Book Talk, Natasha Lightfoot
Associate Professor of History, Columbia University
Troubling Freedom: Antigua and the Aftermath of Brittish Emancipation
DATE & TIME: WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2016 6:00PM
Troubling Freedom: Antigua and the Aftermath of British Emancipation
Natasha Lightfoot, Associate Professor of History Columbia University; IRAAS Faculty Fellow
Location: Faculty House- Garden Room;
64 Morningside Dr, New York, NY 10027
Free & Open to the Public
**Books will be available for purchase with Book Culture Bookstore onsite**
Book Description
In 1834 Antigua became the only British colony in the Caribbean to move directly from slavery to full emancipation. Immediate freedom, however, did not live up to its promise, as it did not guarantee any level of stability or autonomy, and the implementation of new forms of coercion and control made it, in many ways, indistinguishable from slavery. In Troubling Freedom Natasha Lightfoot tells the story of how Antigua's newly freed black working people struggled to realize freedom in their everyday lives, prior to and in the decades following emancipation. She presents freed people’s efforts to form an efficient workforce, acquire property, secure housing, worship, and build independent communities in response to elite prescriptions for acceptable behavior and oppression. Despite its continued efforts, Antigua's black population failed to convince whites that its members were worthy of full economic and political inclusion. By highlighting the diverse ways freedpeople defined and created freedom through quotidian acts of survival and occasional uprisings, Lightfoot complicates conceptions of freedom and the general narrative that landlessness was the primary constraint for newly emancipated slaves in the Caribbean.
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To request disability-related accommodations contact OASID at oasid@tc.edu, (212) 678-3689, (212) 678-3853 TTY, (646) 755-3144 video phone, as early as possible.
To request disability-related accommodations, contact OASID at oasid@tc.edu, (212) 678-3689, as early as possible.