Troubling Freedom

This book is about the struggle of slaves and freedpeople for freedom in Antigua. Using both printed and manuscript documents, the author analyzes how people negotiated freedom in a slave and former-slave society between 1831 and 1858. Which strategies did they use in their struggle for freedom in nineteenth-century Antigua?The author examines different elements of the pre- and post-emancipation Antiguan society. She considers the hierarchical as well as the spatial structure of the island as essential to the understanding of the specific problems of the Antiguan emancipation. Lightfoot starts with a description of a riot that followed the abolition of the Sunday market in 1831. Its social dynamics were symptomatic for rebellions on the island before and after the emancipation. Furthermore, the author is interested in the role that different ideas of freedom played in creating private and public life among the freedpeople. Eventually, she probes religion and economy as influential factors of agency for black people.Natasha Lightfoot chooses a social-historic approach. She focuses on the daily practices of the women and men of Antigua and connects them with the colonial politics. She understands “freedom” as a “process of negotiation,” located in “distinct practices of freedom” (3). Because of the shortage of land, there were very few options for freedpeople to find employment beyond their former owners, but “[they] practiced their freedom through struggles to claim space, uphold community, acquire property, and reorganize their time and space” (3–4). The struggle for space was already a main feature during a riot that followed the abolition of the Sunday market in 1831. The market was part of the “rival geography” (55) that Afro-Caribbean people established during the period of slavery. Moreover, the slaves understood the market as a particular right. In a process that Homi Bhabha calls mimicry, slaves learned to deal with and use British law to “construct themselves ... as colonial subjects with legal standing” (58).The act of emancipation in 1834 was accompanied by this struggle as well. The freedpeople, most immediately being transformed as plantation workers, started to negotiate practices of freedom. Many of them refused to start working in the days following the emancipation. The freedpeople claimed an individual responsibility for their working time and space. But in the end of 1834 colonial laws forced freedpeople into unprofitable one-year contracts and criminalized unemployment. The author highlights the gender-related dimensions of the process: in contrast to men, women had fewer alternative occupations like fishing or the work as bargemen. Freedom, so according to Natasha Lightfoot, was a process of actions and repressions.In chapter 4 the author examines the impact of freedom on the private and public life of the freedpeople. The gradual establishment of free villages, independent from the accommodations on the plantations, helped to shape “private spaces” (118). A hybrid and lively Afro-Creole culture developed. It was represented, for example, in dress. An elegant and—in the eyes of white people—“extravagant” style became characteristic. It asserted “their simultaneous distinction from and similarities to elites. They signified their change in status from slave to free by changing how they lived and how they looked” (136). This is a remarkable example of the connections between economy, politics, and daily practices in the post-emancipation Caribbean. As the author suggests, the freedpeople's culture illustrated the function of mimicry. Although whites saw the “unorthodox self-presentation” as proof for “cultural difference and racial inferiority,” Lightfoot argues it was rather an expression of resistance and empowerment. The freedpeople were “creating a culture that was all their own, born of their constant struggles and their intermittent breakthroughs” (140).Closely connected with the creation of Afro-Caribbean privacy was the question of religion. The two main missions, those of the Moravians and the Methodists, offered schools and some kind of security, but also new forms of social control. By using the church discipline of the Antiguan Moravian Church as an example, Natasha Lightfoot analyzes how the churches played a role in “refashioning ex-slaves into willing sugar-laborers and law-abiding subjects” (143). Rigid morals, regarding sexuality especially, “shamed black men and women and placed them in a suppliant position before church authority” (154). These insights into the connection between Christianity and imperialism are fruitful for further studies. It would be interesting to compare them with the works by John Catron and Jon Sensbach, who highlighted a more ambivalent interaction between missionaries and Afro-Caribbean converts. Natasha Lightfoot has produced an important contribution to the discussion about the involvement of the churches in colonial power.The last two chapters of the book deal with struggles after the economic crisis of 1848 and a violent uprising that took place in 1858. Especially the analysis of the latter case is convincing. Due to a bagatelle, a conflict between Antiguan-born freedpeople and immigrants from Barbuda escalated. Gender-related patterns of behavior played a pivotal role in the riot. Antiguan women committed brutal and sexualized violence against female Barbudans by mimicking “the violence perpetrated against black women under slavery and in freedom” (202). Simultaneously, the riot of 1858 shows an interesting element in the shifting identity of the Antiguan people. The long struggle for freedom assured that they “understood their progress in freedom contingently” (207). It was part of the process that they distanced themselves from another population of freedpeople in Barbudans. Consequently, Lightfoot concludes that freedom as “a fluid construct ... [which] expand[s] or contract[s] with the changing parameters of struggle” (232).The book is a fascinating analysis about freedom as a product of negotiation, of daily practices and spatial circumstances. It is an exciting reading for everyone interested in the Caribbean, in slavery and emancipation, or the additional value of the history of daily practices

Agency (philosophy · Colonialism · Emancipation · Freedom of movement · Negotiation · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy