Slavery, Emancipation, and Antigua

Again with the class writing assignments, this time on post-emancipation Antigua.

Natasha Lightfoot’s Troubling Freedom examines the process of emancipation in 19^th century Antigua, a small sugar colony where conditions for emancipated peoples permitted fewer options for flight from the plantocracy. Unlike Jamaica, Trinidad, or other British colonies in the region, the freed people of Antigua, because most of the arable land was under the control of sugar plantations, did not have easy access to developing into a peasantry. Nonetheless, Lightfoot’s use of a variety of sources, ranging from newspapers and planters’ records to colonial government documents and travelers’ accounts, suggests freed people envisioned freedom and fought for it, albeit in ways that were sometimes contradictory or reproduced patterns of inequality, as the experience of Barbudans during the 1858 riots demonstrates.

Lightfoot’s suggestive account of postemancipation Antigua places gender at the center. While building on the arguments of Mimi Sheller, Thomas Holt, and other scholars of emancipation in the Caribbean, Lightfoot challenges common readings of uprisings and revolts as male, undermining traditional notions of overt slave resistance as a masculine endeavor. The prominence of women in the 1858 uprising, for example, exemplifies the significance of women as historical actors in postemancipation Antigua. Furthermore, women’s prominence in markets, trade, and labor on the estates indicates the complex process of freedom as neither teleological nor complete. For instance, the work of Moravian missionaries and attempts to limit market activity and non-monogamous relations directly targeted women, as did the low wages and exploitation on plantations after the Contract Law of 1834. Black men, through ideas of domesticity and patriarchal family models promoted by missionaries, also contributed to the marginalization of black working women, buttressing Lightfoot’s introduction of her monograph as an unromanticized reading of resistance.

However, in spite of allusions to freed people’s belief in certain rights not explicitly promised by the state, Lightfoot does not delve deeper into the question of popular democracy Sheller intriguingly argues for in the case of Haiti’s piquets or Jamaica’s Morant Bay Uprising movements. Obeah, spirituality, consumption, leisure and women’s agency are well integrated into Lightfoot’s account, but perhaps discussion of collective organizations in free villages could have strengthened Lightfoot’s conclusions on the 1858 uprising as an expression of the masses while reinforcing the importance of women in the public sphere. Moreover, were there other forms of collective organizing or bargaining besides itinerant labor gangs, such as agricultural societies or cooperatives to work land held by free villages? These questions, particularly in the case of Antigua and Barbuda, raise so many pertinent issues regarding labor, race, and democracy that may hint at alternative conceptions of the state and society.