Examines the women who became involved in Cuba's slave resistance movements of 1843 and 1844, drawing attention to those who molded that resistance in visible and public ways and those whose involvement has often been obscured or unnoticed. The narratives created around Fermina and Carlota Lucumf, two leading figures in the 1843 insurgencies, both rupture and complicate the masculine discourse around slave-movement leadership that has been central to historiographies of slave rebellion.
Dionne Brand's memoir, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, touches on the author's childhood in Trinidad and adulthood in Canada but is equally concerned with understanding and intervening in the larger histories among which Brand situates her identity. Her sources are rich and varied, and they can be broken down into three general types: the historical archives written during the 'age of exploration' and the slave trade; the contemporary archives of newspapers and journals; and the creative archive of postcolonial writers, or the neo-archive.
Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
326 p., Shows how gender shaped urban routes to freedom for the enslaved during the process of gradual emancipation in Cuba and Brazil, which occurred only after the rest of Latin America had abolished slavery and even after the American Civil War. Focusing on late nineteenth-century Havana and Rio de Janeiro, Cowling argues that enslaved women played a dominant role in carving out freedom for themselves and their children through the courts.
Philadelphia, PA: University of Philadelphia Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
217 p., In the 18th century, Bridgetown, Barbados, was heavily populated by both enslaved and free women. Recounts the lives of enslaved women in 18th century Bridgetown, Barbados, and their conditions of confinement through urban, legal, sexual, and representational power wielded by slave owners, authorities, and the archive.
The editors discuss various reports including a tribute to historian Gerda Lerner, a forum on the Western media's use of the term medieval, and the involvement of women in slave resistance unions in Cuba during the mid-19th century.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
241 p, In the Caribbean colony of Grenada in 1797, Dorothy Thomas signed the manumission documents for her elderly slave Betty. Thomas owned dozens of slaves and was well on her way to amassing the fortune that would make her the richest black resident in the nearby colony of Demerara. What made the transaction notable was that Betty was Dorothy Thomas’s mother and that fifteen years earlier Dorothy had purchased her own freedom and that of her children. Although she was just one remove from bondage, Dorothy Thomas managed to become so rich and powerful that she was known as the Queen of Demerara.
"Although Annie John is commonly categorized as primarily Caribbean (a precursor to Kincaid’s “American” sequel, Lucy [1990]), my proposed comparison elucidates the Western and transnational leanings of this foundational “Caribbean” work and the ways in which it implicitly expands on Morrison’s representations of female autonomy and visual culture." --The Author
