Freedom from Liberation: Slavery, Sentiment, and Literature in Cuba by Gerard Aching (review)

At first glance, Gerard Aching’s title Freedom from Liberation appears to play upon denotative differences, differences negligible enough to render freedom and liberation synonyms. The words’ interchangeability obscures their difference until Aching’s introduction distinguishes between the monolithic idea of Freedom and diverse freedoms. Aching centers on the “interlocked yet competing struggles for freedom” (1) involving the nineteenth-century writer and former slave Juan Francisco Manzano’s autobiography, differentiating the psychological freedom which enslaved subjects unconsciously and routinely constructed from the abstract, Enlightenment-inspired visions of abolition held by external agents of freedom. Aching illustrates how Manzano’s Autobiographica de un esclavo (Autobiography of a Slave) resists and revises external constructions of freedom, and thus challenges their dominance.

The book’s four chapters examine how freedom was (re)conceptualized by participants in the discourse on slavery in Cuba during the 1830s and 1840s, namely by Manzano; his wealthy patron Domingo del Monte and the bourgeois Creole reformists who comprised Manzano’s first audience and eventually purchased his freedom; the Irish abolitionist Richard Robert Madden, who translated Manzano’s work for the British Anti-Slavery Society; and the authors of reformist antislavery literature within del Monte’s literary circle. Aching’s readings of the participants’ texts demonstrate how notions of freedom were directly or indirectly articulated via Manzano’s autobiography. In chapter 4, for example, he explains how writers of reformist antislavery literature employed Manzano’s prototypical narrative to “create slave protagonists whose fate is not to liberate themselves but to act as vehicles for the moral education of the Creole bourgeoisie” (13). Aching reveals how these writers supplanted Manzano’s unconsciously constructed freedom by emphasizing their protagonists’ “aspir[ations] to wage labor and the free, black, petty bourgeoisie” (13). Though the study addresses external notions of freedom, Aching establishes its discursive center as Manzano’s personal struggle for freedom, which originates in his “compulsive propensity for creativity” (70). He illustrates how Manzano’s unconscious construction of freedom triumphs over stringent constraints on self-representation and threatens dominant notions of liberation. Ultimately, Aching’s reading of Manzano’s autobiography exemplifies how “Hope creates / From its own wreck the thing it contemplates” (Shelley).

In the first chapter, “Liberalisms at Odds,” Aching examines reformists’ competing desires to liberalize trade and abolish slavery by returning to these incompatible liberalisms’ roots in restrictive Spanish trade laws and Enlightenment-inspired ideas about human rights. Aching explains that “emancipat[ing] local literary writing from colonial censorship” afforded reformists an opportunity to resolve their liberalisms’ contradictions (29). His recreation of this project reveals the expectations which defined the role of Manzano’s autobiography and the risks associated with its visibility in the public sphere. Aching closes the chapter with an analysis of how Manzano’s first public reading of his sonnet, “Mis treinta años” (“My thirty years”) satisfied reformists’ need to present themselves as sympathetic “men of feeling” (23).

The second chapter, “In Spite of Himself,” illustrates how Manzano’s autobiography reflects his pursuit of psychological freedom. Aching utilizes Judith Butler’s concept of subjectivity and Sigmund Freud’s paradigm of melancholy to frame his reading of “unconscious resistance” as a liberating strategy in Manzano’s autobiography (66). He explains that self-representation enabled Manzano to reconstruct his subjectivity by transcending the “double-consciousness” associated with narrating his life as a slave. Aching’s analysis illustrates how Manzano’s intellectual complexity enabled him to transform his abject experience of slavery into the “necessary fiction” of an autobiography. He identifies Manzano’s manipulation of “perverse mothering” (a manifestation of Orlando Patterson’s notion of “perverse intimacy”) and his references to melancholy as two modes of unconscious resistance through which he can convey “the facts” of his enslavement separately from their “most terrible part” (78). This strategy functions as another mode of resistance and means to subjectivity. Manzano devises these strategies “in spite of himself” throughout the autobiography, evidencing a “compulsive or automatic response to coercion that may appear to contradict a...