Black Ghost of Empire: failed emancipations, reparations, and Maroon ecologies

Contributor(s): Professor Kris Manjapra | Manjapra argues that during each of the supposed emancipations from slavery – whether Haiti after the revolution, the British Empire in 1833 or the United States during the Civil War – Black people were dispossessed by the moves meant to free them. Emancipation codified existing racial-colonial hierarchies - rather than obliterating them, with far-reaching consequences for climate colonialism and for environmental justice. For centuries, Black reparations movements emerged in opposition to emancipation’s racial distribution of social exploitation, toxicity, and precarity. Black reparations movements enacted liberation, sovereignty, Maroon ecologies, and alternative ways of dwelling beyond the racial-colonial order. Manjapra highlights the radical traditions of Black reparations as a long and ongoing struggle against the world order first created by slavery, then redoubled by emancipation, with deep consequences for how we approach climate justice today.