Into the Hills: Challenges of Writing Postemancipation Agency in the Caribbean

Abstract

As Caribbean postemancipation scholarship has deepened so richly in recent decades, writers have been able to shake major distortions such as the progressive teleologies of freedom that lurk as the very scaffolding of congratulatory imperial records. The full dynamism of repression directed at postslavery generations still demands attention, as does the difficult task of reconstructing communities’ and individuals’ responses to these serious restraints, efforts that sometimes yielded nothing. Especially given archival difficulties, Johnson’s exhortation to seek everyday understandings and actions, ineffable registers like love and fear, and internal community politics, including discord, continue to present high aims for scholars seeking to conceive and describe agency in such an archivally and politically difficult era.