The 1812 Aponte Rebellion In Cuba And The Struggle Against Atlantic Slavery

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The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slavery

Author : Matt D. Childs
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 0807877417
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slavery by : Matt D. Childs

Download or read book The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slavery written by Matt D. Childs and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2009-01-05 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1812 a series of revolts known collectively as the Aponte Rebellion erupted across the island of Cuba, comprising one of the largest and most important slave insurrections in Caribbean history. Matt Childs provides the first in-depth analysis of the rebellion, situating it in local, colonial, imperial, and Atlantic World contexts. Childs explains how slaves and free people of color responded to the nineteenth-century "sugar boom" in the Spanish colony by planning a rebellion against racial slavery and plantation agriculture. Striking alliances among free people of color and slaves, blacks and mulattoes, Africans and Creoles, and rural and urban populations, rebels were prompted to act by a widespread belief in rumors promising that emancipation was near. Taking further inspiration from the 1791 Haitian Revolution, rebels sought to destroy slavery in Cuba and perhaps even end Spanish rule. By comparing his findings to studies of slave insurrections in Brazil, Haiti, the British Caribbean, and the United States, Childs places the rebellion within the wider story of Atlantic World revolution and political change. The book also features a biographical table, constructed by Childs, of the more than 350 people investigated for their involvement in the rebellion, 34 of whom were executed.

Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba

Author : Aisha K. Finch
Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 1469622351
Total Pages : 316 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (696 download)

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Book Synopsis Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba by : Aisha K. Finch

Download or read book Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba written by Aisha K. Finch and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2015-05-21 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Envisioning La Escalera--an underground rebel movement largely composed of Africans living on farms and plantations in rural western Cuba--in the larger context of the long emancipation struggle in Cuba, Aisha Finch demonstrates how organized slave resistance became critical to the unraveling not only of slavery but also of colonial systems of power during the nineteenth century. While the discovery of La Escalera unleashed a reign of terror by the Spanish colonial powers in which hundreds of enslaved people were tortured, tried, and executed, Finch revises historiographical conceptions of the movement as a fiction conveniently invented by the Spanish government in order to target anticolonial activities. Connecting the political agitation stirred up by free people of color in the urban centers to the slave rebellions that rocked the countryside, Finch shows how the rural plantation was connected to a much larger conspiratorial world outside the agrarian sector. While acknowledging the role of foreign abolitionists and white creoles in the broader history of emancipation, Finch teases apart the organization, leadership, and effectiveness of the black insurgents in midcentury dissident mobilizations that emerged across western Cuba, presenting compelling evidence that black women played a particularly critical role.

Freedom's Mirror

Author : Ada Ferrer
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107029422
Total Pages : 393 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (7 download)

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Book Synopsis Freedom's Mirror by : Ada Ferrer

Download or read book Freedom's Mirror written by Ada Ferrer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-28 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804 was the only slave rebellion in which slaves and former slaves succeeded in ending slavery and establishing an independent state, making it perhaps the most radical revolution of the modern world. Yet on the Spanish island of Cuba, barely fifty miles away, the events in Haiti helped usher in the antithesis of revolutionary emancipation. There, planters and authorities saw the devastation of their neighboring colony and rushed to prevent the same events from happening in Cuba by buttressing the institutions of slavery and colonial rule. Freedom's Mirror follows the reverberations of the Haitian Revolution in Cuba, where the violent entrenchment of slavery occurred at the very moment that the Haitian Revolution provided a powerful and proximate example of slaves destroying slavery. By linking two stories--the story of the Haitian Revolution and that of the rise of Cuban slave society--that are usually told separately, Ada Ferrer sheds fresh light on both of these crucial moments in Caribbean and Atlantic history"--Provided by publisher.

Runaway Slave Settlements in Cuba

Author : Gabino La Rosa Corzo
Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 9780807854792
Total Pages : 310 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (547 download)

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Book Synopsis Runaway Slave Settlements in Cuba by : Gabino La Rosa Corzo

Download or read book Runaway Slave Settlements in Cuba written by Gabino La Rosa Corzo and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2003 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining archaeological and historical methods, Gabino La Rosa Corzo provides the most detailed and accurate available account of the runaway slave settlements (palenques) that formed in the inaccessible mountain chains of eastern Cuba from 1737 t

Voices of the Enslaved in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

Author : Gloria García Rodríguez
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 0807877670
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis Voices of the Enslaved in Nineteenth-Century Cuba by : Gloria García Rodríguez

Download or read book Voices of the Enslaved in Nineteenth-Century Cuba written by Gloria García Rodríguez and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2011-10-10 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Putting the voices of the enslaved front and center, Gloria Garcia Rodriguez's study presents a compelling overview of African slavery in Cuba and its relationship to the plantation system that was the economic center of the New World. A major essay by Garcia, who has done decades of archival research on Cuban slavery, introduces the work, providing a history of the development, maintenance, and economy of the slave system in Cuba, which was abolished in 1886, later than in any country in the Americas except Brazil. The second part of the book features eighty previously unpublished primary documents selected by Garcia that vividly illustrate the experiences of Cuba's African slaves. This translation offers English-language readers a substantial look into the very rich, and much underutilized, material on slavery in Cuban archives and is especially suitable for teaching about the African diaspora, comparative slavery, and Cuban studies. Highlighting both the repressiveness of slavery and the legal and social spaces opened to slaves to challenge that repression, this collection reveals the rarely documented voices of slaves, as well as the social and cultural milieu in which they lived.

Wage-Earning Slaves

Author : Claudia Varella
Publisher : University Press of Florida
ISBN 13 : 1683401921
Total Pages : 237 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (834 download)

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Book Synopsis Wage-Earning Slaves by : Claudia Varella

Download or read book Wage-Earning Slaves written by Claudia Varella and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2020-11-24 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wage-Earning Slaves is the first systematic study of coartación, a process by which slaves worked toward purchasing their freedom in installments, long recognized as a distinctive feature of certain areas under Spanish colonial rule in the nineteenth century. Focusing on Cuba, this book reveals that instead of providing a “path to manumission,” the process was often rife with obstacles that blocked slaves from achieving liberty. Claudia Varella and Manuel Barcia trace the evolution of coartación in the context of urban and rural settings, documenting the lived experiences of slaves through primary sources from many different archives. They show that slave owners grew increasingly intolerant and abusive of the process, and that the laws of coartación were not often followed in practice. The process did not become formalized as a contract between slaves and their masters until 1875, after abolition had already come. Varella and Barcia discuss how coartados did not see an improvement in their situation at this time, but essentially became wage-earning slaves as they continued serving their former owners. The exhaustive research in this volume provides valuable insight into how slaves and their masters negotiated with each other in the ever-changing economic world of nineteenth-century Cuba, where freedom was not always absolute and where abuses and corruption most often prevailed.

Breaking the Chains, Forging the Nation

Author : Aisha Finch
Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 0807170984
Total Pages : 340 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis Breaking the Chains, Forging the Nation by : Aisha Finch

Download or read book Breaking the Chains, Forging the Nation written by Aisha Finch and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2019-04-10 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Breaking the Chains, Forging the Nation offers a new perspective on black political life in Cuba by analyzing the time between two hallmark Cuban events, the Aponte Rebellion of 1812 and the Race War of 1912. In so doing, this anthology provides fresh insight into the ways in which Cubans practiced and understood black freedom and resistance, from the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution to the early years of the Cuban republic. Bringing together an impressive range of scholars from the field of Cuban studies, the volume examines, for the first time, the continuities between disparate forms of political struggle and racial organizing during the early years of the nineteenth century and traces them into the early decades of the twentieth. Matt Childs, Manuel Barcia, Gloria García, and Reynaldo Ortíz-Minayo explore the transformation of Cuba’s nineteenth-century sugar regime and the ways in which African-descended people responded to these new realities, while Barbara Danzie León and Matthew Pettway examine the intellectual and artistic work that captured the politics of this period. Aisha Finch, Ada Ferrer, Michele Reid-Vazquez, Jacqueline Grant, and Joseph Dorsey consider new ways to think about the categories of resistance and agency, the gendered investments of traditional resistance histories, and the continuities of struggle that erupted over the course of the mid-nineteenth century. In the final section of the book, Fannie Rushing, Aline Helg, Melina Pappademos, and Takkara Brunson delve into Cuba’s early nationhood and its fraught racial history. Isabel Hernández Campos and W. F. Santiago-Valles conclude the book with reflections on the process of history and commemoration in Cuba. Together, the contributors rethink the ways in which African-descended Cubans battled racial violence, created pathways to citizenship and humanity, and exercised claims on the nation state. Utilizing rare primary documents on the Afro-Cuban communities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Breaking the Chains, Forging the Nation explores how black resistance to exploitative systems played a central role in the making of the Cuban nation.

Prieto

Author : Henry B. Lovejoy
Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 1469645408
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (696 download)

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Book Synopsis Prieto by : Henry B. Lovejoy

Download or read book Prieto written by Henry B. Lovejoy and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2018-11-14 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Atlantic world history centers on the life of Juan Nepomuceno Prieto (c. 1773–c. 1835), a member of the West African Yoruba people enslaved and taken to Havana during the era of the Atlantic slave trade. Richly situating Prieto's story within the context of colonial Cuba, Henry B. Lovejoy illuminates the vast process by which thousands of Yoruba speakers were forced into life-and-death struggles in a strange land. In Havana, Prieto and most of the people of the Yoruba diaspora were identified by the colonial authorities as Lucumi. Prieto's evolving identity becomes the fascinating fulcrum of the book. Drafted as an enslaved soldier for Spain, Prieto achieved self-manumission while still in the military. Rising steadily in his dangerous new world, he became the religious leader of Havana's most famous Lucumi cabildo, where he contributed to the development of the Afro-Cuban religion of Santeria. Then he was arrested on suspicion of fomenting slave rebellion. Trial testimony shows that he fell ill, but his ultimate fate is unknown. Despite the silences and contradictions that will never be fully resolved, Prieto's life opens a window onto how Africans creatively developed multiple forms of identity and resistance in Cuba and in the Atlantic world more broadly.

An Islandwide Struggle for Freedom

Author : Graham T. Nessler
Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 146962687X
Total Pages : 313 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (696 download)

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Book Synopsis An Islandwide Struggle for Freedom by : Graham T. Nessler

Download or read book An Islandwide Struggle for Freedom written by Graham T. Nessler and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2016-03-14 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reinterpreting the Haitian Revolution as both an islandwide and a circum-Caribbean phenomenon, Graham Nessler examines the intertwined histories of Saint-Domingue, the French colony that became Haiti, and Santo Domingo, the Spanish colony that became the Dominican Republic. Tracing conflicts over the terms and boundaries of territory, liberty, and citizenship that transpired in the two colonies that shared one island, Nessler argues that the territories' borders and governance were often unclear and mutually influential during a tumultuous period that witnessed emancipation in Saint-Domingue and reenslavement in Santo Domingo. Nessler aligns the better-known history of the French side with a full investigation and interpretation of events on the Spanish side, articulating the importance of Santo Domingo in the conflicts that reshaped the political terrain of the Atlantic world. Nessler also analyzes the strategies employed by those claimed as slaves in both colonies to gain liberty and equal citizenship. In doing so, he reveals what was at stake for slaves and free nonwhites in their uses of colonial legal systems and how their understanding of legal matters affected the colonies' relationships with each other and with the French and Spanish metropoles.

A Turbulent Time

Author : David Barry Gaspar
Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780253332479
Total Pages : 284 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (324 download)

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Book Synopsis A Turbulent Time by : David Barry Gaspar

Download or read book A Turbulent Time written by David Barry Gaspar and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1997-03-22 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Stimulating, incisive, insightful, sometimes revisionist, this volume is required reading for historians of comparative colonialism in an age of revolution." —Choice "[An] eminently original and intellectually exciting book." —William and Mary Quarterly This volume examines several slave societies in the Greater Caribbean to illustrate the pervasive and multi-layered impact of the revolutionary age on the region. Built precariously on the exploitation of slave labor, organized according to the doctrine of racial discrimination, the plantation colonies were particularly vulnerable to the message of the French Revolution, which proved all the more potent because it coincided with the emergence of the antislavery movement in the Atlantic world and interacted with local traditions of resistance among the region's slaves, free coloreds, and white colonists.

The Great African Slave Revolt of 1825

Author : Manuel Barcia
Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 0807143324
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis The Great African Slave Revolt of 1825 by : Manuel Barcia

Download or read book The Great African Slave Revolt of 1825 written by Manuel Barcia and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2012-06-06 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In June 1825 the Cuban countryside witnessed a large African-led slave rebellion -- a revolt that began a cycle of slave uprisings lasting until the mid-1840s. The Great African Slave Revolt of 1825 examines this movement and its participants for the first time, highlighting the significance of African warriors in New World plantation society. Unlike previous slave revolts -- led by alliances between free people of color and slaves, blacks and mulattoes, Africans and Creoles, and rural and urban populations -- only African-born men organized the uprising of 1825. From this year onwards, Barcia argues, slave uprisings in Cuba underwent a phase of Africanization that concluded only in the mid-1840s with the conspiracy of La Escalera, a large movement organized by free colored men with ample participation of the slave population. The Great African Slave Revolt of 1825 offers a detailed examination of the sociopolitical and economic background of the Matanzas rebellion, both locally and colonially. Based on extensive primary sources, particularly court records, the study provides a microhistorical analysis of the days that preceded this event, the uprising itself, and the days and months that followed. Barcia gives the Great African Revolt of 1825 its rightful place in the history of slavery in Cuba, the Caribbean, and the Americas.

The Occupation of Havana

Author : Elena A. Schneider
Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 146964536X
Total Pages : 360 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (696 download)

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Book Synopsis The Occupation of Havana by : Elena A. Schneider

Download or read book The Occupation of Havana written by Elena A. Schneider and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2018-10-29 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1762, British forces mobilized more than 230 ships and 26,000 soldiers, sailors, and enslaved Africans to attack Havana, one of the wealthiest and most populous ports in the Americas. They met fierce resistance. Spanish soldiers and local militias in Cuba, along with enslaved Africans who were promised freedom, held off the enemy for six suspenseful weeks. In the end, the British prevailed, but more lives were lost in the invasion and subsequent eleven-month British occupation of Havana than during the entire Seven Years' War in North America. The Occupation of Havana offers a nuanced and poignantly human account of the British capture and Spanish recovery of this coveted Caribbean city. The book explores both the interconnected histories of the British and Spanish empires and the crucial role played by free people of color and the enslaved in the creation and defense of Havana. Tragically, these men and women would watch their promise of freedom and greater rights vanish in the face of massive slave importation and increased sugar production upon Cuba's return to Spanish rule. By linking imperial negotiations with events in Cuba and their consequences, Elena Schneider sheds new light on the relationship between slavery and empire at the dawn of the Age of Revolutions.

The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World

Author : David P. Geggus
Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 1643361139
Total Pages : 282 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (433 download)

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Book Synopsis The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World by : David P. Geggus

Download or read book The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World written by David P. Geggus and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2020-02-14 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The effect of Saint Domingue's decolonization on the wider Atlantic world The slave revolution that two hundred years ago created the state of Haiti alarmed and excited public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic. Its repercussions ranged from the world commodity markets to the imagination of poets, from the council chambers of the great powers to slave quarters in Virginia and Brazil and most points in between. Sharing attention with such tumultuous events as the French Revolution and the Napoleonic War, Haiti's fifteen-year struggle for racial equality, slave emancipation, and colonial independence challenged notions about racial hierarchy that were gaining legitimacy in an Atlantic world dominated by Europeans and the slave trade. The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World explores the multifarious influence—from economic to ideological to psychological—that a revolt on a small Caribbean island had on the continents surrounding it. Fifteen international scholars, including eminent historians David Brion Davis, Seymour Drescher, and Robin Blackburn, explicate such diverse ramifications as the spawning of slave resistance and the stimulation of slavery's expansion, the opening of economic frontiers, and the formation of black and white diasporas. They show how the Haitian Revolution embittered contemporary debates about race and abolition and inspired poetry, plays, and novels. Seeking to disentangle its effects from those of the French Revolution, they demonstrate that its impact was ambiguous, complex, and contradictory.

Conceiving Freedom

Author : Camillia Cowling
Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 1469610876
Total Pages : 344 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (696 download)

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Book Synopsis Conceiving Freedom by : Camillia Cowling

Download or read book Conceiving Freedom written by Camillia Cowling and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2013 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conceiving Freedom: Women of Color, Gender, and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro

The Great African Slave Revolt of 1825

Author : Manuel Barcia
Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 0807143340
Total Pages : 309 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis The Great African Slave Revolt of 1825 by : Manuel Barcia

Download or read book The Great African Slave Revolt of 1825 written by Manuel Barcia and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2012-06-06 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In June 1825 the Cuban countryside witnessed a large African-led slave rebellion -- a revolt that began a cycle of slave uprisings lasting until the mid-1840s. The Great African Slave Revolt of 1825 examines this movement and its participants for the first time, highlighting the significance of African warriors in New World plantation society. Unlike previous slave revolts -- led by alliances between free people of color and slaves, blacks and mulattoes, Africans and Creoles, and rural and urban populations -- only African-born men organized the uprising of 1825. From this year onwards, Barcia argues, slave uprisings in Cuba underwent a phase of Africanization that concluded only in the mid-1840s with the conspiracy of La Escalera, a large movement organized by free colored men with ample participation of the slave population. The Great African Slave Revolt of 1825 offers a detailed examination of the sociopolitical and economic background of the Matanzas rebellion, both locally and colonially. Based on extensive primary sources, particularly court records, the study provides a microhistorical analysis of the days that preceded this event, the uprising itself, and the days and months that followed. Barcia gives the Great African Revolt of 1825 its rightful place in the history of slavery in Cuba, the Caribbean, and the Americas.

The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade

Author : Jorge Canizares-Esguerra
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812208137
Total Pages : 382 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (122 download)

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Book Synopsis The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade by : Jorge Canizares-Esguerra

Download or read book The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade written by Jorge Canizares-Esguerra and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-07-03 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the era of the Atlantic slave trade, vibrant port cities became home to thousands of Africans in transit. Free and enslaved blacks alike crafted the necessary materials to support transoceanic commerce and labored as stevedores, carters, sex workers, and boarding-house keepers. Even though Africans continued to be exchanged as chattel, urban frontiers allowed a number of enslaved blacks to negotiate the right to hire out their own time, often greatly enhancing their autonomy within the Atlantic commercial system. In The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade, eleven original essays by leading scholars from the United States, Europe, and Latin America chronicle the black experience in Atlantic ports, providing a rich and diverse portrait of the ways in which Africans experienced urban life during the era of plantation slavery. Describing life in Portugal, Brazil, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Africa, this volume illuminates the historical identity, agency, and autonomy of the African experience as well as the crucial role Atlantic cities played in the formation of diasporic cultures. By shifting focus away from plantations, this volume poses new questions about the nature of slavery in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, illustrating early modern urban spaces as multiethnic sites of social connectivity, cultural incubation, and political negotiation. Contributors: Trevor Burnard, Mariza de Carvalho Soares, Matt D. Childs, Kevin Dawson, Roquinaldo Ferreira, David Geggus, Jane Landers, Robin Law, David Northrup, João José Reis, James H. Sweet, Nicole von Germeten.

The Year of the Lash

Author : Michele Reid-Vazquez
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
ISBN 13 : 0820340685
Total Pages : 270 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (23 download)

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Book Synopsis The Year of the Lash by : Michele Reid-Vazquez

Download or read book The Year of the Lash written by Michele Reid-Vazquez and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michele Reid-Vazquez reveals the untold story of the strategies of negotiation used by free blacks in the aftermath of the “Year of the Lash”—a wave of repression in Cuba that had great implications for the Atlantic World in the next two decades. At dawn on June 29, 1844, a firing squad in Havana executed ten accused ringleaders of the Conspiracy of La Escalera, an alleged plot to abolish slavery and colonial rule in Cuba. The condemned men represented prominent members of Cuba's free community of African descent, including the acclaimed poet Plácido (Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés). In an effort to foster a white majority and curtail black rebellion, Spanish colonial authorities also banished, imprisoned, and exiled hundreds of free blacks, dismantled the militia of color, and accelerated white immigration projects. Scholars have debated the existence of the Conspiracy of La Escalera for over a century, yet little is known about how those targeted by the violence responded. Drawing on archival material from Cuba, Mexico, Spain, and the United States, Reid-Vazquez provides a critical window into understanding how free people of color challenged colonial policies of terror and pursued justice on their own terms using formal and extralegal methods. Whether rooted in Cuba or cast into the Atlantic World, free men and women of African descent stretched and broke colonial expectations of their codes of conduct locally and in exile. Their actions underscored how black agency, albeit fragmented, worked to destabilize repression's impact.