SOURCE: Sánchez-Eppler, Benigno. “‘Por causa mecánica’: The Coupling of Bodies and Machines and the Production and Reproduction of Whiteness in Cecilia Valdés and Nineteenth-Century Cuba.” In Thinking Bodies, edited by Juliet Flower MacCannell and Laura Zakarin, pp. 78-86. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Sánchez-Eppler explores the relationship of slavery and mechanization on the sugar plantations of Cuba as they are represented in Cecilia Valdés.

How to turn slaves into citizens? How to proceed from the ideological attribution of social death in the captured and sold African body to the incorporation of the slave and his or her descendants into the ranks of society?¹ How to shuffle—how to both mix in and thrust aside—the black body of the slave with/in the body politic? These are just a few ways of rephrasing the central questions of any slaveholding society...