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Paper short abstract

Through life-history interviews in Barbados, this paper examines how enslavement and racial and social hierarchies are lived and remembered, showing how micro-histories turn colonial pasts into embodied, emotional, and morally charged personal and collective experiences.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how the large-scale history of enslavement and racial hierarchy in Barbados is lived, remembered, and narrated through individual biographies in the ethnographic present. Drawing on oral history interviews, I explore how colonial violence becomes embedded in personal memory, moral subjectivity, and everyday understandings of belonging.

I focus on life stories that reveal how plantation histories persist beyond archives and monuments, shaping lived experiences across generations. One interlocutor recounts a childhood memory of collecting fallen coconuts near his home on a former plantation, only to be expelled by a white plantation manager who told him that “Black people should not be on the plantation unless they are working.” The following day, the manager cut down all nearby coconut trees. This episode illustrates how colonial property regimes, racialized exclusion, and historical power relations continue to structure embodied memory, spatial belonging, and moral injury.

I argue that such micro-histories do more than illustrate colonial legacies; they actively reshape how history is understood, contested, and emotionally inhabited. Through narrative, people negotiate dignity, resentment, resilience, and historical accountability, transforming abstract pasts into lived moral worlds.

By foregrounding biography, affect, and memory, this paper contributes to debates on “history in person,” political emotions, and decolonial anthropology. It shows how personal narratives operate as sites where history becomes intimate, ethically charged, and politically meaningful, revealing how postcolonial subjects live with, resist, and reinterpret the enduring presence of the plantation in contemporary Barbados.