist tradition.
G. R. Coulthard, Race and Colour in Caribbean Literature ( London: Oxford University Press, 1962 ), 12–13.
See Roberto Friol, Suite para Juan Francisco Manzano ( Havana: Editorial Arte y Literatura, 1977 ).
See Branche, “Mulato entre negros,” as well as Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo, Black Cosmopolitanism: Racial Consciousness and Transnational Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Americas ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005 ): 187–255.
For an excellent discussion of the social structure and daily life of Afro-Cubans during the mid-nineteenth century, see Adriana J. Bergero, “Escritura, vida cotidiana y resignificaciones en La Habana de Juan Francisco Manzano,” Afro-Hispanic Review 24.2 (2005): 7–32.
Carlos M. Trelles, “Bibliografi a de autores de raza de color de Cuba,” Cuba Contemporáneo 43 (1927): 31.
Sonia Labrador-Rodríguez, “La intelectualidad negra en Cuba en el siglo XIX: El caso de Manzano,” Revista Iberoamericana 62 (1996): 23.
See Sylvia Molloy, “From Serf to Self: The Autobiography of Juan Francisco Manzano,” MLN 104.2 (1989): 412–13.
Thomas Bremer, “The Slave Who Wrote Poetry: Comments on the Literary Works and the Autobiography of Juan Francisco Manzano,” in Slavery in the Americas, ed. Wolfgang Binder (Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 1993 ), 490.
Henry Louis Gates, “Editor’s Introduction,” in “Race,” Writing and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986 ), 8.
See Martha Cobb, Harlem, Haiti, and Havana: A Comparative Study of Langston Hughes, Jacques Roumain, and Nicolás Guillén ( Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1979 ), 28.
Cited in Edward J. Mullen, ed., The Life and Poems of a Cuban Slave: Juan Francisco Manzano, 1797–1854 ( Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1981 ), 115.
Also see Marilyn G. Miller, “Reading Juan Francisco Manzano in the Wake of Alexander von Humbolt,” Atlantic Studies 7.2 (2010): 180–81.
Cintio Vitier, “Dos poetas cubanos: Plácido y Manzano,” Bohemia 14 (1973): 20.
For detailed comment on Manzano’s publishing history, see Antonio López Prieto’s important bio-bibliographic essay “Juan Francisco Manzano” in his Parnaso cubano: Colección de poesías selectas de autores cubanas desde Zequeira a nuestros días ( Havana: Miguel de Villa, 1881 ), 251–52.
See José Juan Arrom, Historia de la literatura dram á tica cubana (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1944), 52–53
as well as Marilyn Miller, “Imitation and Improvisation in Juan Francisco Manzano’s Zafira,” Colonial Latin America Reviews 17.1 (2008): 49–71.
See Miller, “Imitation and Improvisation,” 50 as well as her “Rebeldía narrativa, resistencia poética y expesión ‘libre’ en Juan francicsco Manzano,” Revista Iberoamericana 71.1 (2005): 417–36. Also of importance is the edition of Abdeslam Azougarh, Juan Francisco Manzano: esclavo poeta en la isla de cuba (Valencia: Episteme, 2000) especially “La poesía,” 33–52;
A. Lewis Galanes, Poesías de J. F. Manzano, esclavo en la isla de Cuba (Madrid: Betania, 1991)
in which she reprints 13 poems transcribed by the English Quaker B. B. Wiffen. William Luis’s Juan Francisco Manzano. Autob iograf ia del esclavo poeta y otros escritos (Madrid: Iberoamerica, 2007) presents the most complete annotated version of Manzano’s poems. See “Poesías,” 135–99.
Cited in Francisco Calcagno, Poetas de color ( Havana: Imp. Militar de la V. Soler y Compañía, 1878 ), 45–46.
Emilio Martín González del Valle, La poesía lírica en Cuba (Barcelona: Tipo-Lit. de Celestino Verdaguer, 1884), 171; Prieto, Parnaso cubano, 252;
Aurelio Mitjans, Historia de la literatura cubana ( 1890; reprint, Madrid: Editorial América, 1918 ), 187–88.
Miriam DeCosta, “Social Lyricism and the Caribbean Poet/Rebel,” CLA Journal 15.4 (1972): 442;
Richard L. Jackson, The Black Image in Latin American Literature (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1976), 94 (Jackson seems to have altered this position in his Black Writers and the Hispanic Canon [New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997], especially 24);
Susan Willis, “Crushed Geraniums: Juan Francisco Manzano and the Language of Poetry,” in The Slave’s Narrative, ed. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates Jr (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 199–224 (especially 213–17).
Antonio Vera-León, “Juan Francisco Manzano: El estilo bárbaro de la nación,” Hispamérica 20.60 (1991): 7–8.
William Luis, “Nicolás Azcárate’s Antislavery Notebook and the Unpublished Poems of the Slave Juan Francisco Manzano,” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 28.3 (1994): 335. Also see Luis, Autobiografía del esclavo poeta, “Azcárte, abolicionista y difusor de la cultura cubana,” 20–30.
Rex Hauser, “Two New World Dreamers: Manzano and Sor Juana,” Afro-Hispanic Review 12.2 (1993): 3.
Robert Richmond Ellis, “Reading through the Veil of Juan Francisco Manzano: From Homoerotic Violence to the Dream of a Homoracial Bond,” PMLA 113.3 (1998): 443.
See Edward J. Mullen, “Francisco Calcagno and the Afro-Cuban Literary Canon, PALARA 12 (2008): 29–37.
José L. Franco, ed., Autobiografía, cartas y versos de Juan Fco. Manzano ( Havana: Municipio de la Habana, 1937 ).
For an interesting discussion of these problems, see John W. Blassingame, Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), xvii–lxv.
See Daniel Laferriere, “Making Room for Semiotics,” Academe: Bulletin of the AAUP 65 (1979): 434–40.
See Frances Smith Foster, Witnessing Slavery ( Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979 ).
See also the important essay by Barbara Foley, “History, Fiction and the Ground Between: The Use of the Documentary Made in Black Literature,” PMLA 95 (1980): 389–403.
See James Olney, “‘I Was Born’: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature,” in The Slave’s Narrative, ed. Charles Davis and Henry Louis Gates, 148–75. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Miriam DeCosta-Willis, “Self and Society in the Afro-Cuban Slave Narrative,” Latin American Literary Review 26.32 (1988): 9.
See Robert Richmond Ellis, “Reading through the Veil of Juan Francisco Manzano,” who claims that the autobiography “can also be read as silent testimony to a kind of abuse largely unacknowledged by historians of slavery and critics of slave narratives: the sexual violation of male slaves” (422). Also of interest with reference to the discourse of torture is Julio Ramos, “The Law Is Other: Literature and the Constitution of the Juridical Subject in Nineteenth Century Cuba,” Annals of Scholarship 11.1–2 (1996): 1–35;
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and the Unmaking of the World ( Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985 ).
See Martha Cobb, “The Slave Narrative and the Black Literary Tradition,” in The Art of Slave Narrative: Original Essays in Criticism and Theory, ed. John Sekora and Darwin Turner (Macomb: Western Illinois University Press, 1982), 36–44; DeCosta-Willis, “Self and Society,” 6–15;
Luis A. Jiménez, “Nineteenth Century Autobiography in the Afro-Americas: Frederick Douglass and Juan Francisco Manzano,” Afro-Hispanic Review 14.2 (1995): 47–52.
See Jackson, Black Writers, 25, for commentary on this point. Gera Burton reproduces a letter in Ambivalence and the Postcolonial Subject: The Strategic Alliance of Juan Franciso Manzano and Richard Robert Madden (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 95, which confirms that Manzano frequently visited him during his tenure in Havana.
See César Leante, “Dos obras antiesclavistas cubanas,” Cuadernos Americanos 207 (1976): 175–89.
See Fernanda Macchi, “Juan Francisco Manzano el discurso abolicionista: Una lectura enmarcada,” Revista Iberoanericana 217–218 (2007): 63–77, and her “Richard Robert Madden y el origen de las indias,” Afro-Hispanic Review 27.2 (2008): 71–90, for a discussion of the links between Madden’s writing and the ideological goals of Anglophone abolitionism.
Fionnghuala Sweeney, “Atlantic Countercultures and the Networked Text: Juan Francisco Manzano, R. R. Madden and the Cuban Slave Narrative,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 40.4 (2004): 402.
Anna Brickhouse, “Manzano, Madden, ‘El Negro Mártir,’ and the Revisionist Geographies of Abolitionism” in American Literary Geographies: Spatial Practice and Cultural Production, 1500–1900, ed. Martin Brückner and Hsuan L. Hsu ( Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007 ), 232–33.
Joselyn Almeida, “Translating a Slave’s Life: Richard Robert Madden and the Post-Abolition Trafficking of Juan Manzano’s Poems by a Slave in the Island of Cuba,” in Circulations: Romanticism and the Black Atlantic, ed. Paul Youngquist and Frances Botkin (October 2011): 2. Web.
See David R. Murray, “Richard Robert Madden: His Career as a Slavery Abolitionist,” Studies 61 (1972): 43–44.
Cited in Richard Robert Madden, preface to The Memoirs (Chiefly Autobiographical) from 1798 to 1886 of Richard Robert Madden; M.D., F.R.C.S., ed. Thomas More Madden ( London: Ward and Downey, 1891 ).
Richard Robert Madden, A Letter to W. E. Channing, D.D. on the Subject of the Abuse of the Flag of the United States, in the Island of Cuba, and the Advantage Taken of Its Protection in Promoting the Slave Trade (Boston: Ticknor, 1839). A review of the pamphlet appeared in the Boston Christian Examiner 27 (January 1840): 410–11: “The name of Mr. Trist has been frequently in the newspapers of late, with many disgraceful additions; but until we read this pamphlet of Dr. Madden we knew no sure ground of belief as to the justness of their application… He brings against the Consul serious charges of misconduct, and substantiated by documentary evidence of apparently unquestionable authority.”
See Howard R. Temperly, “British and American Abolitionists,” in The Antislavery Vanguard: New Essays on the Abolitionists, ed. Martin Duberman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965 ), 337–58.
See Frederick S. Stimson, Cuba’s Romantic Poet: The Story of Plácido (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964), 99–102. Also see “Notes to the Text” in Floyd J. Miller’s edition of Martin R. Delany’s Blake or the Huts of America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), which contains an interesting note on Plácido, whom Delany refers to in the aforementioned novel (319).
Molloy, “From Serf to Self,” 407. See also Julio Ramos, “Cuerpo, lengua, subjectividad,” Revista de Cr itica Literaria 19.38 (1993): 225–37.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2014 Edward J. Mullen
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Mullen, E.J. (2014). Introduction. In: Mullen, E.J. (eds) The Life and Poems of a Cuban Slave. Afro-Latin@ Diasporas. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137481382_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137481382_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-50286-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-48138-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)