Join us for a conversation on the forthcoming book Racial Doubt: Slavery, Passing, and the Emergence of Black Writing in Cuba (Cambridge University Press, spring 2026).  Víctor Goldgel Carballo, Professor of Latin American Literatures and Cultures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, offers a groundbreaking study that introduces the concept of racial doubt - the hesitation, ambiguity, and contingency surrounding race - as a critical lens to examine how enslaved and free Afrodescendants navigated, contested, and reimagined racial categories in 19th-century Cuba.

Drawing on sources such as Juan Francisco Manzano’s poetry and rare testimonies from kidnapped Africans, Goldgel Carballo traces how form shaped experiences of racialization. Racial Doubt invites readers to rethink the very notion of “Black writing” as a category defined by conceptual instability and historical contingency. Within this complex social landscape, the enslaved became property owners, free people of color passed as white, and Black intellectuals directly challenged the premises of scientific racism.

This event raises timely questions about literature, racial passing, and the shifting meanings of Blackness in the Americas.

Víctor Goldgel Carballo is a leading scholar of 19th-century literature, race, and media in the Americas, and Professor of Latin American Literatures and Cultures at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author of Cuando lo nuevo conquistó América. Prensa, moda y literatura en el siglo XIX (Siglo XXI, 2013), recipient of the Latin American Studies Association Book Award and Honorable Mention from the Casa de las Américas Literary Prize. His second book, Modesta dinamita (Blatt & Ríos, 2021), was a finalist for the 2022 Medifé Filba Literary Prize. He is also co-editor of Slavery, Mobility and Networks in Nineteenth-Century Cuba (Routledge, 2024). His work has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Humanities Center, and the Institute for Research in the Humanities at UW–Madison.