Black ghost of empire : the long death of slavery and the failure of emancipation

Black ghost of empire The long death of slavery and the failure of emancipation

Kris Manjapra, 1978-

Book - 2022

"The 1619 Project illuminated the ways in which every aspect of life in the United States was and is shaped by the existence of slavery. Black Ghost of Empire focuses on emancipation and how this opportunity to make right further codified the racial caste system-instead of obliterating it.To understand why the shadow of slavery still haunts society today, we must not only look at what slavery was, but also the unfinished way it ended. One may think of "emancipation" as a finale, leading to a new age of human rights and universal freedoms. But in reality, emancipations everywhere were incomplete. In Black Ghost of Empire, acclaimed historian and professor Kris Manjapra identifies five types of emancipation-explaining them in c...hronological order-along with the lasting impact these transitions had on formerly enslaved groups around the Atlantic. Beginning in 1770s and concluding in 1880s, different kinds of emancipation processes took place across the Atlantic world. These included the Gradual Emancipations of North America, the Revolutionary Emancipation of Haiti, the Compensated Emancipations of European overseas empires, the War Emancipation of the American South, and the Conquest Emancipations that swept across Sub-Saharan Africa. Tragically, despite a century of abolitions and emancipations, systems of social bondage persisted and reconfigured. We still live with these unfinished endings today. In practice, all the slavery emancipations that have ever taken place reenacted racial violence against Black communities, and reaffirmed commitment to white supremacy. The devil lurked in the details of the five emancipation processes, none of which required atonement for wrongs committed, or restorative justice for the people harmed. Manjapra shows how, amidst this unfinished history, grassroots Black organizers and activists have become custodians of collective recovery and remedy; not only for our present, but also for our relationship with the past. Timely, lucid, and crucial to our understanding of the ongoing "anti-mattering" of Black people, Black Ghost of Empire shines a light into the deep gap between the idea of slavery's end and its actual perpetuation in various forms-exposing the shadows that linger to this day"--

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Subjects
Liberty > Case studies.
Race relations > Case studies.
Slavery > Political aspects.
Case studies.
Genres
Case studies
Published
New York : Scribner [2022]
Language
English
Main Author
Kris Manjapra, 1978- (author)
Edition
First Scribner hardcover edition
Physical Description
xi, 240 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, map ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9781982123475
  • Note on Terminology
  • Global Emancipations Map
  • Introduction: Emancipation and the Void
  • Chapter 1. Making Africans Pay, Gradually, in the American North
  • Chapter 2. Punishing the Black Nation in Haiti
  • Chapter 3. British Antislavery and the Emancipation of Property
  • Chapter 4. Rewarding Perpetrators and Abandoning Victims Across the Caribbean
  • Chapter 5. From Civil War to Dirty War Against Black Lives
  • Chapter 6. Global Jim Crow and Emancipation in Africa
  • Conclusion: The Insurgent Presence of Reparations
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Selected Bibliography
  • Photo Credits
  • Index
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Tufts University historian Manjapra (Colonialism in Global Perspective) delivers a sweeping study of how emancipation processes in Africa, the Americas, and Europe "aggravated slavery's historical trauma and extended white supremacist rule and antiblackness." Contending that the officials who implemented abolition sought to preserve the racial caste system and "withdrew justice from the historical victims and appeased the perpetrators," Manjapra documents how the heirs of British slaveholders--rather than descendants of the enslaved--received "lucrative state-funded reparations" up until 2015; how voter suppression and convict leasing programs helped preserve the racial hierarchy in the U.S.; and how European countries "imposed an order of imperialist rule and underdevelopment" on African nations. In addition to the forces that stunted equitable emancipation, Manjapra details Black resistance movements such as the Haitian Revolution and Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association. Though Manjapra ranges widely across the history of the 19th century, he suffuses the narrative with vivid and often enraging details, describing, for instance, how a Union general decided to return a fugitive woman and her child to their enslaver, but "congratulated himself for at least not providing a military escort" back to the plantation. This is an essential contribution to understanding the legacy of slavery. (Apr.)

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Review by Library Journal Review

Born in the Caribbean of African and Indian parentage and currently an award-winning history professor at Tufts, Manjapra argues that slavery is essentially still with us because emancipation was incomplete, reinforcing rather than destroying the racial caste system. He speaks not only of the United States but the entire Atlantic world, defining five emancipations from the 1770s to the 1880s: the Gradual Emancipations of North America, the Revolutionary Emancipation of Haiti, the Compensated Emancipations of European overseas empires, the War Emancipation of the American South, and the Conquest Emancipations of Sub-Saharan Africa. All failed to provide restorative justice, he says, and all affirmed the notion of white supremacy. With a 100,000-copy first printing.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A pointed study of the dissolution of slave economies in emancipation and the exceedingly long tail between so-called freedom and justice. Tufts University historian Manjapra identifies five categories of emancipation, none of them quite satisfactory inasmuch as "the emancipations--the acts meant to end slavery--only extended the war forward in time." None ever effectively erased the color line, and then there's "the ghost line," an extension of personal ghosting into the social sphere, wherein the "ghostliner" simply ignores the experience of formerly enslaved and currently oppressed peoples and insists on " 'unseeing' the plundered parts, and 'unhearing' their historical demands for reparatory justice." The author, born in the Caribbean of mixed African and Indian heritage, considers the forms of emancipation practiced by the British and French governments that compensated slaveholders for the loss of their putative property. In Colonial New York, this played out in numerous ways. For example, when enslaved people were manumitted, their former owners were required to post a bond for them in case they should ever become public wards, a charge they passed on to the freed people. As such, "they were 'freed' into the condition of having to pay their oppressors." In some instances, enslaved people emancipated themselves, as with the uprising that led to the establishment of Haiti, whose slaveholder class the French government repaid for their losses without considering that reparations were due the formerly enslaved. "In its most banal expression," Manjapra writes, "white supremacy is merely the wish among groups who benefited from slavery to continue to enjoy its spoils and privileges long after its formal death." This supremacist stance self-evidently endures nearly 160 years after slavery was formally ended in the U.S., and reparations are still yet to materialize. "The struggle for reparatory justice," the author concludes meaningfully, "belongs to the history of slavery and emancipation itself." A worthy contribution to the controversial discussions around how to compensate for crimes past and present. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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