SOURCE: Luis, William. “The Antislavery Narrative: Writing and the European Aesthetic.” In Literary Bondage: Slavery in Cuban Narrative, pp. 27-81. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990.

In the following essay, Luis describes how Cuban editors Domingo del Monte and José Antonio Saco encouraged the island's liberal writers to protest slavery.

I

The antislavery narrative developed as part of a movement to abolish slavery and the slave trade.¹ Domingo del Monte gave rise to this form of protest by encouraging friends in his literary circle to write about slavery and the plight of the slave. These early works describe the abuses of the slavery system and the unjust and cruel punishment of the slave protagonist. By making blacks and slaves dominant elements of the emerging Cuban narrative, the antislavery works reflect a historical and literary counter-discourse which directly challenged the colonial and slavery systems.

Del Monte and the authors of...