Racial Doubt

Slavery, Passing, and the Emergence of Black Writing in Cuba
Erscheinungsjahr 2026
ISBN: 978-1-009-69283-0
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 294 Seiten

Reihe: Afro-Latin America

With a focus on nineteenth-century Cuba, Víctor Goldgel Carballo conceptualizes the analytical category of racial doubt: the hesitation produced by divergent, contradictory, or ambiguous understandings of race. Racial doubt is the flip side of racialism, or of the assumption that social hierarchies are based on the existence of races, imagined as natural or prior to those hierarchies. Mapping key moments of a century that witnessed the peak of racial slavery, abolition, and the birth of the Black press, this book shows how captives, free people of color, and Afro-Cuban authors leveraged doubts to overcome racist sociopolitical structures. It interweaves analyses of literature, including poems by enslaved authors and a novel by a mixed-race journalist, with unpublished archival material, including testimonies of kidnapped Afrodescendants. Focusing on how people held multiple views of race simultaneously, it examines debates crucial to the history of the Americas, including color-blindness and shifting understandings of Blackness.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Goldgel Carballo, Victor

Goldgel Carballo, Víctor

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of figures; Acknowledgments; Introduction: on doubt; Part I. The Enslaved: 1. Racist agnosia; 2. The farce of law; Part II. Free People of Color: 3. Two one-drop rules; 4. Fictions of racial coherence; Part III. Black Writing: 5. Back talk; 6. The beginning of Black writing; Conclusion; References; Index.

Über Autor(innen)

Goldgel Carballo, Víctor
Víctor Goldgel Carballo is a novelist and Professor of Spanish at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author of Cuando lo nuevo conquistó América, which won prizes for best book from the Latin American Studies Association and Casa de las Américas.