Rojo Posada, Roseli. Cuerpos incómodos: tecnologías del género y la raza en La Habana colonial (1790-1850). Retrieved from https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-bm1z-5s04
DescriptionCuerpos Incómodos: Tecnologías del género y la raza en La Habana Colonial (1790-1850) explores how women, slaves, and freed Afro-descendants challenged the segregationist politics of the Creole lettered city in Havana during the 19th century. This dissertation unearths the material city that underrepresented groups built in their daily interactions in the colonial capital. I show how 19th-century literary, visual, and legal documents justified segregation in Cuba. These discourses enacted race, gender, and class categories that continue to shape Cuban society today. Simultaneously, I also detail how economic spheres related to fashion, transportation, and urbanization enabled vulnerable communities to achieve social mobility that destabilized colonial power. Through the study of canonical poems, novels, artículos de costumbre, legal and medical documents, my study reveals the burgeoning tensions hidden behind a supposedly orderly colonial Havana and the crisis of its lettered city.The first chapter uncovers how Manuel de Zequeira, founder of Cuban literature, tied female urban practices to contagious diseases in his poetry and artículos de costumbre. He favored confining white women in domestic spaces. However, women in Havana advanced new practices of sociability outside of the patriarchal home by using imported Spanish fashion items. The second and third chapters analyze how slaves and freed Afro-descendants employed transportation systems to challenge the hierarchies of the colonial city in literary works by Buenaventura Pascual, José Antonio de la Ossa, and the Condesa de Merlin. As I demonstrate, slaves and freed African artisans shaped Havana’s understanding of time and space with their work and daily routines. In my final chapter, I analyze the overlooked first editions of Cecilia Valdés (1839) to reveal the key role that mulatto crowds played in Havana cultural life in these early versions. I contend that Cirilo Villaverde’s diasporic experience in the American post-Civil War period marked his decision to erase that mulatto influence in the Cuban nation from the final and definitive Cecilia Valdés (1882).
My project shifts the usual focus on the elite’s literary-artistic productions to engage with underrepresented populations’ practices of resilience in the colonial era. It advances debates in Latin American literature and visual culture by showing how female and black communities used fashion and transportation systems to build urban material space and it contributes to the understanding of the lettered city’s anxieties vis a vis the urban population in colonial Havana.