The freedom suits authored by Cuban women during the 1870s constitute a unique set of documents, including narrations by the enslaved women of their life stories. The Spanish response to these rhetorically rich texts also opens a window onto the peninsula’s understanding of the gender and racial aspects of its empire. In my presentation, I will focus on the narrative authored by a 44-year-old woman from Mantanzas, Cuba who argued that she had been falsely enslaved and forced to work as a wetnurse for over half of her life. In addition to her freedom, she demanded the right to sue the Spanish woman whose physical abuse (forced lactation) illustrated her degradation in terms of normative European identity categories of domesticity and motherhood. Her petition is central to a larger master narrative about fiction, biography and tales of women's lives that served to effectuate political change and push the boundaries of legal personhood in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Her powerful story prompts us to reconsider our understanding of the place of gender in abolitionist discourse.
Dr. Lisa Surwillo is Associate Professor of Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford University. Her research addresses the questions of property, empire, race and personhood as they are manifested by literary works, especially dramatic literature, dealing with colonial slavery, abolition and Spanish citizenship. Surwillo is the author of The Stages of Property: Copyrighting Theatre in Spain (Toronto 2007), an analysis of the development of copyright and authorship in nineteenth-century Spain and the impact of intellectual property on theater. She is also the author of Monsters by Trade (Stanford 2014), a study of slave traders in Spanish literature and the role of these colonial mediators in the development of modern Spain.
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