Shadow that Lingers : What Slavery Teaches Us about Freedom

Cooper shows how the reaction to slavery unveiled the characteristics of freedom and established the foundation for the human rights movement. The book demonstrates how the legacy of slavery continues to shape individual identity as well as the nature of state power to exercise discipline and control over its citizens.

Allan D. Cooper demonstrates how the resistance to slavery served to unveil the nature of freedom that made possible the abolition movement and anti-colonial struggles. The corpus of human rights law that has evolved over the past two centuries is constructed around the negation of slavery. This book analyzes how slavery mutated into racial identification that governments enforce against their own population to advance more efficient methods of discipline and control. The Shadow that Lingers reveals how race is used to traumatize human beings by embodying inferiority and powerlessness, even for whites that claim privilege under racialized regimes. As an ideology of power, race becomes contextualized to fit local cultures, resulting in contradictory understandings of race from one culture to another. This book focuses attention on how racial hybridity among mixed-race communities poses challenges for racial purists, and how such communities endeavor to construct racial identities that often differentiate themselves from being black. The book concludes with an analysis of how the pursuit of freedom inevitably requires the reification of a non-racial identity.