Freedom and Other Everyday Objects: Black Petitionary Practice in Sierra Leone

This chapter follows self-liberated Black refugees from New York to Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone in the early 1780s–1790s. While historians typically describe the refugees either as Black Loyalists or as agents of U.S. liberal democracy, this chapter looks to their deployments of a revolutionary print form—the petition—for a fuller sense of their collective politics. My discussion draws on the work of Jacques Rancière, Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, and Stefano Harney to show how petitionary form is transformed in the hands of the Sierra Leonean refugees, who repurpose its conventions of political address to serve their needs on a day-to-day basis. Refusing crude dichotomies that segregate the implicitly elevated sphere of liberty from its raw materials, the refugees’ petitionary practice redefines revolution as a quotidian struggle. The refugees’ writings thus enact forms of political expression and collectivization that are not based on rational self-possession, but rather on shared experiences of need that permeate everyday life.