| Targeting slave society in nineteenth century Havana, Cuba and New Orleans, Louisiana, this dissertation examines mechanisms of social control directed at people of African descent and cultural resistance efforts embodied in public performances. After exposing these cities' multifaceted assaults on space, the family, social image, and community, it then details how people of color used two performance traditions, El Dia de Reyes (Havana) and Congo Square (New Orleans), to construct of vision of reality that directly countered the slave regime's specific social control objectives.;At the core of this examination lie two fundamental premises. The first of these is that although urban slave society may have been less harsh than its rural counterpart, it still relied on a concerted assault on the psychological, social, and cultural identity of its African-descended inhabitants to maintain its power. With direct reference to Havana and New Orleans this assault included: defining physical space in a way that would cause people of color to associate specific sites with particularly violent or oppressive experiences, deterring the formation of fully formed (i.e. husband, wife, and children) familial units among African-descended peoples, socially degrading the image of the African and the racial concepts of Blackness, and quelling the development of group consciousness among slaves specifically or racial consciousness among African-descended peoples generally. The other premise of this study is that throughout the period examined, the African-descended communities in New Orleans and Havana created and maintained institutions and exhibited cultural models that directly contested/challenged the slave regime's assault and, in the process, put forth autonomous views of self and the social landscape. |
