The Morant War of Representation: Freedom and Whiteness in Jamaican Narratives of the Morant Bay Uprising

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article approaches Jamaican responses to the Morant Bay uprising as part of the earlier ‘war of representation’ fought between abolitionists and pro-slavery writers at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Initial Jamaican responses to the rebellion and its suppression were firmly integrated into global print networks but, in the months and years that followed, narratives evolved in ways that expose ongoing tensions about the meanings of freedom after slavery. In particular, the article explores how articulations of whiteness were entangled within an ongoing war of representation. Extending histories of whiteness during slavery, the shifting narratives around Morant Bay capture how white Jamaicans were attempting to navigate their place in a post-emancipation landscape. Anxiety and vulnerability quickly gave way to more triumphant representations of the rebellion’s suppression, but for some commentators, especially those on and beyond the margins of whiteness, reactions were more complex. By the late nineteenth century, Jamaican representations were further fractured by increasing frustrations towards Crown Colony government, especially for Jamaica’s white population, for whom abolition had already been perceived as an affront to their traditional rights and liberties.