Autonomous Bodies: Enslaved Children and Their Networks of Care During the Age of Abolition

This paper explores how slaveowners and abolitionists exploited Black children’s intimate lives to ensure systems of unfreedom in the years leading up to British Emancipation. Located within the Bahamas between 1820-1834, this presentation places the lives of enslaved children and “Liberated African” children caught from illegal slaving ships together. In doing so, this presentation closely examines how slaveowners, abolitionists, and colonial officials transformed freed and enslaved Black children’s lives into embodiments of debt that attempted to tie these children’s futures to slaveowners and the state. Simultaneously, this paper reads for an alternative calculation of Black life, wherein the practices and spaces of care cultivated by Black children and their kin disrupted the systems that tried to alienate them.