Film, Video Ever Faithful: Race, Loyalty, and the Ends of Empire in Spanish Cuba
Transcript:
TEXT
About this Item
Title
- Ever Faithful: Race, Loyalty, and the Ends of Empire in Spanish Cuba
Summary
- Discussing his new book, David Sartorius explored the relationship between political allegiance and race in 19th-century Cuba. Challenging assumptions that loyalty to the Spanish empire was the exclusive province of the white Cuban elite, he examines the free and enslaved people of African descent who actively supported colonialism. By claiming loyalty, many black and mulatto Cubans attained some degree of social mobility, legal freedom, and political inclusion in a world where hierarchy and inequality were the fundamental lineaments of colonial subjectivity. Sartorius explores Cuba's battlefields, plantations, and meeting halls to consider the goals and limits of loyalty. In the process, he makes a bold call for fresh perspectives on imperial ideologies of race and on the rich political history of the African diaspora.
Event Date
- April 30, 2014
Notes
- - David Sartorius is assistant professor of history at the University of Maryland. He specializes in colonial Latin American history with a focus on race and the African diaspora in the Caribbean. He has served as chair of the International Scholarly Relations Committee of the Conference on Latin American History and is currently a member of the editorial collective of Social Text and the organizing collective of the Tepoztlan Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas, an annual gathering in Mexico of North American and Latin American scholars.
Related Resources
- Hispanic Division: https://www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/
Running Time
- 53 minutes 30 seconds
Online Format
- video
- image
- online text