Víctor Goldgel Carballo’s Racial Doubt: Slavery, Passing, and the Emergence of Black Writing in Cuba was published last month (April 2026) by Cambridge University Press.
Adriana Chira (Emory University) writes, “In this powerful book, Víctor 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.”
Description: 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It interweaves analyses of literature, including poems by enslaved authors and a novel by a mixed-race journalist, with unpublished archival material, including testimonies of kidnapped Afrodescendants.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.
For more information, see https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/racial-doubt/BAD64A623AEED03B9C982D5800BA0DC1
Víctor Goldgel Carballo’s Racial Doubt: Slavery, Passing, and the Emergence of Black Writing in Cuba was published last month (April 2026) by Cambridge University Press. Adriana Chira (Emory University) writes, “In this powerful book, Víctor Goldgel Carballo explores the many and sometimes contradictory definitions of Blackness that emerged amongst Cuba’s people of African descent who expressed an
