The Epistemology of Slave Conspiracy

This essay envisions an American literary history that would allow for a comparative study of race, slavery, and nation. Comparing two 19th century novels, one Cuban and one US, that draw on a 1844 Cuban slave uprising, Gillman examines the political and cultural work slave revolts do in different national contexts. The essay also discusses the reception of Helen Hunt Jackson and Harriet Beecher Stowe by the Latin American intellectuals José Martí and Roberto Fernández Retamar, a revisioning that transforms these novelist from examples of an undervalued literature of women's sentimental reform to central texts of Our American literature.