Abstract

James J. O’Kelly’s The Mambi-Land, or Adventures of a Herald Correspondent in Cuba (1874) is one of some 200 nonfiction, English-language narratives about Cuba published in the US during the nineteenth century. Jennifer Brittan’s edition brings O’Kelly’s important narrative to a contemporary readership. A correspondent for the New York Herald, O’Kelly produced one of the few foreign eyewitness accounts of the Ten Years’ War (1868-1878), a significant uprising in colonial Cuba that also marked a turning point in the history of enslavement on the island. An Irish nationalist, soldier, journalist, and politician, O’Kelly was an active opponent of colonialism. In the case of the Cuban rebellion, O’Kelly clearly favors the insurgents and is highly critical of absolutism and colonial institutions, particularly that of enslavement. Despite his political disposition, however, O’Kelly is not able to overcome coloniality entirely (see Aníbal Quijano and Walter Mignolo on coloniality). His narrative relies on commonly held North Atlantic perceptions of Spain and Cuba as Orientalized, uncivilized places and a belief in white supremacy. Despite its reinscription of coloniality, O’Kelly’s narrative nonetheless allows for a reading of the rebellion in dialogue with Global South studies in productive ways. Written for Reconstruction-era readers in the US, O’Kelly’s narrative positively describes the shared activism among marginalized Afro-Cuban and East Asian populations in 1870s Cuba that helped advance the end of forced labor and colonial power on the island.