Afro-Latinas and the Temporalities of Enslavement

Drawing on the rich archival resources of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center, this paper investigates the ways in which Latina and Afro-Latina women in late-18th- and 19th-century Argentina conceptualized... [ view full abstract ]

Drawing on the rich archival resources of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center, this paper investigates the ways in which Latina and Afro-Latina women in late-18th- and 19th-century Argentina conceptualized temporality. This research is part of my larger project on the temporalities of the Atlantic slave trade. My previous work on this topic has focused on African and Afro-Caribbean characters in Melville’s Benito Cereno and Eugene Sue’s Atar Gull; I have argued that these novels about the Atlantic slave trade depict enslaved Africans and Afro-Caribbeans deploying a temporal artistry: a creative ability to recognize and manipulate other people’s temporal orientations. In this paper I argue that the gradual abolition instated by Argentina’s Free Womb Act of 1813 generated a period of temporal disjunction for enslaved mothers. Until slavery was fully abolished in 1853, enslaved Argentinian mothers found themselves in a temporal paradox, with their children belonging to a future condition of freedom that they themselves could not inhabit. I compare this paradox to the ways in which enslaved mothers in the US during the same period understood enslaved motherhood to be an impossible state, recognizing, as Harriet Jacobs puts it, “what mockery it is for a slave mother to try to pray back her dying child to life! Death is better than slavery.” Whereas enslaved US mothers were often loath to bring their children into a shared condition of enslavement, enslaved Argentinian mothers were unable to reconcile the non-synchronous temporalities of their lives and their children’s lives.