Suchergebnisse

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Chapter 1. The Intimacies of Four Continents -- Chapter 2. Autobiography Out of Empire -- Chapter 3. A Fetishism of Colonial Commodities -- Chapter 4. The Ruses of Liberty -- Chapter 5. Freedoms Yet to Come -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- References -- Index

This article explores under what conditions, with what methods, and in relation to what materials the question of recovery with respect to slavery and freedom can be posed. Accounts of Black Atlantic and African American slavery are central to understanding enslavement and the terrains of struggles for freedom, yet the questioning of recovery also requires a critical examination of the genealogy of freedom itself. The author argues that liberalism did not contradict slavery, but rather served as a means to rationalize slavery and its aftermath, and observes that many liberal ideas were also employed to justify settler occupation, theft of land, imperial trades, war, and overseas empire, making these simultaneous yet differentiated processes that link Africa, Asia, and Europe with the Americas relevant to the study of slavery and freedom. Moreover, the author observes that because slavery and colonialism are the conditions of possibility for liberalism, we must hesitate before reiterating the desire for freedom.

In Reconstructing Womanhood, Hazel Carby showed us that reading lost histories required the deconstruction of liberal institutions and ideologies that had worked to render them illegible. My contribution takes up this dimension of Carby's work as I discuss the place of the autobiographical genre in reckoning with histories of slavery and empire, beginning with The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1789), and concluding with Carby's own autobiography-in-progress, "Child of Empire: Racializing Subjects in Post World War II Britain."