Manifest Diaspora
Black Transamerican Politics and Autoarchiving in Slavery in Cuba
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11272739 |
|---|---|
| Authors | R J Boutelle (Vanderbilt University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 40 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 110-133 |
| Publication date | 2015-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | MELUS Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0163-755X • E-ISSN: 1946-3170 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/melus/mlv019 |
| OpenAlex | W2171542793 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 12 |
This essay reads the published proceedings of the Cuban Anti-Slavery Committee's 1872 meeting in New York, Slavery in Cuba , as a dense node of postbellum politics for black citizens in the United States. Recently liberated themselves, these individuals gathered to petition the federal government to support Cuba's anticolonial revolution and thereby end Cuban slavery. I locate this meeting in a broader, public debate over USAmerican foreign policy toward Cuba, including two 1870 meetings held in the same auditorium. Where these previous conventions frame the necessity of USAmerican intervention in the familiar language of the Monroe Doctrine, the CASC convention posits collaboration between Afro-descended communities in both the United States and Cuba as an alternative model of transamerican politics, rooted in empathy rather than paternalism. By hosting and documenting their convention in support of the Cubans, the Committee repurposed the social and print networks of antebellum anti-slavery movements in order to extend this project temporally and geographically. Through the processes of what I term autoarchiving , the CASC commanded its own narrative of the convention by creating, curating, and circulating a collection of writings about the meeting. Assembled in Slavery in Cuba , these transcriptions and news articles function as a durable, portable archive of the events themselves. Through these autoarchival practices, the CASC not only publicized how black citizens were exercising their newly acquired civil rights to question the dominant narrative of transamerican politics (the Monroe Doctrine) but also preserved this otherwise ephemeral moment of civic engagement in print.
Art · Constitution · Convention · Diaspora · Literature · Media studies · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Cuban History and Society · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society
From behind the veil
Forgotten readers
The black Atlantic
A World Not to Come
Ambassadors of Culture
Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere
Slave Emancipation in Cuba
Translations of Cuba
Let Your Motto Be Resistance
Poetics of relation
Theorizing the hemisphere Inter-Americas work at the intersection of American, Canadian, and Latin American studies
American Interest in Cuba
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.33 |
| Citation span | 2023 - 2023 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |