|
|
|
Book Review
| Rebecca J. Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. Pp. 365. $29.95 (ISBN 0-674-01932-6).
|
| The small but growing number of comparative studies of societies after slave emancipation departs significantly from the explanatory frameworks that guided a larger body of comparative studies of slavery. Rebecca Scott's compelling examination of the making of new postemancipation social orders in Louisiana and Cuba, while not dismissive of an earlier post–World War II scholarship pioneered by Frank Tannenbaum's Slave and Citizen, pointedly criticizes the misleading objectivism of this earlier work. "There is, in effect," she judges, "no convincing way to isolate something called 'race relations' from the specific ways in which black labor was employed in the countryside and power was reallocated in the polity" (1–2). The result is a study whose exploration of the dynamics of post-emancipation social mobilizations not only vividly illuminates local, particular features of the reconstruction of politics and labor in the sugar growing districts of Cienfuegos and Santa Clara in central Cuba and in southern Louisiana's sugar parishes of Terrebonne and Lafourche west of New Orleans. It also identifies divergences in the histories of the nations that oversaw these emancipations. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Scott argues, the post-emancipation ascendance of white supremacy "as an organized structure constraining the public voice and civic standing of those whom it labeled inferior" had become a principle of turn-of-the century American nationalism, citizenship, and public life, defining formal rights and shaping informal social interactions in Louisiana in a manner that had no counterpart in Cuba (258). |
1
|
|
Constraints of space permit only a cursory sketch of significant elements of this rich, nuanced argument. First, Degrees of Freedom extends conventional models of historical comparison by calling attention to the circulation of peoples and ideas between southern Louisiana and Cuba, as groups in both areas used cross-national migrations to push beyond the boundaries of their then possible social worlds. Second, it demonstrates the inseparability of the social relations of labor from the racial geography of political mobilization. For, although former slaves in both areas made similar efforts to improve their working lives through varying combinations of wage work and quasi-peasant farming, a relatively weaker access to non-plantation land in southern Louisiana reinforced racially segmented labor in sugar production and labor protests, while, in central Cuba, cross-racial collaboration in daily life in settlements beyond the plantation supported the region's typically cross-racial political mobilizations. Third, post-emancipation public life was fundamentally re-shaped in both areas after "people who generally did not have access to the vote, but who did claim the right to political voice, had burst into the field of public debate" (124–25). |
2
|
|
A revised view of the ideology and political realignments of New Orleans's Afro-creole urban activists and rural voters emerges from Scott's analysis of their Reconstruction campaign for "public rights" and a public sphere defined by equality before the law (42). Scott rejects the view that racially integrated public accommodations, carriers, and schools were important chiefly to black middle classes, instead proposing that they were essential to the consolidation of a multiracial base for an emerging Republican party. Similarly, she later concludes that the Plessy case "was ... far more than an attack on a specific piece of legislation concerning the railroads.... [I]t was an emblem of the collective refusal of caste by those whom the law had targeted" and drew support in sugar zones outside New Orleans as well as in the city (90). |
3
|
|
The national backing for Louisiana's disfranchisement measures contrasts sharply, Scott proposes, with the scope of popular and later formal opposition in Cuba to property restrictions on suffrage in the early twentieth century. Although the U.S. military governor favored restrictions on universal manhood suffrage, she writes, "Town councils, mass meetings, and the veterans' associations lined up in favor of writing a positive right to vote directly into the Constitution—something that the U.S. Constitutional Convention of 1787 had not done, that the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution did not do, and that Governor Leonard Wood undoubtedly did not want to see the Cuban convention delegates do" (204). |
4
|
|
Scott reiterates the fundamentally contradictory nature of historical documents as a caution against naive understandings of evidentiary reasoning. Throughout her analysis, she indicates that central events—the 1874 assault by the White League on the Republican government in New Orleans in 1874, sugar workers' mass strikes and their bloody repression in Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes in 1887, a deadly clash between black U.S. soldiers and a Rural Guard in eastern Cuba in 1898, the campaign appeals of organizers of one of the hemisphere's earliest black political parties and brutal repression of its armed demonstrations in Cuba in 1912—have produced contradictory, politicized accounts, not objective statements of truth. By implication, her method conveys the inescapable necessity of interpretation to critical reflection on archival and legal fictions alike. |
5
|
| Julie Saville
|
| University of Chicago |
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|