This panel explores how nineteenth-century Black Atlantic subjects navigated the unstable, porous boundary between enslavement and freedom amid racial capitalism, ever-expanding plantation economies, the persistence of the slave trade and the unending assault on black personhood. Freedom always carried within it a wide swath of unfreedoms for black people on either side of formal abolition, a contradiction fraught with racialized, gendered, and economic dimensions. Current scholarship of the late slavery and early freedom periods in the Black Atlantic insists upon the economic, cultural, political, and spiritual innovations of black communities as they encountered plantation regimes seeking to devour their labor power and wither their sense of selves; as well as the ways in which such struggles in one site resonated with counterparts elsewhere. These myriad forms of singular and collective self-making cannot ever be fully known given the limitations of the archive, but critical scholarly contributions in recent years have brought us closer than ever to contemplating their complexities. However these studies also illustrate the ways in which such innovations were structured by the violence of individual and corporate forms of state and imperial power; shaping black subjectivities by affecting black mobility, material accumulation, and community formation. In this vein, the papers in this session interrogate narratives of enslaved and freed black people from the US South, the Caribbean, and Brazil, mounting parallel struggles to obtain and/or sustain liberation. The panel includes studies of an enslaved community on a plantation in rural Louisiana subject to dispossession, surveillance, and eventual dispersal under the control of their white owner; captive Africans from Angola illegally traded to Brazil and the notorious violence both of clandestine slave trafficking and imperial “rescue” processes; the efforts of a runaway enslaved woman born in the British Caribbean after her illegal sale to Spanish territory to petition British authorities for her freedom with mitigated results; and the cultivation of economic, social and spiritual lives among freedpeople, and especially freedwomen, amidst the coercive discipline of the post-emancipation plantation US South, Jamaica and Cuba. Ultimately the panel aims to reveal, as one of our papers so aptly puts it, “how black collectives forged livable lives on the underside of modernity.”