Practicing Emancipation: Slave Ship Survivors, Atlantic Abolition, and the Everyday Politics of Freedom.

FAIN: FEL-282380-22

Laura Rosanne M. Adderley
Administrators of the Tulane Educational Fund, The (New Orleans, LA 70118-5698)

Completion of a book on slave ship survivors and the era of emancipation in the Anglophone Caribbean in the early nineteenth century.

I am applying to the NEH to support a year of full-time writing to complete a book about the labor and social experiences of several thousand free Africans taken from Atlantic slave ships by the British navy at the beginning of the 1800s. These people were the earliest Africans rescued during a six-decade international campaign against the slave trade. British colonial officials often looked to this population as a precursor for imagining what black lives might look like after slavery ended. Authorities collected voluminous data about these Africans and their experience as free laborers in Caribbean slave societies, especially in the pivotal years between British slave trade abolition in 1807 and emancipation in 1834. Using more than a thousand interviews—collective African witness to the process of ending slavery—"Practicing Emancipation" seeks to re-center everyday black experience in the history and contemporary understanding of race, labor, and the meaning of freedom.