Historicizing Freedom of Movement: Memory and Exile in Political Context

This essay historicizes the concept of “freedom of movement” in the context of the late eighteenth-century desire to distinguish the free movement of emigrants from the coerced movement of slaves. It explores the distinction between free and unfree mobility by interrogating eighteenth-century ideas about the way memory tied (or did not tie) a person to a place. It proposes that, during this period, two forms of memory—which it dubs “exilic memory” and “diasporic memory”—were placed in ever sharper opposition to one another. Eighteenth-century abolitionists tried to prove that slaves had exilic memory in order to claim that they, like emigrants, were true exiles, and deserved the right to return to, or at least properly remember, their native lands.