Synopses & Reviews
As Louisiana and Cuba emerged from slavery in the late nineteenth century, each faced the question of what rights former slaves could claim.
Degrees of Freedom compares and contrasts these two societies in which slavery was destroyed by war, and citizenship was redefined through social and political upheaval. Both Louisiana and Cuba were rich in sugar plantations that depended on an enslaved labor force. After abolition, on both sides of the Gulf of Mexico, ordinary people-cane cutters and cigar workers, laundresses and labor organizers-forged alliances to protect and expand the freedoms they had won. But by the beginning of the twentieth century, Louisiana and Cuba diverged sharply in the meanings attributed to race and color in public life, and in the boundaries placed on citizenship.
Louisiana had taken the path of disenfranchisement and state-mandated racial segregation; Cuba had enacted universal manhood suffrage and had seen the emergence of a transracial conception of the nation. What might explain these differences?
Moving through the cane fields, small farms, and cities of Louisiana and Cuba, Rebecca Scott skillfully observes the people, places, legislation, and leadership that shaped how these societies adjusted to the abolition of slavery. The two distinctive worlds also come together, as Cuban exiles take refuge in New Orleans in the 1880s, and black soldiers from Louisiana garrison small towns in eastern Cuba during the 1899 U.S. military occupation.
Crafting her narrative from the words and deeds of the actors themselves, Scott brings to life the historical drama of race and citizenship in postemancipation societies.
Review
Rebecca Scott‘s compelling examination of the making of new postemancipation social orders in Louisiana and Cuba, while not dismissive of an earlier post-World War II scholarship pioneered by Frank Tannenbaum’s Slave and Citizen, pointedly criticizes the misleading objectivism of this earlier work. The result is a study whose exploration of the dynamics of postemancipation social mobilizations not only vividly illuminates local, particular features of the reconstruction of politics and labor in the sugar growing districts of Cienfuegos and Santa Clara in central Cuba and in southern Louisiana’s sugar parishes of Terrebonne and Lafourche west of New Orleans. It also identifies divergences in the histories of the nations that oversaw these emancipations. -- James E. Sanders - Journal of Social History
Review
[Scott] gracefully brings the limitations of historical knowledge to our attention. For example, from the fact that census records reveal their residences and common last names, she infers that several individuals who resided near each other after emancipation were slaves on the same plantation, and notes that inferential step. Her subtle references to what we do not and cannot know about the past remind us that there is much we do not--and probably cannot--know about the present or about the general propositions economists urge on us. -- Publishers Weekly
Review
Rebecca Scott's book, Degrees of Freedom, is a major historical contribution to the comparative study of slavery and race relations in the Americas by a senior and pre-eminent historian...Through painstaking research of court records and legal proceedings, and riveting accounts of individual and collective struggle, Scott has assembled a formidable argument to support her thesis that "degrees of freedom" can make an enormous difference in the evolution of two broadly similar sugarcane regions. -- Mark Tushnet - Michigan Law Review
Review
Rebecca Scott's Degrees of Freedoms...distinguishes itself from earlier comparative works by taking "the construction of postemancipation society, rather than slavery and race relations, as the subject of comparison." It is solidly grounded in primary sources from a variety of archival sites, and its methodological approach and general style also distance Scott's book from earlier comparative studies. The book raises important issues for debate, and even those differing from the author's conclusions or emphases would recognize that it is a groundbreaking study and a remarkable piece of historical research and analysis. -- Helen I. Safa - European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Review
This magnificent work will not only satisfy Latin Americanists but also demand attention from the much larger (and historically insular) scholarly audience of U.S. historians. Degrees of Freedomeloquently explores the political, social, and economic worlds of Cuba and Louisiana after slavery, bringing Scott's nuanced interpretative lens to both societies, while also setting a new standard for comparative and connected history that will force historians of the United States to engage Latin American history (and historiography)...This work will be both an inspiration and touchstone for scholars studying life after slavery. -- Jorge Giovannetti - International Review of Social History
Review
Scott has given us an epochal work that is the most important comparative analysis of race relations in the Americas since Carl Degler'sNeither Black Nor White. What makes the book so important is its truly unusual method, and the great skill and brio with which that method is carried out. It is a triumph of historical investigation. George Reid Andrews, author of < i=""> Afro-Latin America, 1800-2000 <>
Review
A model of how comparative history should be written, Degrees of Freedom offers strikingly original insights into how former slaves in two of the western hemisphere's most important slave societies tried to breathe substantive life into the idea and experience of freedom. Eric Foner, Columbia University
Review
Degrees of Freedom is a watershed study in the history of post-emancipation societies in the Americas. Rebecca Scott spins a fascinating narrative about race and nationality, political voice and associational activism, the struggle for resources and the quest for respect, the role of labor and the power of law to set limits of the possible. In ranging widely between the large, impersonal structures that constrain change and the ground-level individual and collective struggles that advance it, Rebecca Scott has pulled off a remarkable feat. Lawrence N. Powell, Tulane University
Review
Scott has written a masterful comparative history, but she has also succeeded in the challenging task of integrating thepolitical, social and economic history of each society into a unifiedstory, documenting how issues of race, labor, and citizenship wereinextricably intertwined. -- Lawrence N. Powell, Tulane University
Review
Tracing the parallel histories of post-slavery Louisiana and Cuba, Scott uses court cases, activist profiles and heartpounding runaway narratives to slowly draw the reader into the lives of slaves, freedmen and slaveowners (both black and white) of the late nineteenth century Gulf... Her back and forth cultural contrasts between Louisiana and Cuba are well-crafted...Though similar economically (both Cuba and Louisiana had agricultural economies that heavily depended on slave labor), the two areas' divergent political climates at the turn of the century saw Louisiana's blacks continue to lose rights, while across the Gulf, voter rolls swelled. -- John Rodrigue, author of
Review
A fascinating and well-written piece of comparative history...Those who are rebuilding New Orleans would do well to capitalize on what’s inside Scott‘s suddenly extremely timely book. -- Julie Saville - Law and History Review
Review
and#8220;Freedom as Marronageand#160;is an exciting, well-conceived, and passionately argued work of political theory and Africana thought. Robertsand#8217;s distinctive understanding of freedom is especially welcome in the context of political theory and philosophy, where slavery still appears largely (if at all) as either a metaphor or a signpost of moral and political progress. As he shows, thinking through the legacies of enslavement and the flight from it is essential to understanding freedom in a postcolonial, post-apartheid, post-civil rights moment.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;Could there be a topic in Western political theory as thoroughly analyzedand#8212;indeed as exhaustedand#8212;as freedom? But it all depends on whose liberties have been framing your conceptual investigation. Taking up the perspective of the and#8216;dread historyand#8217; of Afro-modernityand#8212;a history of slavery, revolt, and marronageand#8212;Roberts opens up for us an exciting new conceptual terrain unexplored by the hegemonic Euro-narrative. In the process, he makes irrefutably clear the extent to which modern Western political theory has been constructed on the silencing of the voices of resistance of the Westand#8217;s subordinated racial Others.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;Freedom as Marronage is not only an illuminating exegesis on the self-activity of enslaved people to create free space for living but an utterly brilliant meditation on the fundamental meaning of freedom in the modern world. Political theorists, historians, philosophers, and cultural critics take heed: Roberts is a thinker to be reckoned with.and#8221;
Review
andldquo;In Freedom as Marronage, Roberts insists that a new theory of freedom emerges from the Haitian Revolution, but each instance of formulating this new thought seems to demonstrate, instead, a more rigorousapplication of the tenets of freedom and fraternity in the French Revolution. Where there is a difference is through dynamics of creolization, of African, European, and indigenous American conceptions of legitimating practices in the struggle for freedom. That the Black slaves chose, for example, the Native American name for the island as the one for their republic is a case in point. Roberts responds to and builds on these criticisms through theoretical reflection on the concept of marronage, whose etymology points to the sea, to what it means to be lost at sea from one perspective, stuck on an island in another. It refers to the consciousness of enslaved Africans in the Caribbean, whose hopes to return to Africa (home) were challenged by the sea in every direction. Roberts shows how, in such modern isolation on the one hand and the constant, brutal realities of slavery on the other, the enslavedandrsquo;s conceptions of freedom were affected; would, for example, being marooned, being andlsquo;stranded,andrsquo; lead to a form of stoic resignation as the formulation of freedom or more active forms of resistance, what the revolutionary psychiatrist, political theorist, and philosopher Frantz Fanon refers to as becoming andlsquo;actionalandrsquo;? Roberts works through Hannah Arendt, Phillip Petit, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Frederick Douglass in a debate over such topics as the impact of racialized slavery on conceptions of freedom to problems with the dialectics of recognition as the basis of securing freedom and dignity for the self.and#160; Particularly powerful is Robertsandrsquo;s discussion of Coleridgeandrsquo;s impact on Douglassandrsquo;s thought. Roberts reveals, in Coleridge, a profound existential commitment against bondage and an understanding of freedom that transcends mere liberty. This book, then, is an exemplar of the creolization of theory, of theory from the global south reaching beyond the institutional location of its author in northern provinces, to articulate freedom and the quest for human dignity beyond the confines of Euromodernity to the heart and soul of a human world in need of learning much from its always present dark side. Itandrsquo;s a splendid addition to the bourgeoning movement of creative political thought from Afro-modernity and beyond. A must read for those interested in knowing, proverbially, otherwise.andrdquo;
Synopsis
2005-2006 Gulf South Historical Association Book Award
2006 Frederick Douglass Book Prize, Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
2006 John Hope Franklin Publication Prize, American Studies Association
2005 Kemper and Leila Williams Prize, Historic New Orleans Collection and Louisiana Historical Association
Synopsis
What is the opposite of freedom? In
Freedom as Marronage, Neil Roberts answers this question with definitive force: slavery, and from there he unveils powerful new insights on the human condition as it has been understood between these poles. Crucial to his investigation is the concept of marronageand#151;a form of slave escape that was an important aspect of Caribbean and Latin American slave systems. Examining this overlooked phenomenonand#151;one of action from slavery and toward freedomand#151;he deepens our understanding of freedom itself and the origin of our political ideals.
and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;
Roberts examines the liminal and transitional space of slave escape in order to develop a theory of freedom as marronage, which contends that freedom is fundamentally located within this spaceand#151;that it is a form of perpetual flight. He engages a stunning variety of writers, including Hannah Arendt, W. E. B. Du Bois, Angela Davis, Frederick Douglass, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the Rastafari, among others, to develop a compelling lens through which to interpret the quandaries of slavery, freedom, and politics that still confront us today. The result is a sophisticated, interdisciplinary work that unsettles the ways we think about freedom by always casting it in the light of its critical opposite. and#160;
Synopsis
and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Freedom as Marronage deepens our understanding of political freedom not only by situating slavery as freedomand#8217;s opposite condition, but also by investigating the experiential significance of the equally important liminal and transitional social space
between slavery and freedom.and#160; Roberts examines a specific form of flight from slaveryand#151;
marronageand#151;that was fundamental to the experience of Haitian slavery, but is integral to understanding the Haitian Revolution and has widespread application to European, New World, and black Diasporic societies.and#160; He pays close attention to the experience of the process by which people emerge
from slavery
to freedom, contending that freedom as marronage presents a useful conceptual device for those interested in understanding both normative ideals of political freedom and the origin of those ideals.and#160;
and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Roberts investigates the dual anti-colonial and anti-slavery Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) and especially the ideas of German-Jewish thinker Hannah Arendt, Irish political theorist Philip Pettit, American fugitive-turned ex-slave Frederick Douglass, and the Martinican philosopher and#201;douard Glissant in developing a theory of freedom that offers a compelling interpretive lens to understand the quandaries of slavery, freedom, and political language that still confront us today.
About the Author
Rebecca J. Scott is Charles Gibson Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Law at the University of Michigan.
University of Michigan
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Two Worlds of Cane, 1803-1860
2. Building Citizenship: Louisiana, 1862-1873
3. Crisis and Voice: Southern Louisiana, 1874-1896
4. Finding the Spaces of Freedom: Central Cuba, 1868-1895
5. A Wartime Cross-Racial Alliance: Cuba, 1895-1898
6. Democracy and Antidemocracy: The Claims of Citizens, 1898-1900
7. The Right to Have Rights, 1901-1905
8. The Search for Property and Standing: Cuba, 1906-1914
9. Diverging Paths and Degrees of Freedom
Appendix: Tables
Abbreviations
Notes
Select Bibliography of Primary Sources
Illustration and Map Credits
Acknowledgments
Index