Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies, and: Espacios, silencios y los sentidos de la libertad: Cuba entre 1878 y 1912, and: Societies after Slavery: A Select Annotated Bibliography of Printed Sources on Cuba, Brazil, British Colonial Africa, and the British West Indies (review)

After decades of research on the central characteristics of African slavery, the experiences of slaves themselves in the Americas, and the processes leading to their emancipation, beginning in the late 1980s, some scholars turned their attention to what happened to the slaves immediately after abolition. Recently published postemancipation studies have examined the social, political, cultural, and economic status of the ex-bondsmen and -women in Peru, Venezuela, Cuba, Brazil, and the British and French Caribbean. These studies have generally explored the position of the ex-bondsmen and -women and their relationship with members of the dominant European colonial society. They have also looked at the problems former slaves encountered because of race and class, and how they attempted to remedy their problems. Scholars' examination of racial attitudes has illuminated the influence played by Auguste Comte and a host of pseudoscientists who sought to prove the biological inferiority of Africans. What these studies have discovered is that the former slaves continued to be marginalized. The majority have never been integrated into the political, social, cultural, and economic institutions of their societies.

By dealing with members of the subaltern, and people who until recently had no history, the three books reviewed here make a balanced contribution to our understanding of what ex-bondsmen and women confronted in freedom from the abolition of slavery until the 1930s. More importantly, they seek to fill a gap in the historiography by illuminating how the former slaves themselves felt about their freedom. Finally, they explore how former slaves thought about the concepts of modernity, citizenship, and nationalism, notions that informed their attitudes toward their liberty as well as their status.

Beyond Slavery and Espacios, silencios begin their examination by exploring the conditions, social status, and material life of slaves and freedmen and women before and during abolition. They next discern the changes that occurred in postemancipation rural society more than in the urban context. Beyond Slavery does this with three brief yet well-written essays on the British Caribbean, particularly Jamaica, written by Thomas Holt, a comparative study of Cuba and Louisiana written by Rebecca Scott, and a piece on British colonial East Africa, written by Frederick Cooper. The essays highlight the different forced labor systems such as the apprenticeship, indentured servitude, gang labor, and sharecropping that the colonial powers and elites employed in order to gradually replace slavery and to ensure that planters still had an adequate labor supply to produce sugar at a profitable level. How these labor systems influenced the daily lives of former slaves, plantation owners, and society and economy in general are also discussed. In both Jamaica and Louisiana they led to collective resistance that took the forms of worker organization, and work stoppages in the sugar-producing parishes. In Cuba, black exploitation encouraged Cubans of African descent to resist as well by joining the ranks of the revolutionaries between 1895 and 1898. But what both books share is the focus on what freedom and citizenship meant to the ex-bondsmen. Beyond Slavery examines this issue within the broader context of the former slaves' relationship with the colonial metropolitan government and elites, while Espacios, silencios is a micro-history of the postemancipation experience of black Cubans in Cienfuegos, located in the province...