Worldmaking and the Meaning of Freedom in the Postemancipation United States

This paper proposes “worldmaking” as a framework for investigating the transnational dimensions of Black politics after slavery. Drawing on the political theory of Adom Getachew, I define worldmaking as a collective effort to reconstruct the international order. I argue that many African Americans in the post-emancipation United States understood worldmaking as an essential part of the meaning of freedom. Over the course of four centuries, Europeans and their descendants had constructed an international legal order that protected Atlantic slavery. This proslavery order made African Americans vulnerable to re-enslavement, deportation, and incarceration whenever they traveled. For this reason, many Black Americans argued that a new international order was necessary to secure their citizenship rights. They saw Reconstruction as a “golden opportunity” to construct a world in which sovereign republics in the Caribbean would help secure Black collective autonomy throughout the region. To achieve this vision, African Americans organized to liberate Cuba—one of the last slave societies in the hemisphere—from Spanish imperial rule. When the Cuban War for Independence broke out in 1868, they drafted petitions, organized assemblies, founded societies, and enacted legislation demanding that the U.S. intervene to support the establishment of the Cuban Republics. It was only in the face of sustained opposition from white supremacist elites within the Republican Party that their worldmaking movement began to fracture, giving rise to a new strain of African American internationalism that accommodated and even endorsed U.S. imperialism.