基本説明
New in paperback. Hardcover was published 2000.
Full Description
This book tells the extraordinary story of a village of peasants and miners in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Cuba who were slaves belonging to the king of Spain and whose local patroness was a miraculous image of the Virgin of Charity of El Cobre. In reconstructing this history, the book reveals that in Cuba s eastern region, slavery to the King became a very ambiguous form of slavery that evolved into forms of freedom unprecedented in other colonial societies of the New World. The author studies the relations that developed between the Virgin, the King, and the royal slaves as the enslaved villagers imagined and negotiated social identity and freedom in this Caribbean frontier society. In the process, she examines several dimensions of the royal slaves daily and imaginary lives. Drawing on a range of cultural, social, political, and economic sources, this book presents a multisided history of enslaved people as they remade colonial spaces and turned them into a new homeland in El Cobre.
As they produced social memory and appropriated popular religious traditions centered on the Virgin of Charity, they reinvented their past and present as a new people within the structures and strictures of Spain s colonial world.
Contents
Introduction; 1. From African slaves to Creole Royal slaves: some demographic transformations; 2. Slavery to the King: shaping social identity; 3. An unusual proposal; 4. The virgin in local history; 5. Remaking a Marian tradition; 6. A mainly farming village; 7. Owning personal slaves: an extreme instance of the right to property and to familial legacies; 8. Copper mining: a small independent and mostly female local industry; 9. The unbreachable burdens of bondage: laboring as the King's slave; 10. Local government and politics; 11. Reaching the King: regional politics and litigation; Epilogue; Conclusion.
