Troubling Freedom: Antigua and the Aftermath of British Emancipation by Natasha Lightfoot (review)

Lightfoot aims to use the particular case of Antigua to provide a fresh analysis of the nature of post-slavery black experience around the Americas. The book succeeds in this task, often with eloquence, and with engaging detail. Lightfoot argues for an understanding of emancipation as a multi-decade, contested, and never-complete experience, rather than as a status change fixed to a particular date or legal action. Versions of this argument have appeared in previous studies, but as Lightfoot emphasizes, overly clear-cut ways of imagining emancipation persist.

Chapter 1 introduces readers to the world of early nineteenth-century Antigua, a small British slave society in the eastern Caribbean. The chapter mostly employs an analysis of the geography of the island—rural and urban spaces accessed, experienced, and utilized differently by free whites and mostly enslaved blacks. Even a reader with little background in Caribbean history will be able to visualize the specific setting of the book, as well as the racialized politics and economics of British West Indian slavery.

Although Lightfoot’s use of the methods of social geography dominate the first chapter, the remainder of the book revolves more around intersections between social history and political science, or at least the study of black popular politics, broadly defined. The book also incorporates a robust engagement with the ways in which ordinary people understood and experienced the law, and the manner in which gender differentiated so many aspects of post-slavery life.

Considering recent scholarship on post-emancipation societies, Troubling Freedom is intellectually closest to the work of Mimi Sheller in Democracy After Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica (Gainesville, 2001).Whereas Sheller focuses more acutely on political questions, Lightfoot attempts in theory to cover multiple spheres of black life equally—labor negotiations and the establishment of independent villages; the development of new leisure practices and material culture after slavery; marital, sexual, and religious life; white perceptions of the black population; and two public uprisings. This range perhaps inevitably leads to some lack of cohesion in the book’s analysis.

Chapter 2 explores an 1831 rebellion, three years before emancipation, which occurred after colonial reforms prohibited the long-standing use of the Christian Sunday Sabbath as a market day for the enslaved. Chapter 3 examines the negotiations around post-emancipation labor contracts. Chapter 4 focuses on material culture, entertainments, and living arrangements among the recently emancipated. Chapter 5 mostly uses Moravian church records to illuminate the inner workings of marital and sexual relationships among black heterosexual couples after slavery. Chapter 6 traces the effects of economic decline after the ending of preferential sugar tariffs for British West Indian colonies. Finally, Chapter 7 examines an 1858 uprising in the town of St. John’s, which began with black working people from Antigua attacking fellow black workers from the neighboring island of Barbuda. Lightfoot analyzes how even violence among emancipated people themselves reflected the multiple constraints on their attempts to craft lives after slavery on their own terms. She gives special attention to the prominent role of women in the uprising.

Exploration of gender inequities in the experience of emancipation and the study of conflict among freed people are two of the strengths of Lightfoot’s work. Indeed, these themes—most often explored through close textual analysis of various documents—might have been used to shape the whole book more cohesively, rather than strongly shaping only some chapters. But a certain unevenness may have been Lightfoot’s intent—an argument that any explanation of the lived experience of emancipation should be almost intractably difficult to cohere or to complete, like the very freedom that her black subjects sought.