coldhearted scientist وداد

Here’s Jerome Branche in the Afro-Hispanic Review, 1998. That’s another photocopy I don’t need to keep. But I had great notes and underlining in it.

Branche is in part criticizing William Luis’ construction of Sab as an abolitionist text.

Del Monte (with whom Gómez de Avallaneda was not affiliated, but with whom Luis associates her), for instance, was “decidedly non-egalitarian” on race. Abolition would mean financial ruin for him, and he did not think Africans had a place in a future Cuban republic. As with the French Revolutionary Assemblies, abolition in practica “differed greatly from the idealism of humanistic theory.” And there is NOT nearly as much abolitionist writing in Brazil or Cuba as in the US.

Haberly notes that Brazilian abolitionist literature is both anti-slavery and anti-slave, and the same could apply to Cuba. Jackson also detects an aversion to Black people in antislavery works. Branche sees these things happening in Sab.

Sab the character is pro-slavery, yet gets read as a symbol of freedom, and the novel’s feminism doesn’t extend to Black women; Branche says a lot more in this regard, critiquing readings like Doris Sommer’s.

There is little discussion of Sab’s mother’s alleged “passion” for his father (whereas in US feminist antislavery discourse, slavery is bad because of what it does to Black women–separating families, subjecting them to abuse from white masters, and so on).

The hypersensitivity to color is colonial (it makes the Cecilia Valdés narrator American as in, a person from the colony). And the novel does hint at desire of white women for Black men, which WOULD go against the slavocracy-patriarchy.

The text occludes all sorts of violence, and “generates the illusion that it is not violence” (Bourdieu).

SAB is the focus, not the slaves he drives, so slavery is EVOKED AND ELIDED. And Sab can’t be a father; the white father having hidden his identity so as to relegate the son to slavery. The mother is suppressed too, so the son represents whiteness and fights for it, but doesn’t have access to it and also can’t become a progenitor in the symbolic order, and can’t have a Black ethnic identity, either.

So all these novels are anti-Black even as they give us some materials to criticize slavery and even though they have therefore been read as abolitionist.

Axé.