I was perusing my department's website yesterday and was surprised by what I found. On the faculty webpage, instructors and professors are expected to list their interests or research subjects. One in particular stood out. The following are the historian's list of interests, please note the last one.
• American Revolution
• Emancipation
• Slavery
• Political Ideology
• Free Blacks
What does "Free Blacks" mean? Is this a common subject title in contemporary American history? Please don't get me wrong, I'm more perplexed than offended (even amused at the awkardness of such a phrase), but there must be a more "academic-like" manner to describe this subject other than "Free Blacks". I mean if emancipation is already up there, can we just use "post-emancipation" or "post-slavery", after all isn't the current political and ideological discourse concerning Black people in the U.S. an extension of the rupture of slavery/emancipation? Furthermore, since the idea that "Blacks" are "free" (especially politically and ideologically) at present, is still in debate, shouldn't this historian be more sophisticated in describing research subjects? This of course isn't merely a nitpicking rant, but rather a question of liberalism and power in the academy. Whether as lecturers or authors, professors at the end of the day are teachers who teach their subjects (I am speaking of subject more in terms of research interest rather than individuals). This reality leads me back to a Foucault and the subject. For example in order for the historian to truly become better disciplined, the historian must know his/her subject through objectifying it. In other words, to truly be interested in a subject, one must not care about that subject.
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Language structures and filters all meaning and perception---it's indescribably important and inescapably political, and the meanings it casts are constantly contested. Word-concepts like "free" and "black" are battlegrounds, and the ways in which they are used shape our understandings of past and present. "Freedom" perhaps more than any other term is the standard of liberalism, and liberal hegemony relies partly on the ease with which the meaning of the term can "float." Legal freedom---which is what the professor means, and what liberalism champions---both implies and stands in for equality. This conceptual fuzziness, this implication of equality in a system that relies on inequality, leaves an opening for other groups to cast their own meanings of "freedom" ... and perhaps encourages them to work within the system in doing so.
However, as it stands, the most solid academic definition of "freedom" is legal and defined in relation to the state, and the professor's usage is no more or less political and considerably less awkward than other terms used to refer to those inhabitants of a slave nation marked by their bodies as members of a slave race, but marked by the law as free. The other term often used, "freedmen and -women" is longer, more codified, and less accurate (many were not freed but born free, and there were freed whites tho the term does not mean to include them) and it raises problems of agency, implying an active emancipator and a passive emancipee. The terms "post-emancipation" and "post-slavery" refer to the period after 1865, and they are limited to those who had been slaves. The term "free blacks" is problematic on several levels, but the problems are as historical as they are political, and the professor's work
begins to address that history, laying the groundwork for a critique of the concept of freedom, which could be employed by others in a critique of liberalism more broadly.
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