Freedom's captives : slavery and gradual emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific / Yesenia Barragan, Rutgers University.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Barragan, Yesenia, author.

Series:

Afro-Latin America

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Slavery--Colombia--Pacific Coast--History.

Slavery.

Enslaved persons--Emancipation--Colombia--Pacific Coast--History.

Enslaved persons.

Black people--Colombia--Pacific Coast--History.

Black people.

Pacific Coast (Colombia)--History.

Pacific Coast (Colombia).

Colombia--Race relations.

Colombia.

Race relations.

Enslaved persons--Emancipation.

Colombia--Pacific Coast.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

xvii, 326 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Summary:

"But we know that she was young-"una joven"-and that her master deemed it a "moderate punishment," a corrective measure for an alleged infraction. And so her master dragged her to the patio, tied up "her feet and hands," and placed "an iron bar between her thighs," a torture technique universally employed and perfected by the horrifying perpetrators of Atlantic slavery. After repeated floggings, Magdalena was left alone overnight in the mildewed stocks, accompanied only by the steady rain, constellations of stars, and animals that roamed the village of Noanamá, a remote indigenous settlement tucked away in the secluded rainforest of Colombia's tropical Pacific lowlands in the late 1840s. Perhaps one or more of the five witnesses who later testified to Magdalena's torture that evening tried to comfort her. Perhaps she was tended to by the indigenous woman whom the judge eventually dismissed because she did not know her own age. It is this endless "perhaps" and "perhaps" and "perhaps" that collapse into my failure to tell what Saidiya Hartman calls "an impossible story," "to jeopardize the status of the event, to displace the received or authorized account, and to imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done.""-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: pt. I THE SOCIAL UNIVERSE OF THE COLOMBIAN BLACK PACIFIC

1. Black Freedom and the Aquatic Lowlands

2. Slavery and the Urban Pacific Frontier

pt. II THE TIME OF GRADUAL EMANCIPATION RULE

3. The Gradual Emancipation Law of 1821 and Abolitionist Publics in Colombia

4. The Children of the Free Womb and Technologies of Gradual Emancipation Rule

5. Routes to Freedom, Gradients of Unfreedom: Testamentary Manumission, Self-Purchase, and Public Manumissions

pt. III FINAL ABOLITION AND THE AFTERLIFE OF GRADUAL EMANCIPATION

6. Final Abolition and the Problem of Black Autonomy.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 287-314) and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Barragan, Yesenia. Freedom's captives

ISBN:

9781108832328

1108832326

9781108941051

1108941052

OCLC:

1203964940