The Remnants of Slavery: The Description of Black Corpses in Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés or El Angel Hill (1882)

Abstract

Abstract

Abstract Cecilia Valdés or El Angel Hill (1882), by Cirilo Villaverde, is often read as a Cuban antislavery novel, yet its treatment of the remains of formerly enslaved people has received little scholarly attention. This article examines the scenes following the suicides of Pedro and Pablo Carabalí, focusing on the interval between death and burial—what I term afterdeath . In these scenes, the novel stages a tension between the narrator’s foregrounding of the corpses through description and their erasure by the enslaver characters in dialogue. This tension reveals that the decomposing bodies function as “unproductive remnants” that resist the novel’s speculative logic of valuation and cannot be recuperated under contemporary insurance practices. By foregrounding decay rather than spectrality, the study delineates the limits of commodification in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world and argues that the corpses constitute a critical site for re-thinking representations of death, value, and resistance in slave societies.