“The Edges of Slavery: The Unborn and the Deceased in 19th-century Cuba and Brazil” with Ingrid Brioso Rieumont

Is slavery co-terminus with life? When does enslavement begin and end? Are enslaved individuals considered slaves before birth and after death? In this talk, cognate to my monograph in progress, I examine two 19th-century Latin American literary classics that challenge conventional understandings of where transatlantic slavery begins and ends. Focusing on legal and political debates alongside the complexities of racial capitalism in 19th-century Cuba and Brazil, I revisit two seminal works—The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1881) by Afro-Brazilian writer Machado de Assis and Cecilia Valdés or El Angel Hill (1882) by Cuban author Cirilo Villaverde. Through these texts, I explore how they contribute to an epistemological framework for understanding the significance of the unborn and the deceased enslaved within the context of transatlantic slavery.

Ingrid Brioso Rieumont is an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Dartmouth College, specializing on 19th- and 20th-century Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Studies. She earned her Ph.D. in Spanish and Portuguese from Princeton University in 2022, receiving the 2024 First Honorable Mention for Best Dissertation from the Caribbean Studies Association and the 2022 Princeton University Dissertation Award. Her articles have been published in Cuban Studies, Brazilian Journal of Comparative Literature, and Revista Casa de las Américas. Brioso Rieumont is the editor and translator from Portuguese to Spanish of Paletó y yo (2020), which won the Casa de las Américas Literary Prize. Her research has received support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays Program, and the Cuban Heritage Collection, and she is currently Dartmouth’s nominee for the NEH Summer Stipend.

Part of the Brazilian Studies Lunchtime Series