Lightfoot aims to use the particular case of Antigua to provide a fresh analysis of the nature of post-slavery black experience around the Americas. The book succeeds in this task, often with eloquence, and with engaging detail. Lightfoot argues for an understanding of emancipation as a multi-decade, contested, and never-complete experience, rather than as a status change fixed to a particular date or legal action. Versions of this argument have appeared in previous studies, but as Lightfoot emphasizes, overly clear-cut ways of imagining emancipation persist.
Chapter 1 introduces readers to the world of early nineteenth-century Antigua, a small British slave society in the eastern Caribbean. The chapter mostly employs an analysis of the geography of the island—rural and urban spaces accessed, experienced, and utilized differently by free whites and mostly enslaved blacks. Even a reader with little background in Caribbean history will be able to visualize the specific setting of...