UC Irvine

This dissertation asks how the end of slavery affected ideas of community belonging and social authority. It illuminates the tension created between societal perceptions of a subject’s race based on physical appearance and contradictory perceptions based on behavior and allegiance. These conflicts engendered exclusion of those said to have “black skin and white hearts” or seen as “white niggers,” undermining radical and liberal visions of emancipation. Tracing transnational circulations of people and ideologies, the dissertation shows that similar notions of racial authenticity operated in the Caribbean (c.1823-1866) and US (c.1861-1900), challenging exceptionalist narratives of American racial history. Though many reformers believed emancipation would eradicate racial difference, subjects in every instance grounded authority to enact their vision of emancipation in claims of purity. While research on the relationship between race and slavery tends to focus on origins, it is only by examining the formal end of bondage that we can understand how race survived slavery’s nominal demise to continue as a source of social division today.