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About This Book
In 1834 Antigua became the only British colony in the Caribbean to move directly from slavery to full emancipation. Immediate freedom, however, did not live up to its promise, as it did not guarantee any level of stability or autonomy, and the implementation of new forms of coercion and control made it, in many ways, indistinguishable from slavery. In Troubling Freedom Natasha Lightfoot tells the story of how Antigua's newly freed black working people struggled to realize freedom in their everyday lives, prior to and in the decades following emancipation. She presents freedpeople's efforts to form an efficient workforce, acquire property, secure housing, worship, and build independent communities in response to elite prescriptions for acceptable behavior and oppression. Despite its continued efforts, Antigua's black population failed to convince whites that its members were worthy of full economic and political inclusion. By highlighting the diverse ways freedpeople defined and created freedom through quotidian acts of survival and occasional uprisings, Lightfoot complicates conceptions of freedom and the general narrative that landlessness was the primary constraint for newly emancipated slaves in the Caribbean.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: âMe No Bâlongs to Demâ: Emancipationâs Possibilities and Limits in Antigua
- Chapter 1: âA Landscape That Continually Recurred in Passingâ: The Many Worlds of a Small Place
- Chapter 2: âSo Them Make Law for Negro, So Them Make Law for Masterâ: Antiguaâs 1831 Sunday Market Rebellion
- Chapter 3: âBut Freedom till Betterâ: Labor Struggles after 1834
- Chapter 4: âAn Equality with the Highest in the Landâ? The Expansion of Black Private and Public Life
- Chapter 5: âSinful Conexionsâ: Christianity, Social Surveillance, and Black Womenâs Bodies in Distress
- Chapter 6: âMashing Antsâ: Surviving the Economic Crisis after 1846
- Chapter 7: âOur Sideâ: Antiguaâs 1858 Uprising and the Contingent Nature of Freedom
- Conclusion: âMy Color Broke Me Downâ: Postslavery Violence and Incomplete Freedom in the British Caribbean
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index