The recent Black Lives Matter protests and the movement's fierce response to centuries-old systemic racism in the United States sprang spontaneously from the shock effect of videos showing George Floyd pinned by the neck for nine and one-half minutes under the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer while he lamented again and again, “I can't breathe.” He repeated these words twenty-seven times before expiring. In 2014, Eric Garner, also African American, died pronouncing these same words while being held in a chokehold by a New York police officer, also white. In his farewell address to the British people delivered in London on March 30, 1847, Frederick Douglass declared, “Every bayonet, sword, musket, and cannon has its deadly aim at the bosom of the negro: 3,000,000 of the coloured race are lying there under the heels of 17,000,000 of their white creatures” (1982b, 22). Recalling the well-known cry of the...
“Liberty or Death!”: An Archaeology of the Freedom Narrative in the Age of Revolution
William Boelhower is visiting professor, Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, Italy, and the Robert Thomas and Rita Wetta Adams professor emeritus, Louisiana State University. Recent publications include Immigrant Autobiography (Bordighera, 2021); Atlantic Studies, Prospects and Challenges (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2019); and editor, Introduction, New Orleans in the Atlantic World. Between Land and Sea (London and New York: Routledge, 2010). Recent essays include “Narrating and Archiving Social Movements and Migration,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (forthcoming, 2022); “Conflict,” A Cultural History of the Sea, the Nineteenth Century, ed. Margaret Cohen (London: Bloomsbury, 2019); and “Three early modern genres: A microhistorical approach to ‘World Literature,’” eds. Sorcha Gunne and Neil Lazarus, Atlantic Studies: Global Currents 16, no. 1 (March 2019).
William Boelhower; “Liberty or Death!”: An Archaeology of the Freedom Narrative in the Age of Revolution. CR: The New Centennial Review 1 November 2022; 22 (3): 119–139. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.22.3.0119
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