Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross (2020). Being free, being black. Race, freedom, and law in Cuba, Louisiana, and Virginia

Abstract

In this book, race is considered as the essentialization of a human group according to biological and cultural criteria. Race is a political category, a social construction founded, in this case, to justify slavery from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries in three plantation regions: the present-day states of Virginia and Louisiana in the southern United States, and Cuba. The link of blackness with slavery constitutes the central axis of the research; it justified the systematization of the enslavement of people of color, as well as the permanence of this status and of the institution of slavery for centuries.

Keywords: Race, Freedom, Blackness, Slavery

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