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Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab (1841) has come to be regarded as an iconic work in the canon of nineteenth-century Cuban fiction, celebrated as much for its literary pedigree as for its radical combination of anti-slavery and feminist ideas. Yet it has been the subject of very divergent critical appraisals. This essay sets out to breathe new life into Avellaneda’s novel by interpreting it through a postcolonial optic. Drawing on ideas from the scholarship of Edward Said and Frantz Fanon, as well as the ideas of literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, these pages explore the implications of its nationalist, racial, sexual and feminist politics for Sab’s anti-slavery meaning. This postcolonial reading provides a possible solution for the conflicts between its various interpretations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines nationalist historiography in revolutionary Cuba, focusing in particular on the relationship between pre-revolutionary ‘revisionist’ histories and the revolutionary historiography produced after 1959. Despite agreement among the revolutionaries on the need for new histories to respond to the needs of the revolutionary age, the dominant nationalist historiography of the Revolution repeated many of the myths of the ‘bourgeois’ histories of the past. In the 1960s, however, several historians working at the margins of academia emerged to challenge the nationalist myths perpetuated by both their republican counterparts and by their Marxist adversaries in the University School of History. Yet despite many significant historical re-interpretations undertaken during the Revolution, many of the sacred cows of Cuban nationalism remained firmly on their plinth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]