| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation is the most comprehensive survey of slavery in Afro-Latin American literary narrative to date. Of the approximately 12.5 million Africans trafficked in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, an estimated 7 million were enslaved in present-day Latin America. Scholars have tended to observe the irony that there are relatively few Latin American “slave narratives,” but Afro-Latin American literary narrative is rooted in the struggle against slavery. 'Autobiografía' by Juan Francisco Manzano and 'Biography of Mahommah G. Baquaqua' are invaluable firsthand narrative accounts of slavery in Latin America. Maria Firmina dos Reis’s 'Úrsula' is the first antislavery novel in Brazil, and it was written by an Afro-Brazilian woman. These works depict the horrors of slavery from black people’s perspectives, but they were shaped by white editors and the dominant literary and political discourses of their times. This dissertation therefore looks at Afro-Latin American literary narrative from not only the nineteenth century (Chapter 1) but also the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including 'Biografía de un cimarrón,' 'Reyita, sencillamente,' 'Fe en disfraz,' 'las Negras,' 'Changó, el gran putas,' 'Um defeito de cor,' and assorted writings by Carolina Maria de Jesus. These more contemporary works from Cuba and Puerto Rico (Chapter 2) and Colombia and Brazil (Chapter 3) contribute to black Latin Americans’ collective memory through the expansion of antislavery discourse to include broader literary experimentation and greater representation of black women’s perspectives. In a twentieth and twenty-first century context, slavery in Afro-Latin American literary narrative corrects the dominant cultural and political narrative that widespread racial mixture is both the product and proof of racial harmony in various Latin American countries. Slavery thus remains the dominant theme in Afro-Latin American literature over a century after abolition because it reflects not only the past but also Afro-Latin Americans’ ongoing struggle for racial justice in the present. | |
