Sick Minds, Unproductive Bodies: Nostalgia, Slavery, and Feeling in Late-Eighteenth-Century Cuba

Abstract

ABSTRACT The illness of nostalgia appears in a vast, albeit scattered archive of Iberian slavery from the late-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. According to medical treatises, dictionaries, abolitionist reports, and financial records, nostalgia afflicted mainly newly-arrived enslaved Africans in the Americas, casting them into such despondency that they refused to eat, drink, or work until they died or committed suicide. This article examines the first known medical treatise to address nostalgia as an illness afflicting enslaved individuals in the Americas, namely Francisco Barrera y Domingo’s Reflexiones Naturales Medico Chirurgicas (1797–1798). To Barrera, the rampant number of captives suffering from nostalgia represented a threat to Cuba’s emerging capitalist practices. As a disease of the mind or of the soul, nostalgia required physicians to posit the subjectivities of the enslaved as an object of managerial knowledge. Since the main symptom of nostalgia among enslaved populations was the inability to work while exhibiting no signs of physical injury, this article argues that the illness allowed for an early theorization of Black feeling as a pathology, operating within a framework that encompasses not only the captives’ subjectivities, but also that of the Cuban planters.