Narratives Of Freedom Research Articles

Little girl/Hummingbird/Homme-plante: women and poetics in Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism and the essays of Suzanne Césaire

ABSTRACT Since its publication in 1950, Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism has remained influential for its incisive reframing of the European “civilizing mission.” Nevertheless, feminist interventions have problematized the masculine nationalist project upon which both the essay and the wider Négritude movement rest. The recent surge of critical interest in Suzanne Césaire demonstrates a desire to—recuperate-as Kara Rabbitt phrases—it-the “missing mother” of Martinican cultural genealogy. In this paper, I will reckon with the gender gap separating the two Césaires, thinking through poetics as a gendered political epistemology in their essays. Beginning with Aimé Césaire and Discourse on Colonialism, I focus on his central rhetorical device of formal repetition, specifically anaphora, and draw on the work of Brent Hayes Edwards to argue that the anaphoric line is entrenched in a masculinist narrative of freedom, rhetorically foreclosing on gender consciousness. From there, I undertake a close and comparative reading of selections from Suzanne Césaire's oeuvre against Discourse, noting divergences in their varying figurations of colonized and racialized women. Considering new scholarship on Suzanne Césaire's influence and ecopoetics, including the work of Anny-Dominique Curtius and Lauren Nelson, I propose her posthuman ecopoetics as a source of gendered epistemology.

The Rhetoric of Freedom

Over the past few years, the National Council on Public History (NCPH)’s annual meeting has given attention to the forthcoming 250th anniversary of the American Revolution. NCPH has worked with the National Park Service (NPS) to present a scholar’s roundtable with different annual themes. The roundtable at the 2023 meeting examined “The Rhetoric of Freedom.” This essay opens with an exploration of the theme. What follows is an introduction to the scholars who participated in the roundtable; a description of their suite of programming; and a summary of their findings. I close with a “best practices” case study of the Aiken-Rhett House, an urban plantation mansion in Charleston, South Carolina. The case study answers a reoccurring question that emerged from roundtable discussions: How do historians engage public(s) in narratives of freedom, bondage, and nation building?

Dyskursy historyczne państw bałtyckich jako instrument ochrony młodych demokracji po rozpadzie ZSRR

HISTORICAL DISCOURSES OF THE BALTIC STATES AS AN INSTRUMENT FOR THE PROTECTION OF YOUNG DEMOCRACIES AFTER THE COLLAPSE OF THE USSR: SELECTED ASPECTSThe aim of the article is to discuss selected elements of the historical policy of the Baltic states, tracing the process of shaping their official historical discourse – from post-Soviet nationalist narratives and the glorification of interwar independence to the pro-Western freedom narrative. The starting point of the research is the hypothesis that the top-down memorisation processes of the Baltic states, the centre of which were anti-Sovietism and nationalism, were an effective instrument for protecting the young democratic systems in the Baltic Sea against both the neo-imperial attempts of Putin’s Russia and the autocratic inclinations characteristic of other countries created after the collapse of the USSR.

Hijab Discourse in Indonesia: Unraveling the Narratives of Freedom, Religion, and Media Representation

This study delves into the intricate narratives surrounding the hijab in Indonesia, exploring the multifaceted perspectives presented by Deutsche Welle (DW) Indonesia, a transnational media entity. In the context of Indonesia, a nation characterized by religious diversity, the hijab has become a focal point of discussions, particularly concerning its compulsory nature and its implications for women's freedom and religious identity. The study critically analyzes DW's portrayal of hijab-wearing Indonesian Muslim women, highlighting the interplay between media representations, cultural identities, and societal perceptions. Employing Sara Mills' critical discourse analysis, the research examines the subject-object positions within DW's coverage, unraveling the complexities of hijab discourse. Through the examination of DW Indonesia's coverage, the study reveals diverse perspectives, emphasizing the non-compulsory nature of hijab, the potential limitations it imposes on women, and the societal pressures associated with wearing it. However, the research underscores the need for a cautious interpretation of these narratives, recognizing the inherent complexities of individual choices, sociocultural backgrounds, and religious beliefs. The study also addresses the influence of global perceptions and Western biases, urging a critical approach to media representations. The research not only contributes to the scholarly discourse on media representations but also critically examines the intersection between religion, freedom, and media influence in contemporary Indonesian society.

The freedom narrative and the War on Terror: Civil‐religious idolatry for the 9/11 generation

AbstractThe dominant narrative by which political and military leaders justified the American War on Terror held that America was attacked on 9/11 because America is “the brightest beacon of freedom and opportunity in the world.” Today, an entire generation has been raised in the shadow of 9/11 and steeped in a dualistic and militaristic understanding of American destiny. That view of America's role in Providence is centered on a totem cult of the sacrificial soldier and makes the flag a symbol of American greatness and of freedom itself. This essay examines the “freedom narrative” as a justification of the War on Terror, analyses the cult of the sacrificial soldier as a backstop for a militaristic religious nationalism, and ultimately shows how the dominant narrative legitimating the war represents an idolatrous devolution of a more prophetic and classically republican understanding of American civil religion.

Exilic Roots and Paths of Marronage: Breaching Walls of Space and Memory in the Historical Poetics of Dénètem Touam Bona

Afropean anthropologist, philosopher, and art curator Dénètem Touam Bona is an original “border thinker” and “crosser” of geographic and conceptual boundaries working within a tradition of Caribbean historical poetics, notably represented by Édouard Glissant. He explores ideas of “fugue” and “refuge” in light of the experience of maroons or escaped slaves, key actors of the simultaneous expansion of freedom and industrial-scale chattel slavery in the Americas. In “Freedom as Marronage” (2015), Neill Roberts defines freedom itself as perpetual flight, and locates its very origins in the liminal and transitional spaces of slave escape, offering a perspective on modernity that gives voice to hunted fugitives, defiant of its ecology, enclosures, and definition, and who were ultimately excised from its archive. Touam Bona’s “cosmo-poetics” excavates marronage as a mode of invention, subterfuge and utopian projection that revisits its history and representation; sacred, musical, ecological, and corporeal idioms; and alternative forms of community, while also inviting contemporary parallels with the “captives” of the global border regime, namely fugitives, nomads, refugees, and asylum seekers who perpetually evade norms, controls, and domestication. He deploys the metaphor of the liana, a long-stemmed tropical vine that climbs and twines through dense forests, weaving relation in defiance of predation, to evoke colonized and displaced peoples’ subterranean evasion of commodification, classification, control, cultural erasure, and ecological annihilation. This article frames his work within an Afro-diasporic history and transnational cultural criticism that envisions fugitivity and exilic spaces as dissonant forms of resistance to the coloniality of power, and their relevance to understanding racialization, representations of the past, and narratives of freedom and belonging across borders.

“Liberty or Death!”

“Liberty or Death!”

White secularity: the racialization of religion in Netflix’s Unorthodox

ABSTRACT Unorthodox is a four-episode Netflix series that offers a compelling narrative of freedom from religion for feminine subjects. This paper interrogates the vision of freedom offered by the show through the lens of lived religion (which circumvents the secular/religion dichotomy by treating the moral meaning-making practices of everyday life as “religious.” A close reading of the lived religious practices in Unorthodox shows three, morally-valanced practices sustaining secular feminine freedom: making the private public, overcoming historical narratives, and taking pleasure. Because in Unorthodox the central barrier to freedom for feminine subjects is the racialized religious community, this paper builds on literature about the racial other and religious freedom to propose the concept of “white secularity.” White secularity is a belief system that assumes every individual can freely opt into good forms of religion, coded as white, and out of bad forms of religion. In white secularity, bad forms of religion are racialized because they make visible white dominance in the public sphere. In this way, white secularity divides the interests of women and racialized minorities by pitting feminine freedom against racialized communities.

People's History in the Age of Populism

Why write people's histories in our age of populism? Much of the original appeal of the genre derived from the marginality its subject once occupied in public life. Ordinary lives were hardly mentioned in school textbooks; popular culture was assigned to the bottom of the nation's hierarchy of values; and popular politics was either criminalised or disciplined to fit national voting patterns in states ruled by bullet and ballot alike. Defining the people naturally set the fault lines between liberal, conservative and socialist practitioners of the genre. J.R. Green's late nineteenth-century prototype – A Short History of the English People – presented a liberal story of social change, from the landing of Hengist to the battle of Waterloo. It incorporated the entirety of social life mushrooming beneath the deeds of kings, in all its evolutionary splendor. On the continent, notably in Central and Eastern Europe, the people would often feature in ethnic garb, in histories of national liberation or imperial projection. Yet it was Marxism, broadly conceived, that provided the most enduring template for people's histories, at least in the Anglosphere, from A.L. Morton's pioneering A People's History of England onwards. Extended beyond strictly national boundaries to topics such as modern Europe or even the world, two recent people's histories written in this vein, both taking their motto from Brecht's Fragen eines lesenden Arbeiters, filter their subject through class struggle and offer a narrative of freedom from want in which a vast labouring multitude toils, suffers and rebels across ages. However, political outlook and epistemological commitments aside, for the past century people's history has claimed to restore to the people its own past, often one of misery at the hands of elites yet one all the more dignified for that reason. Do any of these coordinates still obtain today? Is not the current glorification of ordinary lives, popular culture and politics the bread and butter of populism?

ON UTOPIAN THINKING: LITERATURE AND THE IMAGINATION OF THE FUTURE TO COME

The concept of utopia, which seems to have lost its conceptual power in the second half of the twentieth century, is increasingly returning to the center of debates on the relationship between literature and social change. Utopian thinking is now seen as a fundamental space for coming to terms with the present age—an age defined by pandemics, environmental destruction, and the threat to the narrative of freedom. But how do we go about rehabilitating utopia—itself a product of the long history of European domination—and make it adaptable to our postcolonial situation? How can the utopic be harnessed as an alternative way of imagining postcolonial futures? And is it capable of restoring idealism as a horizon of our expectations and as a precondition for freedom? Drawing on texts from the discourse of decolonization debates about utopian thinking in works of postcolonial literature and neo-Marxist criticism, my paper will address some of the ways in which the imaginative is asked to sustain the idea of an alternative society in moments of crisis and atrophy.

MADNESS AND THE MAN IN THE MIRROR: MAPPING FREEDOM

Contemporary narratives of freedom have been dominated by the static conception that it can be achieved through a dissociation from the oppressor. This essay aims to uncover what modes of freedom have been left underdeveloped by highlighting its depiction in Wolf’s Cassandra and Cervantes’ Don Quixote. By coupling the character arcs of the eponymous protagonists with the personal experiences of the author, a roadmap away from static freedom will begin to emerge. This essay aims to identify a methodological approach towards dynamic freedom by analyzing madness as an exercise of non-conformity, self-perception as an act of affirming identity and heroism as a subject of rejection.

“On the Street, the Only Person You Gotta Bow Down to Is Yourself”: Masculinity, Homelessness, and Incarceration

Despite the well-established link between homelessness and incarceration, very little qualitative research has focused on the social processes that underlie this nexus. In this article, I draw on 19 in-depth interviews with incarcerated men who reported pre-prison housing instability, supplemented with 5 interviews with formerly-incarcerated men experiencing homelessness, to explore the gendered nature of the homelessness-incarceration nexus. I propose the concept of “liberative instability”—defined as an unfettered lifestyle characterized by double-edged freedom and independence—to explore the changing meaning of homelessness in men’s narratives of their life course. Additionally, I explore how themes of masculinity and liberative instability are embedded in men’s narratives of freedom and confinement as they reflect on their experiences with homelessness and incarceration. These findings animate existing quantitative research by highlighting that the homelessness-incarceration nexus cannot be understood fully or disrupted without considering the significance of age-graded cultural scripts regarding masculinity.

Always in control? Sovereign states in cyberspace

AbstractFor well over twenty years, we have witnessed an intriguing debate about the nature of cyberspace. Used for everything from communication to commerce, it has transformed the way individuals and societies live. But how has it impacted the sovereignty of states? An initial wave of scholars argued that it had dramatically diminished centralised control by states, helped by a tidal wave of globalisation and freedom. These libertarian claims were considerable. More recently, a new wave of writing has argued that states have begun to recover control in cyberspace, focusing on either the police work of authoritarian regimes or the revelations of Edward Snowden. Both claims were wide of the mark. By contrast, this article argues that we have often misunderstood the materiality of cyberspace and its consequences for control. It not only challenges the libertarian narrative of freedom, it suggests that the anarchic imaginary of the Internet as a ‘Wild West’ was deliberately promoted by states in order to distract from the reality. The Internet, like previous forms of electronic connectivity, consists mostly of a physical infrastructure located in specific geographies and jurisdictions. Rather than circumscribing sovereignty, it has offered centralised authority new ways of conducting statecraft. Indeed, the Internet, high-speed computing, and voice recognition were all the result of security research by a single information hegemon and therefore it has always been in control.

Emancipation address as creole testimony: Muhammad Kabā Saghanughu, a formerly enslaved Muslim in Jamaica

ABSTRACT During the celebration of emancipation in the British West Indies, Muhammad Kabā Saghanughu, a 90-year-old former apprentice from West Africa living in Jamaica wrote and likely delivered a speech in Arabic script and had it delivered to Jamaican Governor, Sir Lionel Smith. This recently discovered manuscript exhibits elements of the ‘freedom narrative’ as defined by Paul E. Lovejoy and of ‘creole testimony’ as identified by Nicole N. Aljoe. The language and discourse of the address reveal that linguistic and cultural creolization can be deliberate rather than organic. Kabā Saghanughu ingeniously used the official colonial discourse of this public occasion to project into the historical record his autobiography and critique of slavery.

Pre-marital relationships and violence: experiences of working middle class women in Delhi

Scholarship on violence against women in South Asia has not adequately brought attention to the phase of romance and intimacy, before marriage, which as this paper demonstrates, is also an important site of violence. This paper locates violence in pre-marital relationships in a larger narrative of modernity in contemporary urban India, especially as experienced by educated, professional middle class women. Focusing on romantic pre-marital relationships, it delineates how these romantic journeys are considered as integral parts of narratives of freedom and modernity for the women. Yet, in unanticipated ways, these romances are imbued with insidious forms of violence, particularly of emotional and physical abuse. I also trace women’s responses to this form of abuse, thereby arguing that violence comprises range of emotions, including guilt, shame, humiliation, and vulnerabilities. Furthermore, I unpack the reasons of why women might choose to continue these relationships and remain silent about their sufferings, and how eventually they overcome these experiences. Based on ethnographic methodology and in-depth interviews with middle class women working in multinational companies in Gurugram, I, thus untangle the inextricable links between violence, modernity and love.

Refugee, returnee, borderland: the accidental activists and Krys Lee’s How I Became a North Korean

ABSTRACTWorking through the entanglements of diaspora, national identification, and minority formation in the protracted aftermath of the Korean War, this article intends to take the dyadic subject of North Korean defector/refugee as an entry point for unpacking the rhetoric of freedom and salvation. Taking a cultural studies approach that regards literature as a terrain of political engagement for reconsidering the narratives of freedom in relation to the hierarchy of nationhood embedded in the protracted Cold War in Asia, I examine Krys Lee’s novel How I Became a North Korean (2016), an Asian American text that weaves together the story of an Asian American returnee with those of North Korean refugees in the North Korean-China borderland. Conflating refugee and returnee, Lee’s novel occasions an exploration of the ethics of co-presence that undergirded Asian American studies, to consider both the predicaments of North Korean refugees and the linkage between Asian America and Asia. Taking literature as a form of activism, this article furthermore seeks to reflect on the promise of activism by asking how the demands for the right for return may complicate the orthodox of humanitarian imagination, and render a moment for relational thinking beyond representation.

Experiencing nature with sight impairment: Seeking freedom from ableism

The idea of nature as freedom has long captured the human imagination, particularly since the Romantic era when notions of escapism were underpinned by the idealisation and externalisation of nature. The drive for freedom persists in the findings of much contemporary research examining the contribution of nature to human health and wellbeing. Yet, this work tells us little about how cultural narratives of freedom play out in the lives of people living with impairment and disability, or the constraining ableist assumptions that often underpin popular discourses of nature. This paper aims to address this, drawing on the findings of an in-depth qualitative study exploring how 31 people with varying forms and severities of sight impairment, living in rural and urban areas of England, describe their experiences with(in) diverse types of nature through the life course. Moving beyond the ‘wilderness ideal’ and sensationalised ‘supercrip’ stories that reproduce ableist ideas of bodies without limitation, this paper foregrounds the richly textured ways in which participants experienced feelings of freedom with nonhuman nature. These freedoms are characterised as social, mobile and exploratory. In doing so, it seeks to make room for a range of nature experiences, folding social justice into the growing momentum to connect people with nature in the name of health and wellbeing.

Who'll Speak for Malinda?: Alternate Narratives of Freedom in The Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb

Who'll Speak for Malinda?: Alternate Narratives of Freedom in The Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb

The Trouble with Freedom

The Trouble with Freedom W. Caleb McDaniel (bio) David W. Blight and Jim Downs, eds. Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017. 208 pp. Notes and index. Paper, $24.95. Hendrik Hartog. The Trouble with Minna: A Case of Slavery and Emancipation in the Antebellum North. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. 208 pp. Notes and index. Cloth, $27.95. In 1982, when the Freedmen and Southern Society Project (FSSP) began to publish the results of its research in the National Archives, the Project's editors forecast that the multivolume publication would eventually include five series. To date, six volumes in three series have appeared, though much about the project has changed, including the editors, the titles of some series, and the press that is now releasing the door-stopping volumes. Yet two constants remain: the subtitle of this multivolume project is still A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, and the title of the anthology as a whole is still one word, Freedom.1 The contributors to Beyond Freedom are unsettled by that one-word title and seek, in turn, to unsettle the history of emancipation. On the one hand, this volume's editors acknowledge the debt that all historians of emancipation owe to Freedom. The book is dedicated to "all the past and present editors of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project," and three of its contributors belong to that group (p. v). Still, in the twenty-five years that passed between the first volume of Freedom and the appearance of Beyond Freedom, the very documents uncovered by the FSSP have encouraged many scholars to reassess freedom's utility as an over-arching paradigm. This collection joins monographs such as Steve Kantrowitz's More Than Freedom (2012) or Jim Downs's Sick from Freedom (2012) and review essays such as Carole Emberton's "Unwriting the Freedom Narrative" (2016) in marking a historiographical moment: whereas Freedom once seemed an appropriate big-tent term for the history of emancipation from 1861 to 1867, it is now (to borrow from another title in this growing historiography) a troubled refuge.2 [End Page 209] What most troubles the contributors to Beyond Freedom is an idea that their collective scholarship, along with the work of historians not included between these covers, has already done a great deal to unsettle. Emancipation, write the editors, is no longer seen as a "shotgun moment of liberation," but as "a process" (p. 4). And historical actors did not always experience the transition from slavery to freedom as a sharp break, for at least two reasons.3 The first reason can be seen by looking retrospectively at slavery from the vantage point of emancipation, a perspective that discloses a world of enslaved people's politics and thinking about freedom long before legal emancipation occurred. As Susan O'Donovan shows in her contribution to Beyond Freedom, the mobility often required by their labor "allowed slaves to try on new identities, sample new cultures, and experience what it meant to be a masterless man (or woman), if only for a moment" (p. 31). According to O'Donovan, mobility also encouraged enslaved men and women to imagine "different possibilities, different publics, and different futures" that fueled a collective political vision already fully formed when freedom came. Paradoxically, the sorts of documents uncovered by the FSSP show that slavery had served as a "training ground for black freedom" (pp. 27, 33). On the other hand, the archival record also reveals many survivals of slavery—its violence, coercion, and racist underpinnings—in the era of black freedom. As O'Donovan writes in another context, "the end of the Civil War must not be confused with the end of slavery."4 Likewise, what Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan later called the badges and incidents of slavery survived long after slavery was legally destroyed by the Thirteenth Amendment (a consummation that, as James Oakes argues in his contribution to Beyond Freedom, abolitionists and Republicans had long devoutly wished and worked for). As the process of slavery's destruction unfolded, it brought in its train violence, displacement, death, and new forms of coercion. If, as O'Donovan...

Expanding the Boundaries of Reconstruction

Expanding the Boundaries of Reconstruction Justin Behrend (bio) Steven E. Nash. Reconstruction's Ragged Edge: The Politics of Postwar Life in the Southern Mountains. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. xiv + 288 pp. Maps, tables, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95. Carolyn L. Karcher. A Refugee from His Race: Albion W. Tourgée and His Fight against White Supremacy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. xviii + 464 pp. Halftones, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95. The historiographical boundaries of Reconstruction were once clear and well accepted. For much of the twentieth century, the field, to use Bernard Weisberger's term, was a "dark and bloody ground" of starkly different interpretations.1 William Dunning and his acolytes set the tone by declaring Reconstruction an utter failure in no small part due to the efforts of radical Republicans to treat black people similar to white people. Revisionist scholars countered by arguing that Reconstruction was, in fact, a noble effort that moved former Confederate states toward democracy. Postrevisionists, however, questioned the significance of black male voting and Republican political power since former slaveholders retained their land and former slaves continued to labor in the fields. Then, in 1988, Eric Foner published his masterful synthesis, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, which sustained the revisionist interpretation and subsequently dominated the field. But since Foner, the clear lines of Reconstruction historiography have blurred. Although historians have added much to our understanding of the era, there has not been a significant challenge to Foner's interpretation. Part of the reason for the sustaining nature of Foner's work is that the freedom narrative still has a powerful grip on conceptualizations of American history. Another reason is that Foner helped to solidify the chronological scope of Reconstruction and its primary focus on politics and governance. While other syntheses of Reconstruction have been published in recent years, neither departs substantively from Foner's interpretation and each accepts a similar scope and focus.2 [End Page 79] Despite this continuity of framing, historians are increasingly pressing the boundaries of Reconstruction, challenging the chronology, exploring different places, and calling into question the very meaning of the term "Reconstruction." The two books under review here are part of this shift away from the traditional framework of Reconstruction historiography. Steven E. Nash directs our attention to the mountain South, while Carolyn L. Karcher focuses on Albion Tourgée's long postwar struggle against white supremacy. Neither are large departures from the existing scholarship, but both show how the most innovative work in the postbellum era seeks to expand our conceptualization of Reconstruction. In Reconstruction's Ragged Edge, Steven E. Nash largely adopts the traditional periodization of Reconstruction, but he shifts focus from the Deep South to Appalachia. In so doing, he reorients our perspective away from the story of how plantation districts shed slavery and instead focuses on the legacies of war's injustices, the new politics of biracialism, and the challenge of adapting to greater market integration. The twenty-one mountain counties in western North Carolina that form the basis for this illuminating and deeply researched account sat on the edge of the southern economy and at the margins of national politics. But the Civil War and Reconstruction, Nash contends, shattered "the localized world" of mountaineers, ushering in a series of new power brokers and subjecting local people to regional, national, and international transformations (p. 4). Although the number of enslaved and free black people in western North Carolina was small, the region was closely tied to slavery. Mountain farmers produced a surplus of food and sold their excess to markets in the lower south. Mountaineers also held similarly racist views toward black people as other white southerners did elsewhere. The war, however, ruptured the local rhythms of these counties. It pulled military age men out of the region and in to Confederate service, but it also brought to the region Confederate officials who increasingly disrupted local people's lives through conscription, tax-in-kind policies, and the home guard. The outbreak of guerrilla war, with some white mountaineers fighting for the Union and others deserting from Confederate service to join the Federals, further unraveled the antebellum social...