 webinar now. Actually, I'm going to hit live on YouTube and live in the webinar. Hello, hello, everybody. Welcome. Welcome in good day. Welcome to our conversation with Chris Manjapra and his book Black Ghost of Empire, The Long Death of Slavery and the Failure of Emancipation. I'm Shauna Sherman, Program Manager for the African American Center at the San Francisco Public Library's main library, where we celebrate Black excellence all year round. We'll get started with our conversation after I give a few brief announcements. Thanks for joining us today. We are broadcasting from the area now known as San Francisco, which is on the unceded ancestral homeland of our Ramaytush Aloni peoples of the San Francisco Peninsula. As the original peoples of this land, the Ramaytush Aloni have never ceded lost nor forgotten their responsibilities as the caretakers of this place. We recognize that we benefit from living, working and learning on their traditional homeland. As uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ramaytush community. We also have an ancestral acknowledgement, which is adopted from the African American Reparations Advisory Committee here in the city. We honor the gifts, resilience, and sacrifices of our Black ancestors who toiled the land, built the institutions that established this nation's wealth and freedom, and survived anti-Black racism despite never being compensated nor fully realizing their own sovereignty. We acknowledge this exploitation of not only labor, but of our humanity, and through this process, are working to repair some of the harms done by public and private actors. Because of their work, we are here and will invest in the descendants of their legacy. So throughout the summer, during our summer stride program, the library offers free in-person and virtual programs for all ages and abilities. They are designed to inspire reading, learning, and exploring for at least 20 minutes a day. Sign up today for, can read or explore for 20 hours this summer and earn a customized 2022 Summer Learn Summer Stride Library Book Tote. Visit us at sfpl.org Summer Stride to sign up and to see book lists and other upcoming events. And also visit our library at San Francisco Public Library's YouTube page to see some of our past events. There's a lot there. So on June 30th at 6 p.m. in the Karat Theater here at the main library, we will be welcoming author Mark Berford who will be talking about his book, Mahalia Jackson and the Black Gospel Field. In July on Wednesday the 7th, we welcome our San Francisco poet Laureate, Tom Goh-Eisen Martin to celebrate his newly released Spoken Work album. I go to the railroad tracks and follow them to the station of My Enemies. That's going to be at the main library in the African American Center at 6 p.m. And you know today we're here to talk about emancipations as we get ready to celebrate Juneteenth at the library. There's a lot more to do at the library to celebrate Juneteenth like here a reenactment from local historian Bill Doglett who will talk about the enslaved who ran away and emancipated themselves on Friday, June 17th from noon to 1 30 in our virtual library. And on Saturday at the Richmond Library, there's a story time for children, a tie dye activity for teens, and then a raffle drawing where you could win a copy of Opal Lee, Opal Lee, and what it takes to be free or Amanda Gorman's The Hill We Climb. That's taking place at the Richmond branch at starting at 1 p.m. And then if you're ever at the main library and entering through our Grove Street entrance, check out our display called Juneteenth and beyond, a celebration of Black liberation that was produced by our African-American Center librarian and tells a short history of Juneteenth. Now on to our featured guests to talk about emancipation around the world and why the fight for Black liberation continues. I'll introduce our author, Chris Mandjapra. Chris Mandjapra is a professor of history at Tufts University and a recipient of the 2015 Emerging Scholar Award by Diverse Magazine. He is the author of the book Black Ghost of Empire, The Long Death of Slavery and the Failure of Emancipation. Publishers Weekly called his book An Essential Contribution to Understanding the Legacy of Slavery, and Kirkus Reviews said the book is a worthy contribution to the controversial discussions around how to compensate for crimes past and present. Please join me in welcoming Chris Mandjapra. Thanks so much. Hi, Chris. Hi, Shauna. Thanks so much for this invitation. It's great to be here. You're welcome. And thank you for being here. And thank you for your book. You know, it really, here's your book. It really presents a lot of information in a concise and readable way about emancipation. And sometimes I found the information a little hard to digest, but we'll get to that. We'll get to that. Mm hmm. Yeah, I know what you mean. Yeah. Having written it, I know what you mean. Yeah, right. I mean, I did shed a tear at a couple of places. So yeah. So before we get started, could you give us like a brief overview of slavery in the world since you do cover emancipations around the world? And I think sometimes, you know, I know for myself, I did just I tend to think of slavery only in the United States context, but could you just give us like a brief idea of like how slavery impacted the world? Sure. And if you don't mind, maybe I could even begin on a personal note or, you know, a note of my personal history, because, you know, in some ways, that's where this book begins. For me, and the need to write it. I am originally from Bahamas, and my ancestral island on the Bahamas is called Andros. It's the largest island by space, but it's the lowest population density. It has the fewest people. And on the coast of Andros Island is a small village called Mystic Mastic Point. And Mastic Point is where in some ways my people are from. What's what's interesting about Mastic Point is it's what's called a freedom village. Because back in the 19th century, it was one of the villages across the different islands of Bahamas, in which freed people having received emancipation started creating their own lives together. So, you know, and so I think Bahamas is kind of an interesting and good place to begin the discussion of slavery, because after all, it's a kind of passage point, you know, between Africa, and deeper into the Caribbean, and to the United States, it's an area in which a lot of slave ships traveled, in which there are a lot of people from different parts of Africa, East Africa, West Africa, who ended up creating a new society together. And so, you know, I think that's that's the the beginning that I wanted to share, which is the personal piece of this. And as the beginning of the book, I have these I begin with these questions about my fourth grandmother, my my great, great great grandmother named Lorena, who we don't know who her parents were, but our hunch in the family is that they were from the Congo. But but yeah, the overview is that when we talk about the history of slavery, we are talking about the history of at least four continents, and better to say five continents, because we are talking about a circulating story that is connecting Africa, obviously, North America, South America, Europe, and then we even get into Asia, and the Pacific, and the history of emancipations, and what actually happened in the processes of emancipation, which the book is interested in exposing and exploring, we don't talk about that enough. You know, we don't talk, we haven't been told enough about this, these global interconnected processes of emancipation. Right. And so why so why emancipation? Why were you interested in it? Because of the history, you know, of your town, where it was, did you hear stories about it being like a town founded by, you know, emancipated enslaved people? And yeah, yes. I mean, I think the, you know, the history of Mastic Point as a free village has always interested me. I also happened to have some very close friends in Jamaica, in, well, friend and mentor, somebody named Nana Erna Broadbear, who lives in the interior of Jamaica in Woodside, which is a village in the Cockpit Mountains. And some of you may know, Nana Erna Broadbear, she is a novelist, and she's a philosopher. And every year she holds an emancipation celebration in, in Woodside. And I've been going for the past number of years to that. And it's, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's an interesting thing that as members of the African diaspora, you know, emancipation days are part of our family histories are part of our family life, you know, our kind of yearly part of yearly life is, is, is recognizing one of the emancipation days, or maybe many of them, you know, the Caribbean Emancipation Days, August 1st. But for me, the question has always been, what went wrong during the emancipations? Is, is it the case that emancipation ended slavery? And, you know, as a historian, the more and more that I've looked into the archive, it's not only that the answer to that is, emancipations did not end slavery, they, they in some ways, continued bondage, you know, in some very cunning ways. But, but the, the, the reason why I had to write the book is because the level of compensation that was being given to the slave owners, the, the erstwhile slave owners and the, the planning that went into how to continue the oppression of the emancipated people was simply stunning to me. You know, it was just, it was, I didn't, I didn't know this. And I didn't realize that we're talking about an international system in which different governments are kind of talking with each other. So that's why I decided that this was a book that I needed to write. Cool. And what, what governments in what areas do you focus on in the book? And what time period? Yeah, so, you know, we don't usually, we don't probably know this. And it's not part of our common knowledge. But when we, you, when we talk about emancipation, there were over 80 different emancipations around the world between 1770 and 1930. That was the main period in which emancipations are taking place. Now, amongst those 80 emancipations, there are actually 20 separate emancipations that took place in the United States alone. So there isn't one emancipation day. There are many, many emancipation days. And when we look at those 20 American emancipations, we see that they have these different time periods and these different characteristics. And I can talk, I can talk more about that as we go. But just in brief for now, you know, I think it helps us re, it helps us recalibrate our understanding of emancipation to understand how many of them there were. And then I would say that they're, they shared all of them, all 80 shared some pretty essential characteristics in common. One of those characteristics is all emancipations that benefited or that took place in the Western world, let's put it that way, as opposed to emancipations in Africa, all emancipations that took place in the Western world, all paid some form of reparations to the enslavers. And it's also the case that all emancipations everywhere, in, in, in, in different ways, continued bondage and debt of the previously enslaved people into the period of freedom. And they were designed to do so. So there are these two dimensions of emancipation, regardless of what we're talking about, they all shared that DNA. And then finally, it is a story a little bit like the way DNA mutates, you know, because the story begins the very first emancipation in the world ever took place in, in Pennsylvania in 1780. And Pennsylvania thereby served as this very important model or template that began to be, you know, reapplied or, or ripped on in different parts of the world going on for the next 120 years or so. So there's an international conversation, you know, that was taking place around how do you emancipate the enslaved? And what we actually find is that the, what was actually happening is a, is a kind of a cunning process of ensuring that property rule remained in the hands of those who had it before emancipation took place. So it was a lot about preserving property rights. Yeah. Yeah, that's very, it's very sobering to see, to see, to hear that they, you know, all emancipation is here, that can you talk about the first emancipation in Pennsylvania and a little bit? Yeah, sure. So the, the, the first, so my, my books, you know, looks kind of categorizes these different emancipations, these 80 emancipations to make it a bit, to make it simpler, puts them into five big categories, they're five different types. And the first type is the first that emerged called the gradual emancipations. And gradual emancipations are a story of the US North in the, in the time of the Revolutionary War and the aftermath of the Revolutionary War. And what they, in Pennsylvania, like I mentioned, is the very first place that this was, that this emancipation law was passed. And it had a very peculiar character, which is that when emancipation came to Pennsylvania in 1780, March 1st, 1780, what happened the day after is that anybody who was already enslaved, remained enslaved for the rest of their lives. So their plot did not change unless the slave owner on their own will voluntarily decided to manumit that person. And that was already a well-established practice. There was a lot of manumission taking place, especially in Pennsylvania, because of its Quaker background. So that wasn't new. What was new was that on the day after emancipation in Pennsylvania, children who would be born to enslaved women would be born as quote unquote free people, but quote unquote because the law stipulated that they would have to live in bondage as quote unquote apprentices for 28 years. And only on the 28th birthday would they be freed. So this became the kind of the first model for what emancipation would look like, especially this idea of enslaving children until a particular date and then allowing them to be free. That model was replicated in Connecticut and Rhode Island and New York and New Jersey. And it became the first kind of gold standard that other countries later on would begin to develop and elaborate. And the next big elaboration came in the 1830s by the British who were studying the Pennsylvania emancipation, as well as, you know, in Latin America, it was the Pennsylvania emancipation that they took as their model. And that was its unique characteristic. Wow. So what does that mean then for somebody who does that? I mean, because we always hear of like the north is like, you know, not, it didn't really have, I mean, we knew that sometimes we know that there's slavery there, but it's not really talked about. It's mostly talked about in the South. So but it seems like that means that there's still slavery going on in the North for a long time, even after they, you know, people were emancipated. Yeah, yeah. I mean, this, you were mentioning, Shauna, like the the some of the difficulty of this history. And so I also just want to invite us as we're listening to, you know, invite a deep breath into our lungs as we go through this together, because it's an important, this is, this is important history. And even by looking into it, like I call it looking into the void, or walking around this void together. There's something important in this itself, you know, there's something important for our consciousness and for us as people. There's something reparative, I think, in not looking away, but finding a healthy way and a healing way to look around it, you know, and so that's kind of what I feel like we're doing. And remembering to breathe as we do so. And, you know, and so the the the answer to the question is, yes, that we have in our minds that 1865 in the United States is the date in which slavery ends in the US South. And then, you know, in some ways, the national narrative separates slavery between the North being abolitionists and the South being slave owning. And this our history is much messier than that. So because the Northern emancipations were structured in the way they were, it meant that there were people in New Jersey who, although emancipation, the emancipation law was passed in 1804, slavery actually ended in New Jersey in 1866, which is a year after which is months after the 13 Amendment was finally ratified supposedly ending and added to the Constitution supposedly ending slavery. And, you know, similarly in New York, slavery officially ended in 1827. But when we look at how the emancipated were living, we see that de facto, in many cases, enslaved freed people were continuing to live the same life as an enslaved person, often as a domestic laborer, or as a field laborer without being paid. And, you know, working without pay in a white home in a white household, that was that continued after 1827 all the way into the 1850s and 1860s. So there are many, there are many examples of how the harm of racial slavery was not ended by emancipation, but was continued. It's not only a story about continuation. I think of it as a story about the change of phase between of oppression. So what I mean is, you know, we think about how water, when heated, changes to gas, or ice when melted changes to water. To me, that's the best way to think of what emancipation was. You know, it was, it was like a phase change. It was the change of oppression from water to gas state. But it wasn't the end of the oppression. And that's the case, that is certainly the case for the U.S. North. Yeah. So you've also mentioned the different types of emancipations that you found. You want, would you like to go through a couple of the other types of emancipations that you you studied? We talked about gradual emancipation in the U.S. Yeah, sure. Did you find so like I mentioned there, I separate this the story of emancipation into five big categories. The gradual we just talked about gradual emancipations. We just talked about gradual because the emancipation date might happen, you know, in year whatever 1780, but enslaved people would may continue to live in that condition for decades and decades afterwards. It was gradual. Then we come to the second type of emancipation that emerged called what I call retroactive emancipation. This really came to for it before came into its fullness in the 1820s. And it has to do with Haiti. So, you know, revolutionary Haiti broke away from the French Empire and declared their own freedom. They liberated themselves. They self emancipated in 1804. And what happened in the aftermath is that the French Empire refused to recognize Haitian independence. We know there was a big piece in the New York Times about this couple of weeks ago. Not only that, but France then coordinated with the other Western nations to boycott Haiti in the most fragile time of its life at its birth, at its inception. And, you know, we contrast that with what happened to the fragile, nascent American nation, which was recognized by France upon its independence. And, you know, a number of Western nations actually helped it kind of grow into being a full fledged player on the international scene. That wasn't Haiti's experience because of international racism. And not only that, the French government spent 20 years denying the recognition of Haiti until Haiti decided or agreed to participate in France's emancipation process. So it was it was conceived in 1825 that Haiti still needed to be emancipated, which meant that France wanted to in some ways put Haiti in its place. And the putting of Haiti in its place involved forcing Haiti to pay the indemnity or reparations payment, which, you know, approximately equals 22 billion dollars that created a debt legacy that Haiti is still suffering from to this day. So there we have, you know, that same logic of emancipation, that the slave owners are the aggrieved party and need the reparations and that the enslaved need to be punished or put into debt in order to receive freedom. That's the logic of emancipation. And it plays out in this retroactive way in Haiti 20 years after the Haitians had already won their own freedom. So, you know, that's that's the retroactive case. By the time that we come to the 1830s, this is now 10 years after the Haitian emancipation processes instituted or imposed. The British government institutes a new new and improved from the slave owner perspective, emancipation, which they call compensated emancipation. It's kind of like gradual emancipation on steroids. You know, so what the British government does is it not only requires enslaved people once freed to continue working unpaid, which they call the apprenticeship. And it in the end, it was a four year apprenticeship that enslaved that the emancipated people were subjected to. But the new piece here is that the government now paid direct cash reparations to enslavers. And it's not just a little bit of money. It was a lot of money that the government paid so much money. Some of some of us know this story, some of so much money that it actually took 180 years for the British government to pay back the loan that it took out in 1835 to pay its 44,000 slave owners. So that's the compensated emancipation because it involved this huge reparations payment to the enslavers and you know, ongoing colonization and oppression for the enslaved. And then the last two forms of compensate of reparations come beginning in the 1860s. So here I call it the war emancipation. It is this story about the civil war here. We don't have a reparations payment that's paid in cash to enslavers because the slave owners of the South fought a war to maintain the institution at the end of that war 1865. They don't receive a cash payment because they were the vanquished. But what's interesting is the narrative that slave owners are the aggrieved party still kind of insinuates itself. And you know, we think of President Andrew Johnson's restitution of the lands of slave owners back to the slave owners in 1865. Or we look at the fine print of the reconstruction amendments, the 13th, the 14th and the 15th. And in the fine print, there is written in various loopholes. You know, we think of the film 13th, which goes into this for the 13th amendment, that actually aid the ongoing oppression of enslaved people, of freed people, but previously enslaved. And then finally, when we look at what happens, you know, by 1877, which is the end of reconstruction. What we see is that the the federal government basically seeds and gives back to the plantocracy a lot of a lot of power. It gives them the power of taxation. It gives them back the power over property. It gives them back the power over the controlling of the polls and election. I mean, this is real power. And that's a form of reparations that's being paid again to the erstwhile slave owner. So it's like reparations in in different forms that are being paid and at a vast level in in the in the case of this war emancipation of the 1860s. And then the last emancipation that the book looks at is what I call conquest emancipation. This began precisely at this time 1860s 1870s. And it's the story of how emancipation the waves of emancipation walk wash back to Africa. Because European empires began to conquer sovereign African nations beginning in this very moment this very time under the banner of being the emancipators. So emancipation becomes weaponized as a form of conquest in this last period. So, you know, those are the that that's the kind of the history, the frame for understanding the pity of emancipations. It doesn't yet tell us about what black people did in response, you know, because my book is really interested in telling that side of the story as well. But in terms of the frame of how oppression continues, those are the five pieces that I think it's important for us to know. Yeah, and I really appreciate in the book how you're the response that you write about from black people. I mean, it's sort of been happening since the beginning, right? Do you have any examples of that? Like people, I mean, yeah, I mean, this is when hearing you just go through all that like I want to take another breath. Yeah, let us take a breath. Yeah, so what what so what were people, you know, they weren't they weren't breathing they were fighting from the very beginning, right? Yeah, they were breathing and they were fighting, you know, they were breathing and they were fighting. And the breathing part is important because what black people did under slavery, but also during the emancipations and in the aftermath of the emancipations is they created refuge. I think that's really important, you know, they created refuge. They they and, you know, people write about how under slavery running away. You have an event coming up and running away. Running away was in a very important form of survival. And sometimes it was running away for a few hours, you know, to be with your people and to, you know, be in a black church or be in a secluded area and to be able to rest. So the role of the black church, especially as a civil rights organization, as a refuge for emancipated people grows stronger and stronger. But it begins in this moment, you know, in the 1770s in the 1780s, the African Methodist Episcopalian Church, the AME is playing a really important role in Philadelphia in New York, in Boston, in providing refuge. Another thing that black communities do in the aftermath of the emancipations, these failed emancipations is not just, you know, the refuge, but also the memory, you know, the memory work that sustains and strengthens. So in my first chapter, I write a lot about the importance of the burial grounds and the importance of the basements of churches where the ancestors were kept, their bodies were kept and also how they, you know, as we know, they served in the Underground Railroad. So community, you know, people found community together, not just community with the living, but community with the ancestors as a form of strengthening them. In addition to the refuge and the breathing and the communing, like you said, they also fought, you know, and there was there and the fighting took many different forms. The resistance took many different forms and the one I could highlight now and, you know, then pause because, you know, it's more interesting to hear your questions than for me to just keep talking. The one that I find remarkable is the kind of fight of this black abolitionist in London named Otoba Kugwano, who lived and worked in London in the 1780s, 1790s, one of the first big black abolitionists himself having been enslaved and, you know, manumitted and experienced the traffic. And he wrote in an autobiography in the just turn of the 1790s that what was needed in the aftermath of slavery was in his language, restitution and reparation, you know, that's his language. And he wrote that in that time in 1790 and he went into detail about what restitution and reparation would look like. And so that's important for us to know that emancipated people, freed people were not accepting the terms of the freedom they were forced to have. There were that was forced upon them. They were contesting it, you know, and they and they contested it within the language of reparation and restitution. I think that's really important. And those contests, therefore, the ones that we're having today around reparations, they're not new. You know, these are 250 years old and they're rooted in the very moment in which a freedom was promised that was not delivered. I mean, you talk about memory work and I'd say your book is contributing to that memory work that we're doing and trying to, like, you know, tell these stories of emancipation. I was wondering was and did anybody did any black people get retribution? I mean, get any reparations after being emancipated? Were there any stories of that? There are some isolated cases. For example, there's the there's the case in in Boston of a black woman who applied for or sued for reparations. And she received one payment of reparations from a loyalist slave owner from his estate, but nothing thereafter, you know, and there was the application was for reparations for life, which she didn't receive. So it was, in some ways, another broken promise. And if we looked into the historical record, we'd find isolated cases of enslaved people having been emancipated, receiving some form of compensation, but in, you know, in very isolated and individual ways. It is it is also the case that there were a number of there was a there was a multiracial solidarity around providing restitution and reparations to enslaved people. So even though it didn't happen in practice, it doesn't mean there wasn't a lot of discussion and a lot of effort placed into making right, making history move in the right direction. So, you know, we think of I write about somebody named Elizabeth Hayrick, who is a white woman who lived in London and it's not in London, which she lived in the United Kingdom. And she wrote, you know, very passionately in the 1820s about the need to pay reparations to the freed people, not to the enslaved. And, you know, she kind of set a model for the way that some of the radical white abolitionists were writing in the 1830s. And there are other there are examples like that in the United States of multiracial communities of abolitionists demanding reparations for the enslaved. So the question becomes, why didn't it happen in any single case? You know, how is it that political elites who were on the side of slave owners managed to control the narrative and also control the direction of history in each case? To me, that's a that's an indication of how how power works, you know, how established elites kind of try to try to control the direction of history, but it doesn't mean that people were not protesting and people were not resisting and that that was not a multiracial effort going on for a very long time. Right. I mean, it seems illogical. I don't I just wonder what the reasoning would be to like give power to the slave owners to decide how they're formally enslaved, you know, get to live after that afterwards. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's it's it's it's troubling and and confusing for me to until I reflect on the fact that what was really at work here was a discussion around property and privilege, you know, and when I put it in those terms, it begins to make more sense to me. Privilege and property. So, you know, if we look at Cheryl Harris, who writes about whiteness as property, one of the things that she says is property is not just the physical things we own. Property is also our entitlements. It's our privileges. It's our benefits. It's when we walk down the street. Are we do we feel protected? Do we feel that the police have our back or do we feel like we are vulnerable? You know, that's a difference in property, according to her definition. I like that because what I think was is really going on is vested elites who by this time for centuries had developed a kind of privilege that allowed them to own other human beings. They were basically saying if you want us to give our give up our ownership and other human beings, you need to give us back or ensure for us that we're not going to lose our privilege in society. We're not going to lose our place in the racial caste system, you know. And I think what the government was saying, the governments around the Western world were saying is we will emancipate. The enslaved, but we will maintain the racial caste system intact. We're not going to change the system. We're just going to eliminate this particular institution, but we're going to keep the system of racial caste the same. So I think that's that's what was happening. And when we think about it, that's kind of what we struggle with. That continues to be the struggle, you know, that the struggle is that the system, their interests that want the system, which is based on oppression to stay the same and to include people into the system when, in fact, we need to transform the system, right? So I see that as a resonance, a very long term resonance with this history. Reminds me of that Audrey Lourd quote about, you know, not using the master's tools to take apart the master's house. Or I can't quote it correctly, but it sounds like it's the same. Yeah, exactly. And we're going to have time for questions and answers. So please, I'm sorry, I didn't mention earlier, put your questions in the Q&A portion of the webinar and we'll pick them up and you can also put them in YouTube. We did have we do have a question now about how did you plan and conduct your research for this book? And I was wondering to go along with that, you mentioned that, you know, like Britain used its emancipation process and based it on Pennsylvania's. Did you find what did you find to prove to show that? Was there something that and along with that, maybe you could talk about how you conducted your research. Sure. So, yeah, it is it is very clear that, for example, Zachary Macaulay, who was one of the most important engineers for British emancipation, he played a very important role in 1807, when the slave trade was abolished, the, you know, the transatlantic slave trade was abolished. And he was a very careful student of what was happening in Pennsylvania. And he wrote a lot about that. Thomas Clarkson, who lived a very long time and was considered, you know, along with Wilbur force, one of the most celebrated British abolitionists. You know, Clarkson was writing on abolition all the way back in the 1770s and continued to write and be an activist for the cause into the 1820s and 1830s. He also was a very close student of what was happening in the United States with the gradual emancipations. You know, the British had, of course, just lost the 13 colonies and the 13. So there was already a lot of fascination in what they were going to be doing now post independence. And there was a sense in Britain that America was a little bit like the future. You know, what America was doing is what should happen in Britain soon. So they saw the American North as futuristic and they were interested in in modeling themselves in a variety of ways on what was happening in American society. We also know that during the Bolivarian revolutions taking place, you know, from 1814 onwards as the Latin American republics are being set up, that emancipators in Latin America like Bolivar himself, they are also writing about their interest in what's happening not just in the American North, but also what's happening in Haiti. And, you know, Simone Bolivar travels to Haiti so fast because he's so fascinated by Haitian liberation. So every time there was an emancipation, it set a kind of model and that model was an international model. And we see this, you know, going down the line in each of the other emancipation emancipatory moments that that I mentioned earlier. And the question about, you know, how I conducted my research. I as a historian, I have always written books that are multi cited. So that's just part of my way. I like to make this also personal because, you know, when when a person comes out of diaspora and, you know, for me personally, you know, having roots in Bahamas, I have part of my childhood was spent in Canada, part of my childhood was in the United States. I have family members who live in India. So I have there's there is a lot of displacement, you know, in the in the family experience. What I have learned over the years is that that is a tremendous strength. You know, it took me a long time to learn that, but it's a strength because it allows me to understand to interpret things in a particular way, which is I call it eccentric. You know, I don't see things in a centered way. I see them in an eccentric way. And that means that when I ask a historical question, I'm always interested in what are the different archives that are not located close to each other? That may hold up the answer. And so for this book, I travel to, you know, to the UK. I traveled to different parts of the Caribbean. I traveled to Ghana. I did a lot of work, you know, in I travel to Mississippi. I did work in different archives in the US North. I live in Boston, so that's not so hard. But there the work of writing was the work of. Accessing different archives and different histories. And then finding out as I was writing, how they actually were woven together. I didn't quite know how closely woven together the story was until I began writing the book. Yeah, it sounds like globalization existed back then as much as it does today, huh? Yeah, yeah, sure. And absolutely. And when we think about it. What was slavery, what was slave trafficking, but a system that traveled across, you know, oceans and continents and only worked because those oceans and continents were being linked together. You know, so if you put it another way, the African diaspora is a kind of reflection or at the yield of what an early form of globalization was doing. And and I and I think if we think of it in that way, the African diaspora bears the trauma of that moment. But it also generates a tremendous creativity that came out of that, that came out of the survival and the resistance and the contestation, you know, the the forms of internationalism that that black people on different parts of the Atlantic were imagining were futuristic. You know, they were they were thinking and identifying in ways that people with republics and nation states were not able to, you know, until well into the 20th century. So there there is a kind of pan African futurism that the book also catalogs, which I find very inspiring. And I think that we see it, you know, we see it today, too. And I find that really, really inspiring. Yeah, I do, too. And I like I said, I love reading about the different stories in your book. And there's a great bibliography of some of the sources that you used in the back of the book that, you know, is where you can like learn a lot more about everything you talk about. I was wondering, what what what does the Black Ghost of the Empire? What does Black Ghost stand for in your title, Black Ghost of the Empire? Yeah. So I have a way of answering that based on a book I was reading this weekend, which I thought, you know, I really like the way that that book frames things. So the book I was reading, I am still reading is Samuel Delaney's 1994 book called Silent Interviews. And I love Samuel Delaney's work as a Black as a Black science fiction writer and, you know, a writer on a variety of amazing themes, including Black queerness. And what Delaney says is that we should be interested in excess. And what he means by excess is everything that is not written down on the page. That's where art comes from. That's where aesthetics comes from. That's where beauty lives. It lives in the excess. And I that's actually what I'm getting at when I'm interested in the Black Ghost of Empire, you know, one side of this is to say the history that is written down, which is the history of emancipations as the end of slavery in the beginning of freedom, that that history written in words in a variety of different archives, generates excess. It generates things that are unsaid, but that we know are, we know happened. We know resulted from it, but that are not written down. And I'm interested in that, you know, I'm interested in that ghost. And another way to say it, I think, is that to maintain the story that slavery ended neatly and freedom began requires that we repress societies that tell that story or actually repress societies. They're repressing the truth. And when you repress something, when you repress the excess that you're not talking about, it doesn't go away. It comes back, you know, and it haunts you. And so what what ghosts do is they haunt and all societies that have been touched by the history of slavery are haunted societies because each one is in some process of of suppression, you know, of repression. And that drives that brings us back to that that that theme that we were talking about earlier about finding a different way of relating to this history, you know, one that's not about looking away, but that's about reckoning with being in relationship to remembering. And that's why I called the book Black Ghost Vampire, because I want the book to help in that work. You know, I wanted to encourage us to do that kind of revisiting of something difficult so that we can come up with some new way of relating to it and relating to each other today, you know, based on based on that. To me, that's also one of the definitions of what reparations can look like. Right. I know that there was a great story about an abolitionist in I believe it was London and he gave a speech about like not, you know, that he was, I think, mixed, mixed with white and gave a speech about like not having friends in this family and then even knowing about the I'm going to boggle it. You know what I'm talking about, I think, right? Yeah. And I think that that talks to, you know, what we could do today as humans to try to get over some of this history. Could you speak about that a little bit? Yeah, yeah. Davidson, the person you're speaking about is Davidson, who, you know, was was a black man living in London in the 1820s, an abolitionist eventually was killed by the British government. For his work. And he he talked, you know, he talked about the feeling, the experience of being alienated and isolated and the yearning that he had for Kin, for Kin, for for kinship. And and I agree that that to me was a really powerful, you know, thing to read from a person who, you know, these are kind of the words that he spoke right before the government killed him, eliminated him. And so it makes me it also makes me think of other abolitionists, black abolitionists who were doing similar work to him at the same time, like Robert Wetterburn and they Robert Wetterburn was was contemporaneous. And Wetterburn was similar in that he was also he was born in Jamaica. He was emancipated and moved to the United Kingdom. And when he was here in the United Kingdom, he went looking for his the white father, who was a slave owner and demand and he demanded recognition from that family. And he was denied that recognition. And he spent his life not begging and pleading, you know, for recognition, but rather for writing to those who are still in Jamaica about the need to resist and to, you know, sometimes to to to resist with arms, other times to resist by running away. But he was interested in resistance and he was also interested in free villages and, you know, how black communities could come together and sustain themselves to create those free villages that I was talking about earlier. So I I I I find a lot of I guess in in people writing like Wetterburn and like Davidson, I hear and I feel pain and struggle, you know, because because what they were bearing was a lot. But I also can feel and recognize and be inspired by the way that they created something more out of that pain. They weren't I don't feel in what I've what I have seen in amongst so many of these black abolitionists who were freed into something that was not full freedom. I don't feel kind of acquiescence and I don't feel that they lose hope. What I feel is that they they learn to continue speaking up, you know, and and and they create amazing things. And the things that they create are often with others, you know. And I mean, and I think that's interesting because when as slavery robs. Asa Varkin, part of what our redress is, is to create new kinship, you know, to to create new bonds. And I feel like that's something that black communities in the diaspora continue to do. And that's something that the reparations movements today are doing, which is creating new communities to talk about what freedom looks like, what it feels like. Yeah, yeah, what it could look like. Yeah, I appreciate you mentioning all that. And so what do you think we could do with learning about all these different emancipations around the world? Like today, once we've learned, like, how could that take us into the future, knowing about knowing this history? Yeah, I think. I think one thing that it can do is it can invite us to pause and to reflect, you know, and in the pause to think about the question, what does repair really look like? Or what could it look like? Obviously, we have a very recurring pattern of disrepair. So how do we create the kinds of relationships that we need to really repair the problems that are replicating? I think that would be a really good thing that we can do. There's a Ralph, Ralph Ellison wrote a book called Juneteenth. And I write about it at the end of Black Ghost of Empire. And and Ellison has at the end of his novel, Juneteenth, he has this wonderful line, which is I'm going to probably butcher it. But it's something like, you know, how the hell do you get love into politics and compassion into history? How do you get love into politics and compassion into history? I feel like that's a great resounding question for us to sit with, you know, especially on a societal level, on a kind of multiracial level because what emancipations did, and that's what my book is saying, is that they broke things. They didn't fix things and what they broke caused more breakage. So we're in a phase now where we have to turn to the work of how do we fix and how do we heal? And and that's really, really important work, but it's it's the work of our time. That's a yeah, that's what the book wants to say. Great. I appreciate you saying that. And I definitely appreciate the appreciated the book. Here's I'm showing my copy. I take off book covers so I have to fix it. But yeah, read the book Black Ghost of Empire, the Long Death of Slavery and the future, the failure of emancipation. And, you know, try to think about, too, like how how how can we repair as as fellow countrymen or fellow people of the world? Right. To to help repair this history. I know that there are efforts in San Francisco through our Reparations Advisory Committee and as well in California, who's also put out a report like we were talking about earlier. So really, thank you so much for this conversation. Do you have any last words before we sign off? We have three minutes. This is great. Thanks so much, Shana. It's great to be in conversation and appreciate the invitation. Right. Great. So yes, thanks. Thanks again to Chris Manjupra for a conversation around his book, The Black Ghost of Empire. You'll be able to watch this on SFPL YouTube page. And please check out SFPL.org for a variety of programs that we'll be offering through our Summer Stride 2022 program. And visit SFPL.org as well to sign up. Thanks again, Chris. I really appreciated this talk and hope you have a good rest of your day. Thanks so much. OK, bye, Shana. All right, bye-bye.