This collection presents a comparative study of the impact of slavery on the literary and cultural imagination of the Americas, and also on the impact of writing on slavery on the social legacies of slavery's history. The chapters examine the relationship of slavery and master/slave relations to nationalist projects throughout the Americas - the ways in which a history of slavery and its abolition has shaped a nation's identity and race relations within that nation. The scope of the study is unprecedented - the book ties together the entire 'Black Atlantic', including the French and Spanish Caribbean, the US, and Brazil. Through reading texts on slavery and its legacy from these countries, the volume addresses the eroticization of the plantation economy, various formations of the master/slave dialectic as it has emerged in different national contexts, the plantation as metaphor, and the relationship between texts that use cultural vs biological narratives of mestizaje (being interracial). These texts are examined with the goal of locating the origins of the different notions of race and racial orders that have arisen throughout the Americas. Isfahani-Hammond argues that without a critical revisiting of slavery and its various incarnations throughout the Americas, it is impossible to understand and rethink race relations in today's world.

'This is a subject that has received a stunning and disappointing lack of attention, despite the fact that slavery has played such a central role in the formation of a wide variety of American nations.' - George Hardly

'Superb scholarship...a landmark work, an essential source of knowledge for those who venture into the history, culture and social life of the Afro-Atlantic world.' - Antonio Benitez-Rojo, Amherst College

'The Masters and the Slaves is a welcome contribution to Atlantic Studies, and is sure to inspire further interdisciplinary collaboration in the field.' - Danielle D. Smith, New West Indian Guide

Autorentext
Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Luso-Brazilian Studies. University of California, San Diego, USA.

Inhalt
Introduction * The Sugar Daddy: Gilberto Freyre and the White Man's Love for Blacks - Cesar Braga-Pinto * Writing Brazilian Culture - Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond * Authority's Double Shadow: Thomas Jefferson and the Architecture of Illegitimacy - Helena Holgersson * Fixing History: Race, Nation, and the Symbolics of Servitude in Haitian Noirisme - Valerie Kaussen *Fanon as 'Metrocolonial' Flaneur in the Caribbean Post-Plantation/Algerian Colonial City - Nalini Natarajan * From the Tropics: Cultural Subjectivity and Politics in Gilberto Greyre - Jossiana Arroyo * Hybridity and Mestizaje: Syncretism or Subversive Complicity - Ramn Grosfoguel *Giants of Three Colors: A Writer and an Artist Imagine Racial Mixture in 1940s Brazil - Luiza Franco Moreira *Messianic Melancholic Imagination: Imagine Community with the Dead - Shreerekha Subramanian