Description
Book SynopsisIkuko Asaka examines emancipation's intersection with settler colonialism in North America, showing how emancipation efforts in the United States and present-day Canada were accompanied by attempts to relocate freed blacks to tropical regions, thereby conceiving freedom as a racially segregated condition based upon geography and climate.
Trade Review“Tropical Freedom is an ambitious and satisfying book. Ikuko Asaka balances the two focuses of her work—free black people’s understandings of their freedom and belonging, and white imperial understandings of tropicality, labor, and the spaces of black freedom—with deft organization and clarity.”
-- Elaine LaFay * H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews *
"
Tropical Freedom is a bold book that takes a variety of historical frameworks—among them settler colonialism, environmental determinism, and the geography of freedom—to tell the complicated story of African North Americans in the age of emancipation. This is a fascinating narrative and a welcome addition to the field." -- Kevin Hooper * Western Historical Quarterly *
"Wonderful. . . .
Tropical Freedom is undoubtedly a contribution to historiographies of Black colonization, it is also represents a significant contribution to the fields of settler colonial studies, Black Studies, gender and sexuality studies, critical geographies and race and space scholarship.
Tropical Freedom is an important book to read and teach." -- Tiffany King * Reviews in History *
"In its breadth of analysis and focussed case studies from Ottawa to Haiti; its transnational scope and archival research (the national archives of Canada and the United Kingdom are impressively mined); and its provoking, persuasive arguments,
Tropical Freedom is one of the finest monographs I have read in a long while. It forges new links in transatlantic historiographies of labor, migration, and racial formation, and is essential reading for scholars interested in discourses of race, gender, climate, and settler colonial identity in North America in the era of emancipation." -- Henry Knight Lozano * Journal of American Studies *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii
Note on Terms xi
Introduction 1
1. Black Freedom and Settler Colonial Order 21
2. Black Geographies and the Politics of Diaspora 53
3. Intimacy and Belonging 81
4. Gendered Mobilities and White Settler Boundaries 111
5. Race, Climate, and Labor 139
6. U.S. Emancipation and Tropical Black Freedom 167
Conclusion 193
Notes 205
Bibliography 253
Index 281
