Abstract

Abstract:

This essay compares the depiction of Havanese slavery in two nineteenth-century US novels, Mary Peabody Mann’s Juanita and Martin R. Delany’s Blake. I contextualize these depictions of Havana in terms of contemporaneous discourses regarding the incompatibility of urbanity and slavery. Juanita’s representation of a chaotic Havana, I contend, underpins Mann’s nationalist argument that the absence of problems endemic to Cuban slaveholding entails the superiority of US liberal democracy. Various moments in the text, though, compromise this nationalist logic by revealing similarities between US Southern and Cuban slaveholding. In Blake, Delany seizes on this tension, suggesting that the meaningful division is not that between nations but rather a transnational conflict between US and Caribbean white elites and the black slaves they exploit. For Delany’s protagonist Blake, Havana offers opportunity, as its large, heterogeneous black population makes possible successful slave revolt. In conclusion, this contrast in attitudes towards urban slavery focalizes meaningful differences between Mann's white paternalist and Delany's black nationalist approaches to abolition.

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