From bondage to personhood: autobiographical discourses of freedom from Cuba and Brazil

This article compares the autobiographies of Juan Francisco Manzano, an urban slave born in Cuba, and Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, a Black Muslim African who was enslaved and brought to Brazil after the British Empire had outlawed the transatlantic slave trade. By privileging a phylogenetic framing, it considers the complex dynamic between masters and enslaved people through the formation of diasporic subjectivities in Cuba and Brazil, the last two colonies in the Americas to end slavery officially. As this article argues, autobiographies serve as a proxy for the mediated process through which the conflation of enslaved people’s experiences with those of their masters' does not, contrary to G.W.F. Hegel’s claim, result in a complete sublation of enslaved subjectivities. Instead, this process reveals how relational constructions of subjectivities operate in tense, viscous, and asymmetric interactions that generate strategies of survival and new diasporic cultures in a quest for a more inclusive sort of freedom.