The Remnants of Slavery

The Description of Black Corpses in Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés or El Angel Hill (1882)

Bibliographic Data

ID24225264
AuthorsIngrid Brioso Rieumont (0000-0001-7975-2966, Dartmouth College)
Year2026
Pages1-20
Publication date2026-09-14
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLatin American Research Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0023-8791 • E-ISSN: 1542-4278
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/lar.2026.10147
OpenAlexW7212898750
LanguageEN
References cited40

Cecilia Valdés or El Angel Hill (1882), by Cirilo Villaverde, is often read as a Cuban antislavery novel, yet its treatment of the remains of formerly enslaved people has received little scholarly attention. This article examines the scenes following the suicides of Pedro and Pablo Carabalí, focusing on the interval between death and burial—what I term afterdeath . In these scenes, the novel stages a tension between the narrator’s foregrounding of the corpses through description and their erasure by the enslaver characters in dialogue. This tension reveals that the decomposing bodies function as “unproductive remnants” that resist the novel’s speculative logic of valuation and cannot be recuperated under contemporary insurance practices. By foregrounding decay rather than spectrality, the study delineates the limits of commodification in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world and argues that the corpses constitute a critical site for re-thinking representations of death, value, and resistance in slave societies.

Caribbean novel · Cirilo Villaverde · Commodification · death and burial · Decomposition · Insurance · representation of death · Resistance · Slavery · Afro-Latin American Studies · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Latin American Literature Analysis

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