With a focus on Brazil, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, this chapter examines the sense of belatedness in abolitionist and postabolitionist literature published between the 1860s and the 1930s. Belatedness implied an affective relationship to the global temporality of abolition – a way of feeling time as shame that shaped literature in long-lasting ways. Writers like José Martí and Machado de Assis reflected on the apparently anomalous status of their nations, where slavery was not abolished until 1886 and 1888 respectively. By analyzing canonical literature in light of the Black public spheres that emerged in the last decades of the nineteenth century, this chapter explores questions such as the rejection of African cultures, Whitening ideologies, the fantasy of the submissive slave, the myths and realities of racial democracy, Maroonage, and other forms of slave resistance. Other writers analyzed include Maria Firmina dos Reis, Antônio de Castro Alves, Alfonso Henriques de Lima Barreto, Martín Morúa Delgado, and Francisco Calcagno.