About the Presentation

The act of legal emancipation throughout the nineteenth century Caribbean was a protracted one, ending with Cuba’s abolition of slavery in 1886. So, it should come as no surprise that emancipation in the British Caribbean was viewed then, as it is now, as a watershed moment in the region’s history. Within the literature, there is an overwhelming emphasis on what precipitated emancipation, the legal conditions it set forth, and its wider ramifications. The tendency towards understanding the emancipation of enslaved laborers as an event, with primarily legal and economic implications, has limited the field’s understanding of the socio-economic worlds that the newly free created despite subsequent imperial neglect.

Instead of conceiving of emancipation as merely an event, my research explores trajectories of change in post-emancipation societies and the varied processes through which land and labor relations took shape in the British Caribbean in the years after 1838. In the British Caribbean, archaeologists have documented notable shifts in material culture after emancipation in 1838. Similar diversity and richness in material culture have been observed on contemporaneous sites of slavery in the United States. In this talk I highlight differences in how formerly enslaved laborers in the Caribbean responded to the changes brought on by emancipation, and ask whether the material remnants of these responses differ from contemporary pre-emancipation assemblages like that at The Hermitage. The key research question is: do the differences capture a moment of critical change? Or, are the similarities related to broader changes in nineteenth century material culture and manufacture and distribution?

About the Speaker

Khadene Harris is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Kenyon College. She received her doctorate in Anthropology from Northwestern University in 2019. She specializes in the archaeology and history of the Caribbean from slavery through freedom, with a particular emphasis on socio-economic networks among the laboring class. Her current interests lie in the Eastern Caribbean islands, specifically Dominica, where she carried out dissertation research on land and labor relationships in the post-emancipation era. Khadene has been collaborating and adventuring with DAACS for more than a decade. Her work has appeared in edited volumes and on various online platforms.