Blacks, Coloureds, and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Latin America

This volume combines original research with historiographical essays in a manner that will be of great value to established scholars and graduate students alike. The chapters examine historical questions related to peoples of African descent and nationalism with a focus on the Caribbean, Brazil, and Argentina from the period of the Haitian Revolution through the end of the nineteenth century. It begins with a provocative essay by Lauren Derby on Dominican nationalism. Opposition to Haiti has long been an important dimension of constructions of Dominican national identity. Derby questions the perception that this opposition has its roots solely in the “Haitian occupation” of the early nineteenth century. She suggests that to understand “anti-Haitianness” we must also look to the earlier struggles over exchange, land, labor, and production that began to differentiate the places that would become Haiti and the Dominican Republic as early as the seventeenth century.Franklin D. Knight, in “Blacks and National Identity in the Caribbean, 1840 – 1900,” offers a valuable survey of the existing literature on these topics. While Knight continually reminds the reader of important differences within the region, he also demonstrates the value of a comparative perspective that makes connections across the imperial, national, and linguistic divisions that so often divide Caribbeanists.Jonathan Curry-Machado’s essay focuses on a slave rebellion and the brutal repression that followed that rebellion in Cuba in 1843 — an event that historians have come to know as “La Escalera.” Through research in Cuban and British archives, Curry-Machado reveals how events leading up to La Escalera were influenced by free people of color who immigrated to Cuba from British-ruled islands, white machinists from Britain, and people of color who were kidnapped from British-ruled islands and enslaved in Cuba. His compelling findings about the significance of transnational, class-oriented, and cross-racial alliances in the early 1840s bring to the foreground the Atlantic dimensions of an event that has long been understood as one of the most notorious in the history of Cuban slavery. David Geggus’s essay likewise demonstrates the importance of looking across imperial and national boundaries. Here Geggus provides a valuable synthesis of the findings from his edited volume The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Univ. of South Carolina Press, 2001), which features contributions by a number of distinguished historians, including Geggus himself. In that volume, as he does here, Geggus goes beyond simply asserting the importance of the Haitian Revolution and seeks to specify carefully the particular ways in which events in Haiti influenced specific struggles over slavery in different parts of the Atlantic world.Jean Stubbs’s chapter highlights a question that is implicit in the other essays in the volume: the importance of gender discourses for racial and national formation. She focuses on Mariana Grajales, best known as the mother of Antonio Maceo. Stubbs suggests that considering Grajales’s life story in its own right could open up larger questions about the role of free women of color in Cuban struggles for national independence. Readers of Stubbs’s essay will likewise benefit from Nancy P. Appelbaum, Anne S. Macpherson, and Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt’s important introduction to their edited volume Race and Nation in Modern Latin America (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2001), which stresses the importance of studying not only elites prescriptions for “the nation,” but also how popular groups grappled with questions of race, nationality, and gender in the making of claims to citizenship and national independence.Carmen Bernand’s chapter on Buenos Aires focuses on the intersection between national and personal liberation. Her essay, which appears here in Spanish, charts the ways in which people of African descent navigated and helped transform themselves within the shifting political terrain of the independence and early national period. She offers a rich analysis of the changing meanings of military service for people of color that exposes both the possibilities and limits of warfare as an avenue for upward mobility.Editor Nancy P. Naro concludes with an overview of the shifting importance of race in constructions of Brazilian nationality during and immediately after final abolition. She concludes with a comparison to Cuba that could be read profitably alongside the larger historiography of comparative postemancipation societies, especially Freder-ick Cooper, Thomas C. Holt, and Rebecca J. Scott’s Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2000).In sum, readers can feel a sense of gratitude to the editor of this volume, as well the contributors, for a book that provides an informative overview of recent historiographical developments, as well as enticing glimpses of exciting research now underway in the study of race and nationalism in the Caribbean and Latin America

Historiography · Knight · National identity · Nationalism · Opposition (politics) · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Cuban History and Society · Gender Studies · History · Law