Freedom from Liberation: Slavery, Sentiment, and Literature in Cuba

By exploring the complexities of enslavement in the autobiography of Cuban slave-poet Juan Francisco Manzano (1797-1854), Gerard Aching complicates the universally recognized assumption that a slave's foremost desire is to be freed from bondage. As the only slave narrative in Spanish that has surfaced to date, Manzano's autobiography details the daily grind of the vast majority of slaves who sought relief from the burden of living under slavery. Aching combines historical narrative and literary criticism to take the reader beyond Manzano's text to examine the motivations behind anticolonial and antislavery activism in pre-revolution Cuba, when Cuba's Creole bourgeoisie sought their own form of freedom from the colonial arm of Spain.

Author: Gerard Laurence Aching
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 08/07/2015
Pages: 262
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.25lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.75d
ISBN: 9780253016935

Review Citation(s):
Choice 05/01/2016

About the Author

Gerard Aching is Professor of Africana and Romance Studies at Cornell University. He is author of The Politics of Spanish American Modernismo: By Exquisite Design and Masking and Power: Carnival and Popular Culture in the Caribbean.