JULIE SAVILLE
Dèyè mòn gen mòn.
Beyond mountains there are yet more mountains.
HAITIAN PROVERB
During its increased recognition and ongoing incorporation as an established field of academic inquiry, the framework of the Atlantic world has inspired a rich and burgeoning body of scholarship. Like other productive areas of academic inquiry, the Atlantic world, as a historically varying domain of shifting human experiences, encompasses a range of conceptual approaches, methodologies, and thematic problems. Just a few of its organizing themes are state-to-state diplomatic relationships; webs of long-distance trade, commerce, and consumption; the origins and consequences of Western Europe’s imperial colonizations of the Americas; and the politics of diasporic migrations and returns. Although the logics of these central themes conceive the problematics that Atlantic studies should address somewhat differently, all of them make clear that the early modern and modern Atlantic world differed in many respects from the Mediterranean world as examined by Fernand Braudel.1 The social, economic, and cultural contours of the Atlantic world are distinguished from the sixteenth-century Mediterranean by the former’s volatile, often violent colonial encounters, unprecedented penetration of dispersed social organizations by capitalist economic development, transportation of forced labor to far-distant sites to produce key commodities that were processed and consumed elsewhere, and invention and broad dispersal of logics of racial identification.
Much of the work in this expansive field—particularly the scholarship inspired by the explorations of slavery, race, and colonialism opened by W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Eric Williams—has explored and debated the development, transformations, and consequences of Atlantic slavery and the slave trade. Reflecting on this current emphasis, historians Whitney Nell Stewart and John Garrison Marks have shaped this volume to bring into view the research agendas that can be enriched by extending investigations to encompass Atlantic slavery’s abolitions over the course of the long nineteenth century. An analytical shift that draws slave emancipations more fully into Atlantic studies frameworks recuperates Du Bois’s, James’s, and Williams’s interest in the long-term global effects of slavery, race, and colonization in generating contradictions of modern freedom. This approach is also well suited to capture changes in the historical meanings of nation and citizenship as the abolition of slavery increasingly defined the path to political independence that the new nations in North and South America—though not the slaveholding colonies of the Caribbean—would take.
The circumstances of formerly enslaved, freeborn, and manumitted people of color in the nations that emerged during more than a century of slave emancipations seemed emblematic of the modern meaning of nation that French scholar Ernest Renan described in his well-known essay “What Is a Nation?” (first delivered as an 1882 lecture at the Sorbonne).2 Renan’s classic account pronounced an end to an era in which elements of a shared habitus—dynastic lineages and common language, religion, and territory, as he identified them—served as the wellspring of nation making. Emerging nations in the Americas were culturally, linguistically, and ethnically plural in ways that the old formula was inadequate to describe. Rather than experiences of longtime residence in territories inhabited in common with former owners, formerly enslaved and manumitted people of color had known the unpredictable upheavals of long-distance migrations and multiple relocations—movements often precipitated by the violence of imperial and anticolonial wars. In the place of religions and languages shared by former slaves and former masters, Afro-Atlantic cultural expressions often substituted syncretic religious forms and novel, previously unspoken languages, none of them identical to whatever cultural and linguistic progenitors might be identified in the Old World. Such circumstances, unimagined by Renan as the stuff from which nations were made, lay at the heart of experiences and sensibilities that cultural studies scholar Paul Gilroy has termed a “counter-culture of modernity”—the Black Atlantic as experienced by formerly enslaved and freeborn people of color.3 In the domains of movement, law, labor, and public life—the themes by which Stewart and Marks have organized these essays—the authors explore how transatlantic circuits of long-distance movement, legal modes of categorization, experiences of labor, and the myriad nonpolitical codes that governed public life conditioned responses to variant forms of exclusionary citizenship. Read together, the essays bring into view postemancipation tensions of nineteenth-century nationhood that often lent a transregional character to the pursuit of emancipation from slavery.
Explorations of the Atlantic dimensions and consequences of slave emancipations promise to deepen understanding of the practical and symbolic meanings of nationhood—a project launched by Benedict Anderson’s widely influential Imagined Communities.4 Around the Atlantic, previously subordinated social groups seized abolition of the slave trade, reports (sometimes misapprehended) of court decisions concerning slavery, accounts of the activities of antislavery groups (also at times misconstrued), and even rumored decrees of government officials (usually exaggerated) as institutional guarantees foretelling the fulfillment of aspirations long subordinated under the weight of slavery’s racial hierarchies. The social order envisioned by members of these groups—part prophecy, part experience—amplify Anderson’s pioneering insistence on nations as imagined communities, grounded in historically specific cultural practices and modes of social communication rather than the fixed, stable prerequisites whose decline Renan had posited.
The essays in this volume give close attention to the particular geographic, cultural, and historical contexts in which formerly enslaved people and freeborn people of color began to express an abstract sense of peoplehood whose importance to nation making Anderson has identified. In some respects, they began to forge national sentiments from peculiar—or at least unconventional—community identities. Widely dispersed groups of people, few of whom were mutually acquainted, shared visions of freedom more than territorial loyalties, an attachment to liberty more than to patriotism or, indeed, at times, to life, and more of an opposition to direct domination than an affinity for particular governments. In contrast to propertied, often literate enclaves among free people of color, who appealed to imperial and metropolitan statutes to bolster their claims for civic standing, enslaved people drew on a broadly common ethos that expressed itself most fully in the plane of action rather than as legal precedent or philosophy. Enslaved men, women, and children variously made their ways in mass escapes toward third parties—British, American, Spanish, French, or, in later contexts, Yankee, Mexican, or Brazilian armies and territories.
Despite their physical dispersal, as the principal workers in a globalized system of long-distance production and consumption, formerly enslaved people arguably moved toward the prospect of emancipation encased in one of humanity’s most highly symbolized, and broadly circulated, deracinated human representations: what Anderson terms the “world-category negro,” an identification stripped of references to a particular locale or place.5 Areas that warrant further study include the implications of Anderson’s observation for postemancipation cultural politics and the evolution of multicultural citizenship, the racialization of national minorities, and comparative racial and ethnic studies of the relationship between postemancipation social communities and the newly national states.
This volume’s essays bring into view particular ways in which formerly enslaved people and freeborn people of color drew on historically conditioned sensibilities of abstract peoplehood to give meaning to emancipation. In the shadows of racialized citizenship, they formed new “nations” of religious brotherhoods, fraternal organizations, and public associations, fashioning public displays of cultural claims to membership in communities generated more by a sense of linked fate and common struggles than by identical relationships to state authority. Read together, these essays trace transformations in the experiential worlds of peoples of color, revealing the contours of political landscapes as imagined by communities largely unrecognized in the new national constitutions and state codes that defined more noncitizens than citizens in the emergent states.
The volume’s four thematic sections—movement, law, labor, and the public sphere—identify key areas in which the political identities of these resident but unrecognized groups took shape, thereby demarcating key moments in the emergence of Afro-Atlantic latent citizens as political subjects. At the outset of an era of revolutions in which slavery was illegal in no Atlantic polity, imperial wars and armed conflict created openings in which refugees from slavery found it was easier to change the scale and direction of their movements than to alter the power relations that sparked their journeys and defined their paths toward unknowable outcomes and destinations. Many slaves nevertheless followed with great interest reported changes in the legal recognition of slavery, charting individual and collective routes of escape to a new calculus of free soil. Free people of color who left settled, often urban communities at times benefited from literacy and prior familiarity with administrative and professional bureaucracies that, with persuasion or for a fee, might provide documentation that could legitimate travel. The successful journeys of enslaved people, especially refugees leaving plantation zones, relied on social learning along the way and no small bit of negotiation and luck. Travelers often fled toward a possible world rather than any known destination. However varied their circumstances and whether they traveled alone or in the continuous company of family and kin, they moved in search of new conditions of existence. Therefore, whatever the goals, aims, and strategies of their journeys, they pursued social and political conventions by which a change of place might become a change in circumstance. In an era where the idea of the nation as primary guarantor of rights was slowly emerging, maritime workers seem more than any other group of Afro-Atlantic workers to have enjoyed documented identification of a relationship to state authority. But not even seamen’s protection papers fulfilled stable, portable personal relationships to state citizenship.
Indeed, it is difficult to identify a domain of social life in which racial identifications, which proliferated in law in the era of slavery’s abolition, did not compromise emancipation’s promise. Remunerated labor proved an ideological field as prone to alienation as slavery. At the same time, the centrality of work to emancipated people’s experiences helped to constitute labor as a domain in which rural residents led labor-centered demands for justice, particularly during emancipation’s first generations. Self-conscious organizations took work claims into public spaces with stunning intensity. Nonetheless, the public sphere, idealized in liberal imaginations as a space of consensual social relations premised on equality, could also easily legitimate socially approved hierarchies of clientage and racial subordination, even in staged interracial interactions. Some of the strongest illustrations of the impact of racial hierarchy may well lie in the relatively understudied comparative examinations of postemancipation public life. The essays here call attention to the question of how to decode and compare the celebratory cross-racial festivals of abolition in some regions of Colombia and Brazil with conventions of crowd behavior in the postemancipation U.S. plantation zones, where, outside of a brief period in a few urban centers, staged celebrations of emancipation between ex-masters and former slaves would have been unthinkable.6
The capacity of public rites to stage the display of new rights seems in some ways akin to the faith in the power of legal categories to transform public life. The scripted festivals of emancipation performed in postabolition Recife certainly rehearsed codes of social interaction as novel as the statutes of Haiti’s 1805 constitution, which briefly conjured a new form of citizenship grounded in a nonessentialized, universal Afro-Atlantic blackness. Emancipation’s festivals of freedom and new constitutions at times appealed to the transformative capacities of two ostensibly distinct domains of law and public spectacle that momentarily illustrated what Étienne Balibar has termed citizenship’s “hyperbolic proposition.”7 Deeds and words reach beyond their immediate scripts.
Between 1770 and 1850, then, state-sponsored abolition produced more noncitizens than citizens. Indeed, it is likely that more people were enslaved during this era than were declared free. At the same time, upheavals of an era of volatile, contradictory emancipations from slavery contributed to the paradox of transregional, cross-imperial quests among the hemisphere’s dispersed groups of free people of color to anchor varying claims to state-mediated citizenship. From their perspectives, transnational and national spaces constituted reciprocal, interconnected networks of action and communication rather than politically distinct social spheres. Such networks of action and communication can be aptly described by adapting a Haitian proverb: “Behind nations there are more nations.” A multiethnic, pluralist nationhood crept onto the horizon of possibility, though it remains unrealized more than two centuries later.
1. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols., trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper & Row, 1972). John Thornton called attention to some contrasts in Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
2. An English translation of Renan’s essay appears in Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, Becoming National: A Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 41–55.
3. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 1–41.
4. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983).
5. Ibid., 122–23.
6. In addition to Castilho, this volume, see Jason P. McGraw, The Work of Recognition: Caribbean Colombia and the Postemancipation Struggle for Citizenship (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).
7. This reading of Balibar is explored in Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). See also Étienne Balibar, “Citizen Subject,” in Who Comes after the Subject?, ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (London: Routledge, 1991), 33–57; Étienne Balibar, “Antinomies of Citizenship,” Journal of Romance Studies 10, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 1–20.