No More, No More

No More, No More

Slavery And Cultural Resistance In Havana And New Orleans

Daniel E. Walker

An illuminating look at the festival performances of slaves in Havana and New Orleans

208 Pages, 6 x 9 in

  • Paperback
  • 9780816643271
  • Published: September 15, 2004
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Details

No More, No More

Slavery And Cultural Resistance In Havana And New Orleans

Daniel E. Walker

ISBN: 9780816643271

Publication date: September 15th, 2004

208 Pages

9 x 5

An illuminating look at the festival performances of slaves in Havana and New Orleans

However urban slave societies might have differed from their rural counterparts, they still relied on a concerted assault on the psychological, social, and cultural identity of their African-descended inhabitants to maintain power and control. This ambitious book looks at how people of African descent in two such societies—Havana and New Orleans in the nineteenth century—created and maintained their own forms of cultural resistance to the slave regime’s assault and, in the process, put forth autonomous views of self and the social landscape.

In Havana’s annual Día de Reyes festival and in the weekly activities that took place at New Orleans’s Congo Square, author Daniel Walker identifies specific cultural beliefs and activities that Africans brought to the New World and modified in order to withstand and contest the dehumanizing effects of oppression. No More, No More crosses disciplinary boundaries as well, elucidating the economic, social, cultural, and demographic operations at work in two cities and the wide-scale efforts at cultural resistance embodied in public performances.

Daniel E. Walker is founding director of the Center for Public History and the Arts and historian for the Black Voice Foundation. His articles have appeared in the CLA Journal, the Griot, the Western Journal of Black Studies, and the Journal of Caribbean History.