Present but Unseen

This chapter discusses how Juan Francisco Manzano created two apparently contradictory freedom narratives: the first grounded in Enlightenment ideals of liberty and the second one premised on the secret powers of African-inspired ritual.By privileging Manzano’s slave narrative and his unpublished poetry, this chapter deciphers the way he wrote about spirit presence, the sacred wilderness and the ritual of escape.Poems such as “A Dream: For My Second Brother,” “The Poet’s Vision Composed on a Sugar Plantation,” “Poesies,” and “Desperation” explore African ideas of spirit and cosmos as part of a larger antislavery philosophy.The dream motif, the mountain wilderness, transfiguration, anachronism and magical flight emerges as Romantic tropes that created space for an African-Cuban religious persona in Manzano’s poetry and prose.In this way, the notion that Manzano assimilated to Spanish Catholicism unproblematically is contested and disproven.

Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection

Juan Francisco Manzano and Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés (also known as Plácido) were perhaps the most important and innovative Cuban writers of African descent during the Spanish colonial era.Both nineteenth-century authors used Catholicism as a symbolic language for African-inspired spirituality.Likewise, Plácido and Manzano subverted the popular imagery of Neoclassicism and Romanticism in order to envision black freedom in the tradition of the Haitian Revolution.African religious knowledge subverted official Catholic dogma about redemptive suffering that might free the soul but leave the body enchained.Rather, Plácido and Manzano envisioned emancipation through the lens of African spirituality, which constituted a transformative moment in the history of Cuban letters. Matthew Pettway examines how the portrayal of African ideas of spirit and cosmos in otherwise conventional texts recur throughout early Cuban literature and became the basis for Manzano and Plácido’s antislavery philosophy.Cuban debates about freedom and selfhood were never the exclusive domain of the white Creole elite.Pettway’s emphasis on African-inspired spirituality as a source of knowledge and a means to sacred authority for black Cuban writers deepens our understanding of Manzano and Plácido not as mere imitators but as aesthetic and political pioneers.

Estratégias cimarronas para narrar a negritude no século XIX em "Autobiografía" de Juan Francisco Manzano (Cuba, 1835) e "Úrsula" (Brasil, 1859)

This reflection will analyze the strategies used by two Latin American black writers to present the theme of blackness in the 19th century. On one side, the autobiography written by the cuban Juan Francisco Manzano (1835), the only autobiography text that shows one Latin American semiliterate slave black man that nar-rates your life in exchange for your liberty. On the other side the narrative written by Maria Firmina dos Reis, a free black woman considered the first female novelist in Brazil: Úrsula (1859), an abolitionist text whose main characters are white, surprises by giving voice to the slave people, who narrate their memories in Africa and are aware of their condition. Theoretical references will be used about the novel as a form of projection of an ideal future (Sommer, 2004), abolitionist texts as thesis novel (Jeffers, 2013), mask of speechlessness (Kilomba, 2019) and cimarronagem’s pedagogy (Mendes, 2019) intending to revise the Latin American literary canon in an inclusion proposal the two narratives to mandatory readings in the Litera-ture studies in the Latin American universities.

MANZANO, Juan Francisco. A autobiografia do poeta-escravo. Organização e tradução de Alex Castro. São Paulo: Hedra, 2015.

Resenha d'A autobiografia do poeta-escravo, de Juan Francisco Manzano.

A autobiografia do poeta-escravo, de Juan Francisco Manzano

Resenha do livro:MANZANO. Juan Francisco. A autobiografia do poeta-escravo. Organização, tradução e notas de Alex Castro. São Paulo: Hedra, 2015. 223p.