Reading Postemancipation In/Security: Negotiations of Everyday Freedom

This essay examines in/securities through a central focus on strategies for securing livelihoods after emancipation. While the postemancipation period in the Caribbean was marked by clamorous debate about the region’s economic future, this essay is concerned with the quieter practices that shaped the texture of freedom. An engagement with travel narratives, specifically attentive to reading against the grain of elite mobilities, is proposed as a means through which to reveal the everyday negotiation of livelihoods. Offering the market as a case study, the essay argues that everyday negotiations of economic insecurity rested on mobile strategies and that the mobilization of such strategies took on a new significance with the rise of tourism in the decades after emancipation.