Freedom from Liberation, livre ebook

By exploring the complexities of enslavement in the autobiography of Cuban slave-poet Juan Francisco Manzano (1797–1854), Gerard Aching complicates the universally recognized assumption that a slave's foremost desire is to be freed from bondage. As the only slave narrative in Spanish that has surfaced to date, Manzano's autobiography details the daily grind of the vast majority of slaves who sought relief from the burden of living under slavery. Aching combines historical narrative and literary criticism to take the reader beyond Manzano's text to examine the motivations behind anticolonial and antislavery activism in pre-revolution Cuba, when Cuba's Creole bourgeoisie sought their own form of freedom from the colonial arm of Spain.

Introduction
1. Liberalisms at Odds: Slavery and the Struggle for an Autochthonous Literature.
2. In Spite of Himself: Unconscious Resistance and Melancholy Attachments in Manzano's Autobiography.
3. Being Adequate to the Task: An Abolitionist Translates the Desire to Be Free.
4. Freedom Without Equality: Slave Protagonists, Free Blacks, and Their Bodies.
Epilogue
Appendix
Bibliography
Index