 | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com | As Louisiana and Cuba emerged from slavery in the late nineteenth century, each faced the question of what rights former slaves could claim. Degrees of Freedom compares and contrasts these two societies in which slavery was destroyed by war, and citizenship was redefined through social and political upheaval. Both Louisiana and Cuba were rich in sugar plantations that depended on an enslaved labor force. After abolition, on both sides of the Gulf of Mexico, ordinary people—cane cutters and cigar workers, laundresses and labor organizers—forged alliances to protect and expand the freedoms they had won. But by the beginning of the twentieth century, Louisiana and Cuba diverged sharply in the meanings attributed to race and color in public life, and in the boundaries placed on citizenship. Louisiana had taken the path of disenfranchisement and state-mandated racial segregation; Cuba had enacted universal manhood suffrage and had seen the emergence of a transracial conception of the nation. What might explain these differences? Moving through the cane fields, small farms, and cities of Louisiana and Cuba, Rebecca Scott skillfully observes the people, places, legislation, and leadership that shaped how these societies adjusted to the abolition of slavery. The two distinctive worlds also come together, as Cuban exiles take refuge in New Orleans in the 1880s, and black soldiers from Louisiana garrison small towns in eastern Cuba during the 1899 U.S. military occupation. Crafting her narrative from the words and deeds of the actors themselves, Scott brings to life the historical drama of race and citizenship in postemancipation societies. (20070401) |
Average Customer Rating:   Very Good First, disclosure of potential conflict of interest. The author and I are both faculty at the University of Michigan, though not in the same department. This is a very good comparative study of the aftermath of emancipation in Louisiana and Cuba. In Louisiana, emancipation was followed by the burst of African-American political participation during the Reconstruction period, then the gradual extinction of African-American civil rights that was the imposition of Jim Crow. In Cuba, on the other hand, emancipation was bound up with the cause of Cuban independence and the attainment of nationhood was accompanied by considerable political participation on the part of Afro-Cubans, and this became an enduring feature of Cuban life.
In important respects, Louisiana and Cuba had important common features. Both were slaveholding societies with sugar plantation economies. Antebellum Louisiana, particularly the sugar producing parishes (counties) that are the focus of Scott's narrative, was a highly stratified 'slave' society with relatively small numbers of white owners lording over a large group of slave workers. Free blacks, and whites engaged in plantation labor were relatively sparse. The most important free black community in Louisiana was the urbanized and creolized community of New Orleans. Pre-independence Cuba, in contrast, was more diverse in some respects. There were substantial numbers of free Afro-Cubans, many whites who performed plantation labor, and other forms of ethnic diversity such as significant numbers of Chinese indentured laborers. Emancipation in Louisiana resulted from the Northern triumph in the Civil War (to which large numbers of southern black soldiers and sailors made crucial contributions) and the post-war maintenance of African-American civil rights depended on the sympathy of Northern politicians. The intensification of Northern racism and the desire to placate Southern whites led to the imposition of the Jim Crow system. In Cuba, the long struggle for independence was a multiracial, multiethnic phenomenon in which Afro-Cubans occupied prominent leadership roles. The nature of the Cuban society and the struggle for independence made imposing a Jim Crow like system difficult in Cuba. This was despite the American occupation of Cuba as the American overlords would clearly have preferred a system more like that of the American South.
Well written and documented, this book features a number of interesting aspects beyond the main analysis. The narrative about Louisiana is a very good case study of the imposition of Jim Crow. None of this will be novel to knowledgeable readers but this is one of the best 'bottom up' descriptions of this tragic process I've read. Scott provides some interesting discussion of the roles of New Orleans Creole leadership and their pan-Caribbean perspective. All the discussion of Cuba will be new to most American readers and is very interesting While the topic of this book appears relatively narrow, it is generally illuminating. |  |
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