With a focus on nineteenth-century Cuba, Víctor Goldgel Carballo conceptualizes the analytical category of racial doubt: the hesitation produced by divergent, contradictory, or ambiguous understandings of race. Racial doubt is the flip side of racialism, or of the assumption that social hierarchies are based on the existence of races, imagined as natural or prior to those hierarchies. Mapping key moments of a century that witnessed the peak of racial slavery, abolition, and the birth of the Black press, this book shows how captives, free people of color, and Afro-Cuban authors leveraged doubts to overcome racist sociopolitical structures. It interweaves analyses of literature, including poems by enslaved authors and a novel by a mixed-race journalist, with unpublished archival material, including testimonies of kidnapped Afrodescendants. Focusing on how people held multiple views of race simultaneously, it examines debates crucial to the history of the Americas, including color-blindness and shifting understandings of Blackness.

‘Racial Doubt is a timely reminder that race functions according to a social code, and that its mechanics of power, inclusion and exclusion, are also quite flexible, even as its goal is to establish boundaries.’

Jerome Branche - University of Pittsburgh

‘In this powerful book, Victor Goldgel Carballo explores the many and sometimes contradictory definitions of Blackness that emerged amongst Cuba’s people of African descent who expressed an existential commitment to writing as a space for rethinking hegemonic definitions of race. What emerges is an originally argued, complex, and evocative narrative, based on careful readings of both published and little-known archival texts. It is work that will stand the test of time.’

Adriana Chira - Emory University

‘The concept of ‘racial doubt’ rivals the fetish in its explanatory power. Race, like value, exists and doesn’t exist, creating a useful instability on which cultures built on slavery rest and sometimes rock. Periodic rebellions against ‘race’ reveal a difficult reality: race is a fantasy that readily congeals into a weapon of oppression.’

Elaine Freedgood - Professor Emeritus, New York University

‘How could people in a slave society maintain that race was a stable and essential category even as they routinely recognized its fluidity and fragility? Victor Goldgel Carballo draws on an astonishing array of sources and approaches to provide a convincing answer. Showing how Cubans of all backgrounds experienced this paradox, Racial Doubt explores the open secrets and impassioned debates that made ‘not saying’ a defining feature of nineteenth-century racial ideology.’

David Sartorius - University of Maryland