The most perfect picture of Cuban slavery”

Transatlantic bricolage in Manzano's and Madden's Poems by a Slave

Bibliographic Data

ID12737795
AuthorsR J Boutelle (Monroe Carell Jr. Children's Hospital, corresponding author)
Year2013
Volume10
Issue4
Pages528-549
Publication date2013-09-03
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAtlantic Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1478-8810 • E-ISSN: 1740-4649
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/14788810.2013.829334
OpenAlexW2004537804
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited24

This article reexamines Richard Robert Madden's English language translation of Juan Francisco Manzano's slave testimony and its publication as part of Poems by a Slave in the Island of Cuba (1840) in order to assess how our critical investment in the slave narrative as a generic form has restricted the scope of our readings. By looking at the publication history and confused, ambivalent reception of the antislavery tract in Great Britain, I argue that Poems by a Slave actively resists the nascent generic form of the early slave narrative – a single-author memoir buttressed by white-authored paratexts. Ultimately, I refigure the publication as a bricolated slave narrative, assembled piecemeal out of available writings and circulating as a multi-author portrait of Cuban slavery. This print cultural reading of the volume shifts discourse away from the ways in which Manzano's “voice” has been manipulated and appropriated, foregrounding instead how the intratextuality of Poems by a Slave highlights moments of discord among the collected texts, and opens new avenues for analyzing power relations among contributing authors in the slave narrative

Ambivalence · Art · Bricolage · Foregrounding · Literature · Memoir · Narrative · Poetry · Power (physics · Psychoanalysis · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies

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