The Practice of Freedom: The Making of Black Social Life in the Post-plantation Regime

This paper explores the ways in which former slaves negotiated the quotidian violence of the post-plantation world, responded to its insatiable demands for labor, and cultivated the very things that its ethos encouraged to die -- the inner life, the sacred self, the possibilities for joy. It explores these questions in the context of late colonial Cuba, postemancipation Jamaica, and the post-Reconstruction U.S. South. Long after the formal end of slavery in these locations, the plantation persisted as a set of geographies, social relationships, disciplinary codes, and modes of production that were premised on black coercion and violence. But while the plantation continued to morph with the vicissitudes of capital and empire, it remained constantly vexed by the problem of black freedom well into the twentieth century. This paper examines three archival cases to illuminate the daily strategies that rural black laborers used to survive this newly configured world of empire and capital. Black women in particular presented an insistent refusal to this ongoing state of bodily and psychic rupture through their healing of self, their relationships with one another, and their performance of the sacred. In so doing, they drew on their personal strength, social networks, and ritual spaces to negotiate the vicissitudes of the post-plantation world and create new possibilities for freedom and personhood. They mitigated the scars of cotton and tobacco, laundry and kitchens through ecstatic moments and quiet moments that together became the hallmarks of rural black life. As such, this paper paper seeks to understand how these experiences produced new subjectivities for black women, and how black collectives forged livable lives on the underside of modernity.