Race and Nation in the Age of Emancipations ed. by Whitney Nell Stewart and John Garrision Marks (review)

This wide-ranging collection of essays, based on a symposium held at Rice University in 2012, explores common threads in the idiosyncratic configurations of race and nation across the Atlantic world over the long nineteenth century, reflecting both the centrality of emancipation to the remaking of these societies and the persistence of racial hierarchy and "variant forms of exclusionary citizenship" after abolition. Building upon a generation of local studies and rich comparative scholarship, the editors highlight the central role played by people of African descent in the fundamental reimagining of national communities during and after slavery's demise. Although "black freedom varied immensely" across the diverse societies of the Atlantic world, their involvement at the heart of this process imbued freed slaves and their descendants with a "shared vision of freedom" that transcended national boundaries, placing them at the center of what Paul Gilroy has called a "counter-culture of modernity."

Race and Nation in the Age of Emancipations is constructed around four main themes: law, mobility, labor and the public sphere. In a concise foreword that situates the volume in an expansive literature, Julie Saville explores the paradoxical relationship between abolition and citizenship at the irregular boundary between emancipation and nation-making: "State-sponsored abolition produced more noncitizens than citizens," she reminds us. Denied their rights within new polities, free people of color and former slaves embraced a "multiethnic, pluralist" vision of nationhood that "remains unrealized more than two centuries later" (xi–xii).

The eleven essays comprising the volume range expansively over time and place, from revolutionary and antebellum era North America to post-independence Haiti, the British Caribbean under apprenticeship, mid-nineteenth-century Mexico and post-abolition Brazil. The transregional, Atlantic world vision pursued in the introduction justifies the inclusion of two compelling essays on Liberia—one on its attraction as a laboratory for entrepreneurial nation-making among upwardly mobile African Americans, a second on the demarcation between "civilized" colonists from the US and Barbados on one hand and recaptives and Indigenes on the other.

The opening section, on mobility, reflects the formative role of "networks and movement" in shaping Black politics before and after emancipation. Matthew Spooner reflects on spaces opened up by revolutionary upheaval in Britain's North American colonies for "individual and collective routes of escape" from slavery. Challenging an ostensibly cheery historiography that understates the hardship inscribed in Black experience during the revolutionary era, Spooner acknowledges the "chaos" that "allowed enslaved men and women an unprecedented degree of movement" (14) but insists that this was temporary. As conditions settled, White elites reasserted control, introducing "new restrictions on black mobility" and reenslaving substantial numbers who had tasted freedom briefly. The argument is persuasive, though perhaps not so out of line with recent historiography.

Over the period that followed, a growing free Black community weighed its options in a society regarding them as a "troublesome" presence. Andrew Wegmann argues that an upwardly mobile Black middle class dispersed across the urban US (and particularly in creole New Orleans) came to regard Liberian emigration as its most promising course. They sought a "nation" of their own, where they might escape indignity, realize their entrepreneurial ambitions and, paradoxically, "remake themselves in the image of America's [sic] political elite" (42). Wegmann sees in Black elite "volition" a corrective against the traditional view of colonization as a pet project for White separatists, but passes over the relative exceptionalism of his cohort.

Further north in Canada, Black refugees from the post-revolutionary United States forged exile communities that understood their own condition as akin to the forced movement of peoples fleeing absolutist regimes that had weathered revolutionary challenges in mid-nineteenth-century Europe. Canada's Black abolitionists were alert to the contrast between White valorization of "noble" freedom seekers like Kossuth and their own denigration, Ikuko Asaka observes: they presented themselves not as a...