Kaneesha Parsard Talk

Desiring Freedom: Counterimaginaries of Work, Sex, and Family after West Indian Emancipation

This talk looks to British West Indian emancipation (1834/8) and its legacies for conflicting discourses on and philosophies of freedom. The print culture of emancipation reveals that colonial administrators and planters envisioned freedom as a training ground by which the formerly enslaved would come to manage their own affairs through wage labor and domestic life, and indentured labor from India and China arriving at roughly mid-century would follow suit. So, however preferable freedom was to the condition of bondage, it arrived as another kind of obligation. Yet, the literature and visual culture of the long century after emancipation reveals a counterimaginary by which everyday West Indians were imagined to flout the values of liberal freedom, and instead embraced freedom as desire. In conversation with philosophies of freedom from the ancients to Black and Caribbean studies, and examining literature from Harriet Martineau to V. S. Naipaul, Parsard theorizes desirous freedom as amorousness, the drive to hustle and experiment rather than produce, and the condition of reexamining the very terms of freedom.