Dr. Isabela Fraga

My book project, Bound by Feeling: Personhood from Slavery to Emancipation in Brazil and Cuba, traces a century-long genealogy of writings concerned with the inner, affective lives of enslaved and free people of African descent in the two most lucrative coffee- and sugar-producing regions of the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. My argument in this project is twofold. On the one hand, I demonstrate how enslavers were thoroughly invested in imagining and managing the inner lives of the enslaved and formerly enslaved, thus showing that speculating about the subjectivity of racial others was one of the foundations of chattel slavery in the Atlantic world. On the other hand, I show how captives were not simply passive objects of a white imagination. In poetry and in autobiographical writings, enslaved and formerly enslaved authors made their own incursions into the culture of feeling that permeated nineteenth-century Cuban and Brazilian societies. In so doing, they articulated conceptions of bondage and emancipation that challenged the affective registers and epistemological regimes of their times. By focusing on materials produced about and by enslaved and formerly enslaved subjects, Bound to Feeling also demonstrates that conceptions of personhood are neither solely imposed by an exterior other nor exclusively constituted by oneself.