Networks, tastes, and labor in free communities of color: Transforming the revolutionary Caribbean

Abstract

ABSTRACTScholarship on free people of color in the Caribbean during the Age of Revolutions has focused on themes of mobility and resilience, with emphasis on the few remarkable individuals who pursued their freedom and respectability in imperially visible registers. These themes sometimes mask as much as they reveal. Mobility ignores those individuals who remain in place in families and communities, and resilience elides efforts by some free people of color to secure the benefits of the slave economy for themselves and their descendants. Often figures are assigned subversive motives or subaltern potential they perhaps would not recognize, when in fact their actions sometimes served to legitimate colonial order and strengthen racial divides by distancing themselves from more marginalized groups. Possible displays of respectability complicated revolutionary-era negotiations among the long free, the enslaved, and recently freed. Free people of color frequently defined margins from the enslaved rather than subvert them, including through largely unconsidered realms of taste or conspicuous consumption. This examination raises questions regarding extant conceptions of how Caribbean free people of color acquired and wielded social, cultural, and symbolic capitals. Perhaps more often than operating on socially progressive or latent revolutionary positions they evinced concern for systemic continuity. This essay, which introduces the following research that explores this topic, suggests new avenues of investigating these overlooked complexities in motivations and actions by free people of color, a population of disproportionate importance in the cultural politics of the revolutionary Caribbean. Without this recalibration, we risk underappreciating the legacy of late Caribbean colonialism, minimizing the context of revolutionary change and state formation, and misunderstanding the ambitions and centrality of free communities of color to these processes.