Haunted Flesh and Chaos Theory: Gender, State Violence and the Afterlife of Slave Rebellions

Abstract

Abstract: This article explores the gendered afterlife of slave rebellions, building on historical and sociological scholarship that takes death and haunting as central analytics. It focuses on a moment of state repression in Cuba in 1844, in the aftermath of two substantive slave insurgencies, and the movement of enslaved and free people of color known as La Escalera. While a voluminous colonial record has documented the spectacle of public punishment in 1844, I trace an invisible, largely unarchived form of punishment that haunted Black people who were forced to witness acts of torture and execution, stalking their psychic worlds. Alongside the masculinization of this public punishment, this article explores a phenomenon that I call encumberment, which encompasses the absorption of state terror on the most intimate of levels; the act of contending and coping with torture's impact on wider communities; and the labor of rebuilding and caring for traumatized loved ones—all of which were deeply gendered processes. Yet if haunting was a central feature of moments like 1844, these moments were also characterized by a counter-haunting, illustrating how the aftermath of slave insurgencies also stalked and plagued the colonial state, and disrupted the fantasy of the rebellion's undoing. Encompassing the memory of collective Black rage, the colonial pursuit of public tranquility, the care for traumatized Black bodies and the attention to the dead, counter-haunting became central to the afterlife of 1844. The deep entanglement of haunting and counterlife was a critical legacy of this and other slave rebellions.