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 self and the social landscape.