Racial Doubt - Slavery, Passing, and the Emergence of Black Writing in Cuba

With a focus on nineteenth-century Cuba, Víctor Goldgel Carballo conceptualizes the analytical category of racial doubt: the hesitation produced by divergent, contradictory, or ambiguous understandings of race. Racial doubt is the flip side of racialism, or of the assumption that social hierarchies are based on the existence of races, imagined as natural or prior to those hierarchies. Mapping key moments of a century that witnessed the peak of racial slavery, abolition, and the birth of the Black press, this book shows how captives, free people of color, and Afro-Cuban authors leveraged doubts to overcome racist sociopolitical structures. It interweaves analyses of literature, including poems by enslaved authors and a novel by a mixed-race journalist, with unpublished archival material, including testimonies of kidnapped Afrodescendants. Focusing on how people held multiple views of race simultaneously, it examines debates crucial to the history of the Americas, including color-blindness and shifting understandings of Blackness.

List of contents

List of figures; Acknowledgments; Introduction: on doubt; Part I. The Enslaved: 1. Racist agnosia; 2. The farce of law; Part II. Free People of Color: 3. Two one-drop rules; 4. Fictions of racial coherence; Part III. Black Writing: 5. Back talk; 6. The beginning of Black writing; Conclusion; References; Index.

About the author

Víctor Goldgel Carballo is a novelist and Professor of Spanish at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author of Cuando lo nuevo conquistó América, which won prizes for best book from the Latin American Studies Association and Casa de las Américas.

Product details

• Authors: Víctor Goldgel Carballo
• Publisher: Cambridge Academic
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Release: 30.04.2026
• EAN: 9781009692885
• ISBN: 978-1-009-69288-5
• Weight: 250 g
• Illustrations: Worked examples or Exercises
• Series: Afro-Latin America
• Subjects: Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous; Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900, Sociology, Cuba, HISTORY / Latin America / General, c 1800 to c 1900, 19th century, c 1800 to c 1899, Social discrimination & inequality, History of the Americas, Ethnic minorities & multicultural studies, Slavery & abolition of slavery, Racism and racial discrimination / Anti-racism, Slavery, enslaved persons and abolition of slavery, Literature of Cuba