African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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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.
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.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
193 p., Studies the writings of Toussaint Louverture and Aimé Césaire to examine how they conceived of and narrated two defining events in the decolonializing of the French Caribbean: the revolution that freed the French colony of Saint-Domingue in 1803 and the departmentalization of Martinique and other French colonies in 1946.
453 p., Offers an anthropological interpretation of cultural discourses about the body found in literature, visual narratives and archival sources throughout 19th century in Spanish colonial Havana. These discourses show a pressing concern with the "manners" of bodies, the ways they moved, how they occupied space, and how they managed sensations and emotions to negotiate power and prestige in the highly stratified Havana's society. Concerns for the manners of the body became the discursive domain of the rising planter and intellectual elite of Cuban creoles. They often expressed these concerns in normalizing terms such as "good manners," "good taste," and "tone." Argues that these and other highly embodied, interlocking moral, sensory, affective and aesthetic categories such as nobility, respect or " sabor " became focal indexes of the social status of individuals in colonial society.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
245 p., Addressing the transnational relationships of Freemasonry, politics, and culture in the field of Latin American and Caribbean literatures and cultures, Writing Secrecy provides insight into Pan-Caribbean, transnational and diasporic formations of these Masonic lodges and their influences on political and cultural discourses in the Americas. Includes "Technologies: Caribbean Knowledges, Imperial Critiques 1860-1900s" and "Urgency and Possibility: Afro-Latin® Identities."
The article discusses the history of Santo Domingo (which was renamed the Dominican Republic) under the French General Jean-Louis Ferrand from 1804 through 1809. Particular focus is given to Ferrand's efforts, under the direction of the French Emperor Napoleon I, to re-enslave Santo Domingo and overthrow Haiti's ruler Toussaint Louverture. An overview of the slavery laws in Santo Domingo is provided. Ferrand's use of black Haitian captives as slaves, including the Haitians captured by the French who lived near the border with Santo Domingo, is provided.
