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David Luis-Brown

David
Luis-Brown
Fellowship: 
Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow
Term in Residence: 
Spring 2009
Title / Appointment: 
Assistant Professor of African Diasporic Literature and Culture
Location: 
University of Miami

Contact Information

Address: 
104 Mount Auburn St, 3R
Telephone: 
617-384-8348
E-Mail: 
dluisbrown@miami.edu

Biography Information

David Luis-Brown is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Miami.  He received his B.A. in English from Amherst College and his Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California at Santa Cruz.  Prior to working at the University of Miami, he taught at Pomona College, several University of California campuses, and Lafayette College.  He has held a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend and a University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellowship, in residence at the Department of Comparative Literature at Berkeley.  His first book, Waves of Decolonization:  Discourses of Race and Hemispheric Citizenship in Cuba, Mexico and the United States, published by Duke University Press in 2008, reveals how between the 1880s and the 1930s, writer-activists in Cuba, Mexico, and the United States developed narratives and theories of decolonization, of full freedom and equality in the shadow of empire. They did so decades before the decolonization of Africa and Asia in the mid-twentieth century. Analyzing the work of nationalist leaders, novelists, and social scientists, including W. E. B. Du Bois, José Martí, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Luis-Brown brings together an array of thinkers who linked local struggles against racial oppression and imperialism to similar struggles in other nations. With discourses and practices of hemispheric citizenship, writers in the Americas broadened conventional conceptions of rights to redress their loss under the expanding U.S. empire.  This year, while on junior faculty leave, he will be working on his second book as a visiting scholar at the English Department at Harvard University in the fall term and as a fellow at the Du Bois Institute for the spring. 

Project Description

Blazing at Midnight: Slave Rebellion and Social Identity in U.S. and Cuban Culture.

Blazing at Midnight is a comparative literary-historical analysis of the uses of slave rebellion in constructing social identity at moments of national crisis in Cuba and the United States in the 1840s and 1850s.  I argue that at times of political impasse, a wide range of social groups--nonslaveholding whites, Cuban nationalist exiles, ethnologists, natural scientists, travel writers, and male and female slaves--viewed the slave rebel as providing a model for alternative social arrangements.  The figure of the slave rebel galvanized U.S. anti-slavery advocates following the Fugitive Slave Act, rural whites in both countries who increasingly worked as migrant laborers, and a dissenting group of Cuban nationalist exiles, who began rethinking tactics following Narciso López's failed annexationist expedition in 1851. 

A comparative approach to U.S. and Cuban slaveries is necessary because they were intertwined through shared economic and cultural circuits.  Cuba, the world's wealthiest colony, was the third most important trade partner of the United States, which was Cuba's leading trade partner.  More broadly, the trope of slave rebellion was central to contemporary debates over race, nation, and empire:  invocations of slave insurgency served as a touchstone for controversies over the racial composition of post-emancipation societies.  Only a comparative approach can fully take into account the transnational dimensions and full social consequences of slave unrest.  These interrelated questions--how writers created blueprints of post-emancipation society through the figure of the slave rebel and how schemes of racial classification molded debates on social identity--shape my readings of a range of cultural texts.  Although the bulk of my analysis focuses on novels (Crafts, Delany, Hildreth, Melville, Stowe and Villaverde) and slave narratives (Douglass, Jacobs, Manzano), I draw extensively on other cultural texts such as court proceedings, periodicals and visual culture.  I define the shifts in identity evident in these social texts in relation to larger transformations in predisciplinary sociology, the legal apparatus, and political movements.