Beyond Freedom

Perhaps no greater historiographical revolution has shaped the professional landscape more than the writing of freedom’s narrative. Pulling African American voices out of the silenced wake of emancipation and the debilitating conditions of Jim Crow, scholarship long emphasized freedom as the fitting end to eternities of bitter bondage. This grand narrative arc frames a comfortable way of understanding the coming, conduct, and aftermath of the Civil War. Indeed, freedom is the antithesis of slavery, just as Appomattox is the seemingly clean break between war and peace. While these narratives have served profound historical, professional, and contemporary needs—not the least of which has been the production of a vast and rich literature on the meaning of emancipation—the editors and authors of Beyond Freedom suggest that the field has matured sufficiently to “disrupt” what we thought we knew about the nineteenth-century freedom struggle. This short yet remarkably provocative anthology, which will no doubt align a new generation of historical thinking, discourages readers from considering freedom a reassuring end to the story of slavery. Nor does this volume encourage us to see freedom as a new dawn, that moment at which the long overdue seeds of equity and justice were finally planted in the American soil. Beyond Freedom instead emphasizes the often uncertain, anticipatory, fearful, violent, contingent, innovative, and disappointing dimensions of freedom. Each page of this collection of essays is a meditation on freedom’s simple yet impossible meaning. We see that freedom itself was not boundless. To be secured, it was dependent on forces outside of its own orbit. It required enforcement from the very institutions that legitimized its presence. And it was always contested, always malleable, and always living an uncertain present. If the volume’s editors and authors are correct, emancipation cannot be seen as that inevitable day of jubilee, a defining moment that solved the tragic irony of the American idea. Freedom raised more questions than it answered, fostered more uncertainties than it cured, and opened cavernous spaces of resistance and possibility that did not previously exist.

Aesthetics · Art · Emancipation · Epistemology · Historiography · Individualism · Literature · Meaning (existential) · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · History · Law · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies