REPRESENTACIONES PÓSTUMAS EN CUBA Y BRASIL, 1870-1910

Abstract

Representaciones póstumas en Cuba y Brasil, 1870-1910 is a cultural history, via novels and photographs, of the unacknowledged bodies of enslaved people discarded in the context of Atlantic slavery. This study does not focus on the social deadness of slaves, or on how dead slaves remain a vital presence, but on how the corpses of the enslaved and the posthumous portraits of enslaved persons have political force specifically through their literality and their poses. Beyond theories of slavery and death that emphasize the spectral presence of the enslaved, this dissertation highlights the implications of their physical presence in literature and photography. It shows how narrators and spectators make a last attempt to commodify these bodies in how they look at corpses or talk about them, dramatizing efforts made by slave masters to continue slavery in the two longest slave societies in the Americas. My sources reveal how the posthumous physical presence of the enslaved interrupts the abstracting imagination of capital in 19th-century Cuba and Brazil. The literality of the slave’s corpse halts abstraction and therefore commodification because it brings us back to the physical degradation of things. In the photographs, for example, abstraction is interrupted through slaves’ excessively rigid poses or through visible confidence in front of the camera. The dissertation examines two novels: Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas (1881) by Afro-Brazilian writer Machado de Assis and Cecilia Valdés o la loma del Ángel (1882) by white Cuban writer Cirilo Villaverde. It also investigates a rarely-viewed series of studio photographs taken of enslaved persons from the 1860s to 1880s, which I unearthed in Havana and Rio de Janeiro. Chapter 1 analyzes how the writing of obituaries for enslaved and servant female characters by fictional slave-owner Brás Cubas extends his privileges even after death in response to Brazil’s 1871 Law of the Free Womb. Chapter 2 contrasts narration and description in Caribbean antislavery novels, arguing that descriptions force readers to confront the presence of corpses even as characters ignore their realities. Chapter 3 analyzes studio photographs of former slaves to reveal resistant agency and subjectivity in how sitters’ bodies are foregrounded.