Notional Jewishness in Nineteenth-Century Cuba.

In this paper I will offer an account of the Jew’s textual representation in nineteenth-century Cuba and the broader concerns that this figure personified. I will argue that the conceptual Jew became a vehicle through which white creoles negotiated their anxieties about racial integrity, as well as about political, economic, and social instability. The tensions at play were especially pronounced with regard to slavery and miscegenation, which accounts for the rhetorical Jew’s commonplace use as a discursive element of the abolitionist genre. Further, by recuperating the notional Jew’s critically overlooked yet prominent presence in colonial Cuba, I aim to provide a different lens through which to reread the Cuban abolitionist genre and rethink many of our traditional assumptions regarding such questions as the portrayal of blacks in the abolitionist project, late Spanish colonialism, imperial liberalism, slave labor, and the advent of industrial capitalism in the Pearl of the Antilles.