After Slavery: Asian Labor, the American South, and the Age of Emancipation

Abstract

In comparing the adjustments to a free labor economy in the post-emancipation United States South and in slaveholding Cuba, this essay reveals certain parallels and divergences. Most particularly, it emphasizes the relative position of both places in the global, national, and colonial economies, and it explores the political economy of race and work. Following Confederate expatriates and Victorian travelers from the United States to the Caribbean, it also draws attention to various intellectual and cultural connections between Cuba and the American South. Here, too, it is especially concerned with shared notions of race and racial supremacy.