Vanessa Nelsen

Document Type

Article

Journal/Book Title/Conference

Decimonónica

Volume

8

Issue

1

Publisher

Decimonónica

Publication Date

2011

First Page

57

Last Page

75

Abstract

In nineteenth-century Cuba, a politically influential group of Creole intellectuals, writers and literary critics, headed by Domingo del Monte, sought to replace the ruling Peninsular hegemony by creating a national literary institution under which they could consolidate their power. These writers would take the image of colonial Cuba, as established in Peninsular art and literature, and reinvent it through strategic alteration as a national literature. Del Monte stressed the importance of developing a writing style conducive to the representation of an independent Cuba that differed from the idealized Peninsular image in which Cuba appeared as a colonizer’s utopia or a docile territory that generated prosperity for the motherland. This image of a colonial Cuba was propagated in an art and literature that conspicuously omitted the presence of freed blacks on the island at a time when their presence had never been so statistically significant or politically troublesome for the colonial order.1 In order to outshine Peninsular rule at its own power game, the del Monte writers adopted a costumbrista style of writing, but incorporated a feature previously excluded from these European texts and crucial to disturbing the colonial image: blackness. Because slave rebellions, a growing class of freed blacks, and emancipation movements already threatened colonial hegemony continent-wide, a literature that centered on blackness could destabilize the colonial government led by Capitán General Tacón, which represented the interests of large sugar plantations and slavers. Thus, white Creole writers consolidated their ranks and moved toward institutionality by asserting a proto-nationalist politics encapsulated by the vehicle of a strategically positioned blackness within their texts.

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