Material Culture, Slavery, and Governability in Colonial Cuba: The Humorous Lessons of the Cigarette Marquillas

Abstract

This essay discusses how ephemeral artifacts of daily material culture, such as marquillas – the colorful lithographed papers that were used to wrap bundles of cigarettes during the second half of the nineteenth century in Cuba – partook of the symbolization of emergent forms of racialized governability towards the end of slavery on the island. When the para-carcelary regime of the slaveholding plantation was near its final collapse, what sorts of imaginaries and sensibilities were deployed to formulate new fantasies of domination over bodies that once were, theoretically and juridically, the objects of constant surveillance, spatial coercion, and arbitrary punishment? This essay argues that through their humorous content and seductive appearance, these marquillas articulated complex and widespread discursivities by which people of color were reimagined not just as objects of derision but also as temporally immobilized (thus devoid of historical existence) in the cognitive and visual fields of a masterly gaze. In particular, it focuses on two series: the visual narratives of the lives of mulatas, who appear hilariously trapped by an unavoidable punitive destiny, and on an almanac where the lives of poor free blacks and slaves are ridiculously and inescapably bound to a monotonous and repetitive moral tempo.