Book contents
- The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature
- The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction Unfinished Histories
- Part I Literature in the Early Colony
- Part II Cuban Literature’s Long Nineteenth Century
- 3 Alexander von Humboldt and the Cultural Invention of Cuba Among Its Nineteenth-Century Intellectual Elite
- 4 Philosophy and Pedagogy in Félix Varela, José de la Luz y Caballero, and Enrique José Varona
- 5 Mercedes Merlin and the Rhetoric of Life Writing, Exile, and Race
- 6 The Lyric Vernacular of Cuban Romanticism
- 7 Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda as Literary Precursor and Transatlantic Intellectual
- 8 Racialized Futures
- 9 Journalism and Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture
- 10 José Martí as Hemispheric Visionary
- 11 Julián del Casal and the Other Faces of Cuban Modernismo
- 12 Performance Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Cuban Theater
- Part III Literary and Intellectual Culture in the Twentieth-Century Republic
- Part IV The Revolution’s Literary-Cultural Initiatives and Their Early Discontents
- Part V Cuba and Its Diasporas into the New Millennium
- Epilogue
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- References
5 - Mercedes Merlin and the Rhetoric of Life Writing, Exile, and Race
from Part II - Cuban Literature’s Long Nineteenth Century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 August 2024
Book contents
- The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature
- The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction Unfinished Histories
- Part I Literature in the Early Colony
- Part II Cuban Literature’s Long Nineteenth Century
- 3 Alexander von Humboldt and the Cultural Invention of Cuba Among Its Nineteenth-Century Intellectual Elite
- 4 Philosophy and Pedagogy in Félix Varela, José de la Luz y Caballero, and Enrique José Varona
- 5 Mercedes Merlin and the Rhetoric of Life Writing, Exile, and Race
- 6 The Lyric Vernacular of Cuban Romanticism
- 7 Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda as Literary Precursor and Transatlantic Intellectual
- 8 Racialized Futures
- 9 Journalism and Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture
- 10 José Martí as Hemispheric Visionary
- 11 Julián del Casal and the Other Faces of Cuban Modernismo
- 12 Performance Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Cuban Theater
- Part III Literary and Intellectual Culture in the Twentieth-Century Republic
- Part IV The Revolution’s Literary-Cultural Initiatives and Their Early Discontents
- Part V Cuba and Its Diasporas into the New Millennium
- Epilogue
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
This chapter analyzes the life writing of Mercedes Merlin, who wrote about Cuba, and other topics, entirely in French, after adopting Paris as her intellectual home. The analysis teases out the singularities and paradoxes of her relatively late inclusion – a process the chapter notes in other recent scholarship – in the historical imaginary of Cuban literature. That imaginary, the chapter argues, is prone to privileging signs of emancipation and racial justice in nineteenth-century writing, whereas Merlin, even as she depicted Cuban slavery’s cruelties, did not call for its abolition. Yet, even while her work exhibits some disturbing views of Black and mixed-race people, the chapter suggests that her nuanced considerations of Black subjects intimate a glimmer of proto-abolitionism. The chapter further demonstrates and details that, for Merlin, the rhetoric of life writing provided an avenue to tell her own story and that of other rebellious lives, such that her work projects a notion of freedom, not only in its subject matter but also in its inventive mix of autobiography and fiction.
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- The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature , pp. 97 - 108Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024
References
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