Session Abstract

Freedom may be a cherished chimera. It is something marginalized groups have aspired relentlessly to attain, and it is a sinister delusion. No period demonstrates this absurdity more than the Age of Freedom, the centuries that connect the Atlantic World’s Age of Revolution to the apotheosis of chattel slavery, emancipation to the rise of debt peonage, and the ever-tightening matrix of coercive systems designed to preserve privilege for the few. Each of the four panelists addresses this absurdity from a different vantage point. Max Mishler traces the concurrent development of emancipation and incarceration in early New York, demonstrating that prison was central to reformers’ vision of a free-labor society even as incarceration highlighted diasporic geographies and black cosmopolitanism. Rashauna Johnson Chenault and Kendra Field each explore a single emigration--one connecting early New Orleans to Trinidad, the other Oklahoma’s Indian Territory to the Gold Coast--to explore the individual promises and disappointments embedded within black Atlantic movements whereby freedom was a destination. Finally, Michael Ralph interrogates the relationship between the rise of slave insurance in the era of the U.S. domestic slave trade, headquartered in New Orleans, and the subsequent valuation of all human lives in the life insurance industry. The work reveals that when we commodify any lives, we commodify all lives, a process that imperils contemporary freedoms worldwide. Whether freedom can ever mean “real freedom” remains to be seen, but if past is prelude, it is a far more elusive concept than binaries of “slavery versus freedom” would suggest. The panel will illuminate this deeply contested, continuous production and will be of particular interest to scholars of slavery, freedom, and the black Atlantic.