Contenu du sommaire : Libres de couleur : Migrations choisies ?

Long absent from the historiography as an exclusive focus, the free people of color of the Americas are still often studied in imperial or national contexts, without considering a more global picture. The present article focuses on nineteenth-century New Orleans and demonstrates how considering the Atlantic and Caribbean mobilities of free New-Orleanians of color opens up new perspectives and initiates significant reinterpretations of the history of the Americas.

Julius S. Scott was the first to study a Masterless Caribbean composed of deserters, runaway slaves, privateers, pirates and other bandits who circulated and communicated with one another in the Caribbean. Mostly composed of Afro-descendants, the Masterless Caribbean is opposed to the Caribbean of the (mostly white) planters and captains, who exerted almost unlimited authority over their slaves and sailors. The fuzzy and shifting contours of this world and, certainly, the appeal of such a concept, have favored its use without, however, specifying its content. For some authors, any individual of African descent circulating in the Caribbean until the 1830s is now described as having belonged to the Masterless Caribbean. By focusing on the study of free people of color engaged in the shady activities associated with the Masterless Caribbean during the “age of revolutions”, this article aims at highlighting the profound social differences–which were perfectly perceived by their contemporaries–that are subsumed under a common “racial” origin, whilst underscoring the hierarchies and contradictions of the Masterless Caribbean.

This article analyzes what seems to be a significant absence of free people of color within Cuban exiles' circles during the central decades of the nineteenth century. Between the 1830s and the end of the first Cuban war of independence, in 1879, the political body of exiles which was forming outside Cuba against the Spanish domination seems to exclude supposedly non-white individuals. This article explores how such an exclusion was made possible, sometimes for blatant racist reasons.