This panel examines practices of black place-making in slavery and emancipation in the British Caribbean. By analyzing patterns of migration and return, reproduction and childrearing, rebellion, and maroonage—both within and across imperial borderlands—we illustrate how enslaved and freed peoples have defined and ascribed meaning to the concept of home. Through these interconnected investigations, we chart the multiple sites and geographies black people plotted across the Caribbean to cultivate community and family life. Importantly, this panel explores how black intimate and domestic spaces simultaneously faced heightened state violence and control, while also serving as critical sites for bodily, reproductive, and erotic autonomy.

Bringing together these intimate histories, we join a wave of scholarship from across the Atlantic world attentive to the gendered politics of slavery and emancipation. We demonstrate how both the enslaved and freed resisted against confinement, regulation and surveillance, by expressing oppositional networks of family, kin, and communal support. In so doing, we undo the neat binaries placed between slavery and freedom, and reveal the continuities between the two systems.

Ashby’s work reveals how emancipation intensified the commodification of women and girls’ reproductive labor through an investigation of the kidnapping of newly freed children from Barbados into coerced contract labor schemes across the Caribbean archipelago. Duncan’s work closely reads for how Black children’s lives became calculated as debt on the eve of British Emancipation, through an examination of the intimate lives of enslaved Black children and Liberated African children in the Bahamas. Lix Jones’ work examines the enslaved home as a site of contestation during slave rebellions. Studying the 1831-2 rebellion in Jamaica, she reveals how the gendered labors of homemaking were entwined with the act of rebellion.