Bug Jargal, the Press, and an Intellectual History of Slavery: The Circulation of the Novel in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Latin America

• In Event: Violence, Press and Politics in Latin America: the Public Sphere in Slavery and Cold War

Abstract

This paper deals with the circulation of Victor Hugo’s Bug Jargal (1826) in Latin America, a novel set in the Haitian Revolution. It charts the literary networks that took the story from French to Spanish (1835) and Portuguese, that is, from Paris to Madrid and Lisbon, respectively, and soon thereafter to Rio de Janeiro and Mexico City (1842), among other cities. As a form of serialized literature itself, the press fostered a vibrant trans-Atlantic field of heated exchange about slavery. It popularized the histories of slavery and violence, and at times fanned antislavery politics to potent effect. Yet, this vibrant field crystallized as the institution of slavery was expanding throughout the Americas, at a time when the slave trade and domestic slave populations reached record heights. Exchanges in print often sought to legitimize the buying and selling of people, helping entrench the political economy of slavery. In some instances, newspapers’ operations themselves relied on slave labor. The histories of the press and slavery, then, need to recognized as bound up in complex discursive and material ways.
In thus analyzing the circulation of a story set in the Haitian Revolution, this presentation allows us to reflect on the press’s role in mediating the literatures of slavery and revolution. It helps us consider how those events were narrated at a time when slave-based economies boomed. And, it also compels us to think about slavery through the lens of Latin American intellectual history.

Author

• Celso Castilho, Vanderbilt University