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2 The Public Sphere Unbound Michel Maxwell Philip, El laúd del desterrado, and Mary Seacole By the 1850s, slavery had formally ended in the Englishand French-speaking Caribbean—in part because of the successes of the abolition movement in Europe but also because of increased physical resistance by enslaved people within the region—and abolitionism was no longer the avenue into a European public sphere it had once been. Chapter 1 discussed how the abolitionist movement of the early nineteenth century located its public sphere in the European metropolis even as most of the energies of a Caribbean counterpublic remained outside of print. With the end of slavery bringing increases in literacy and access to publication for greater portions of the Caribbean populace, a local literary public sphere able to debate and critique the state began to come into existence during the second half of the nineteenth century. Abolitionism played an important role in ending slavery, but was not a discourse primarily aimed at mobilizing a local population or setting up an alternative to the colonial state.1 The counterpublic of physical resistance to slavery was no more nationalist: as Sibylle Fischer puts it, “the political unconscious of radical antislavery was not the nation-state” (271). Opposition to slavery opened up transnational liberationist energies that would be closed down in the late nineteenth century as modern colonialism began to organize the world around nation-states and their overseas possessions. Emancipation did not proceed evenly—slavery remained legal in Cuba until 1886—and, as this chapter shows, the unevenness of the passage from mercantile slavery to modern colonialism and the inheritance of abolitionism’s public sphere meant that Caribbean writers of the mid-nineteenth century did not quite imagine their public within the framework of the modern nation-state that dominated international relations of this period.2 45 The Public Sphere Unbound In this chapter, I examine three texts from the 1850s that illustrate the conflicted and in-between positioning of the writers of this transition : the novel Emmanuel Appadocca by Trinidadian Michel Maxwell Philip, the anthology El laúd del desterrado by a group of Cuban poets in the United States, and the travel narrative Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands all imagine a Caribbean subject and public separate from Europe, yet none locates the site of political possibility for the Caribbean within the islands. The chapter begins by showing how, for male writers like Philip and the Cuban poets, the outlaw identity of the buccaneer becomes the ideal bridge for their deterritorialized oppositional aspirations; the last section then turns to how Seacole seeks authority not as a heroic man of action but via her participation in the market, a maneuver foreshadowing the ambivalent move away from patronage and toward autonomy that enables the anticolonial writing of the twentieth century. These authorial projects come out of a period of flux in the Caribbean . Even as the end of slavery brought freedom to many of the islands ’ inhabitants, Europe and the United States tightened their economic and political control over the Caribbean during the latter half of the nineteenth century. These foreign centers exerted renewed control over the region’s nascent intellectual scene as well. Many of the major novels from this time period were either published in the metropolis, such as Cuban writer Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés published in New York in 1882, or remained unpublished, like Busha’s Mistress, or Catherine the Fugitive by Jamaica writer Cyrus Francis Perkins, which was written in the mid-nineteenth century but only became available when it appeared serially in Jamaican newspapers in 1911. While modern colonialism sought to close down the freedoms opened up by emancipation , in the late 1800s publications critical of the planter class and the state began to appear throughout the region; these newspapers and journals became a major institutional basis of early Caribbean literature as well as anticolonial movements.3 While the Cuban poets could publish only in the United States, and both Philip and Seacole published their works in London, Europe is no longer imagined as the only potential site of a public or a public sphere in these works. While this public is not quite located in the local Caribbean setting, Emmanuel Appadocca, El laúd del desterrado, and Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands show how the public sphere becomes unbound after slavery and new possibilities are opened up for its reimagining. [3.144.84.155] Project MUSE...

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