However urban slave societies might have differed from their rural counterparts, they still relied on a concerted assault on the psychological, social, and cultural identity of their African-descended inhabitants to maintain power and control. This ambitious book looks at how people of African descent in two such societies--Havana and New Orleans in the nineteenth century--created and maintained their own forms of cultural resistance to the slave regime's assault and, in the process, put forth autonomous views of sell and the social landscape. In Havana's annual Dia de Reyes festival and in...

Walker (history, Black Voice Foundation) describes public performances, specifically those of El Dia de Reyes festival in Havana and the weekly activities in Congo Square in New Orleans in the nineteenth century, as acts of cultural resistance. There, those of African descent, slave or free, controlled their own definitions of time, family, social