Freedom's Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific

Abstract

In the late 1840s Magdalena, a young woman of African descent, was held overnight in the stocks, “accompanied only by the steady rain, constellations of stars, and animals that roamed the village of Noanamá,” an Indigenous settlement in Chocó, Colombia (p. 1). Magdalena was “a child of the Free Womb,” born after the introduction of gradual abolition legislation in 1821 and into a world of limited and violent freedoms (p. 2). She emerged from the stocks with one of her hands disabled and scarred. Yesenia Barragan's Freedom's Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific begins with this vignette, immediately immersing the reader in the physical world of nineteenth-century Chocó during “gradual emancipation rule.” Freedom's Captives retells the story of gradual emancipation, abolition, and liberalism by centering free womb children like Magdalena and their families.The book is organized into three parts. The first, “The Social Universe of the Colombian Black Pacific,” comprises two chapters that use journeys as entry points into rural aquatic Chocó (chapter 1) and its urban settlements (chapter 2). The second part of the book, “The Time of Gradual Emancipation Rule,” consists of three chapters. Chapter 3 narrates the creation of gradual emancipation rule and the emergence of an abolitionist public sphere, while chapter 4 turns to technologies of governance and analyzes the articulations of these processes on the ground. Chapter 5 examines modes of manumission, self-purchase and testamentary manumission, that continued and were transformed during gradual emancipation rule, and the infrequent emancipations granted by manumission juntas. The third part of the book, titled “Final Abolition and the Afterlife of Gradual Emancipation,” consists of a chapter considering final abolition, its immediate afterlives, and the Pacific iterations of the “problem of freedom” (p. 264). The book finishes with an epilogue that explores more recent histories of political conflict, racialized violence, and Afro-Colombian mobilization for peace in Chocó.Two key threads weave through Freedom's Captives. Its major contribution, the first thread, is that gradual emancipation rule was central to the history of slavery and Black freedom. Gradual emancipation rule begins in 1821, after Colombia's first gradual abolition law, and ends in 1852, with the final abolition of slavery. Barragan thus spotlights a period that often appears as an addendum to slavery proper or as part of the institution's inevitable slow decline. This book retells the political history of nineteenth-century Colombia by centering slavery and unfreedom; liberal elites sought to associate slavery with Spanish colonialism and themselves with republican freedom. Yet gradual emancipation rule, characterized by dynamic transformation and uncertainty, was also a form of domination through which liberal governments produced new modes of unfreedom to control Black people and their labor, on the one hand, and performed freedom as white generosity, on the other. Significantly, Barragan eschews the question of citizenship, about which there is a vast and ever-growing literature. She complements this work by demonstrating the particularities of place in Chocó, where other political processes were of more pressing significance—namely, gradual abolition.The second thread is geographical and material. Barragan captures the paradoxical place of Chocó. It was simultaneously a site of violent enslavement and a landscape of possibilities, where mining gold could allow the purchase of freedom and the rivers and forests permitted refuge from slavery and a measure of autonomy. While deepening understanding of Chocó’s racialized and marginalized location in the Colombian national imaginary as a frontier, she also makes clear that it was a central place, where Black people extracted gold from the soil, capital was accumulated, and ideas were circulated and transformed.Freedom's Captives imaginatively interweaves myriad archival sources, including laws, court cases, baptismal records, notarial records, and wills, with travel narratives. Barragan's historical ethnographic approach is impressive. She uses travelogues and visual materials to immerse the reader in Chocó’s aquatic landscape in a process that she describes as mobilizing the “narrative eye [of travelers] to draft potential universes rendered invisible by slavery's archive” (p. 31). Barragan is highly attentive to the ethics of working with slavery's archive to reconstruct the material world of nineteenth-century Chocó, as much as is possible from extant sources.Freedom's Captives will be of interest to scholars and students of Colombian, Latin American, US, and African diaspora history. The work is deeply situated in Black studies as well as Latin American historiography. Barragan makes extensive reference to the antislavery movements and emancipation in the Caribbean, Latin America, and North America, reflecting the need for more scholarship on gradual emancipation in Colombia. Gradual emancipation rule is a useful interpretive lens that can be applied across the Americas and opens up new analytical possibilities. Pioneering and beautiful, Freedom's Captives is the first historical monograph to center the Colombian Black Pacific, a crucial and understudied part of the diaspora that offers “its own distinct history of black dispossession and possibility” (p. 7).