Black Futures Not Yet Lost

Bibliographic Data

ID4440795
AuthorsKennetta Hammond Perry (0000-0003-0386-8879, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume121
Issue3
Pages541-560
Publication date2022-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSouth Atlantic Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0038-2876 • E-ISSN: 1527-8026
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00382876-9825976
OpenAlexW4289794155
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited36

This essay explores how the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement's public visibility during the summer of 2020 opened critical space to reconsider and critique entrenched narratives of British abolitionism that render the fate of post-emancipation Black futures inconsequential. It highlights some of the contestations within a British historiographical tradition that has co-opted abolitionism as a means to engender and fortify mythologies of a liberal and progressive white nation to the detriment of even conceiving of Black freedom as a requisite to emancipation. Black political thinkers from the period of enslavement to the present have continually spoken back to these abridged and romanticized histories of British abolitionism calling into view the limits of white abolitionist projects. This article outlines some of the intellectual currents that have shaped a history of Black abolitionist praxis in Britain as a political posture rooted in an acknowledgment of abolition's unfinished work and its import in the present in anticipation of free Black futures yet to come

Abolitionism · Art · Emancipation · Futures contract · Historiography · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · White (mutation) · Australian History and Society · Gender Studies · History · Homelessness and Social Issues · Law · Race, History, and American Society

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