Freedom's Captives Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific Afro-Latin America Series

Freedom's Captives is a compelling exploration of the gradual abolition of slavery in the majority-black Pacific coast of Colombia, the largest area in the Americas inhabited primarily by people of African descent. From the autonomous rainforests and gold mines of the Colombian Black Pacific, Yesenia Barragan rethinks the nineteenth-century project of emancipation by arguing that the liberal freedom generated through gradual emancipation constituted a modern mode of racial governance that birthed new forms of social domination, while temporarily instituting de facto slavery. Although gradual emancipation was ostensibly designed to destroy slavery, she argues that slaveholders in Colombia came to have an even greater stake in it. Using narrative and storytelling to map the worlds of Free Womb children, enslaved women miners, free black boatmen, and white abolitionists in the Andean highlands, Freedom's Captives insightfully reveals how the Atlantic World processes of gradual emancipation and post-slavery rule unfolded in Colombia.

Introduction: 'Reborn for freedom'; Part I. The Social Universe of the Colombian Black Pacific: 1. Black freedom and the aquatic lowlands; 2. Slavery and the urban Pacific frontier; Part II. The Time of Gradual Emancipation Rule: 3. The gradual emancipation law of 1821 and abolitionist publics in Colombia; 4. The children of the Free Womb and technologies of gradual emancipation rule; 5. Routes to freedom, gradients of unfreedom: testamentary manumission, self-purchase, and public manumissions; Part III. Final Abolition and the Afterlife of Gradual Emancipation: 6. Final abolition and the problem of black autonomy; Epilogue: 'The precious gift of freedom'.

Yesenia Barragan is Assistant Professor of Latin American History at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. She is the author of Selling Our Death Masks: Cash-for-Gold in the Age of Austerity (2014) and Principal Investigator of the bilingual digital database The Free Womb Project.