Black Revolution on the Sea Islands

Abstract

“Black Revolution on the Sea Islands” historicizes Gullah Geechee practices of collective care and kinship during the US Civil War and Reconstruction. In their engagement with and disengagement from the state, Black people’s politics of communal care challenged the order of property and propriety undergirding slavery, what I call “anti-proprietary freedoms.” Most histories of Reconstruction tend to posit a redemptive narrative for the US state, which is assumed to possess the authority to resolve the contradiction between representative democracy and global capitalism through national inclusion and civic equality. The state’s extension of political freedoms to African American men during Reconstruction has driven generations of historians to lament that the state did not likewise distribute economic freedoms like land ownership. The denial of land redistribution has come to represent the tragedy of the period. By framing Black people’s emancipation of labour around the emancipation of land, my dissertation shifts the focus away from the state’s redistribution of land and toward Black politics of collective sustenance. I argue Black people’s revolutionary visions of freedom emanated not from the state but from their creation of another world beyond property.