With a focus on Brazil, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, this chapter examines the sense of belatedness in abolitionist and postabolitionist literature published between the 1860s and the 1930s. Belatedness implied an affective relationship to the global temporality of abolition – a way of feeling time as shame that shaped literature in long-lasting ways. Writers like José Martí and Machado de Assis reflected on the apparently anomalous status of their nations, where slavery was not abolished until 1886 and 1888 respectively. By analyzing canonical literature in light of the Black public spheres that emerged in the last decades of the nineteenth century, this chapter explores questions such as the rejection of African cultures, Whitening ideologies, the fantasy of the submissive slave, the myths and realities of racial democracy, Maroonage, and other forms of slave resistance. Other writers analyzed include Maria Firmina dos Reis, Antônio de Castro Alves, Alfonso Henriques de Lima Barreto, Martín Morúa Delgado, and Francisco Calcagno.

This essay discusses the historical, literary, and geopolitical junctures that influenced the development of Cuban literature during the nineteenth century and turn of the twentieth century. It demonstrates how, albeit in contradictory ways, literature from this period became a means for criollo self-determination and self-reflection, rooted in literary forms like the nineteenth-century cuadro de costumbres, historical novel, and antislavery narrative.

This essay then moves to the second half of the nineteenth century and explores the way in which the exile literature of José Martí and others was equally important in fostering a sense of national identity. However, an emphasis on Martí and his contemporaries has overshadowed the writing of Cuban women writers. Thus, this essay also argues that the Cuban women writers need to be put in conversation with the male-dominated intellectual tradition of Cuban literature. It concludes by analysing the importance of Nicolás Guillén’s avant-garde poetry for the reclamation of blackness in Cuban literature.