Richard Lee Turits

This project explores race, slavery, and freedom in the Spanish Caribbean, where plantations were often glaring by their absence and where free people of color--through relative ease of manumission and escape from slavery--came to comprise large portions of society long before the abolition of slavery. In such societies, core racial ideologies consolidated in the Americas--ones that associated blackness with slavery and whiteness with liberty and mastery--were challenged and at times subverted. This project elucidates how different histories of slavery and freedom helped shape disparate racial formations and modes of racism. By focusing on histories beyond the plantation, this book contributes to comparative understandings of varying modes of race and racism.