Black Ghost of Empire: The long death of slavery and the failure of emancipation
Allen Lane, $45 hb, 253 pp
History
‘Linger with the voids’
Examining the relationship between past and present
by Georgina Arnott •
Kris Manjapra (photograph by Beowulf Sheehan/History Extra)
‘To fully understand why the shadow of slavery haunts us today, we must confront the flawed way that it ended.’ This premise guides the third book of Kris Manjapra, a Bahamian of African and Indian descent and history professor at Massachusetts’s Tufts University. As Manjapra invites us to see, the ‘voids’ in his family’s history reflect the pernicious afterlife of five hundred years of Atlantic slavery; his loss just one of its manifold legacies.
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