MATTHEW REILLY
Assistant Professor The City College of New York

The 1865 sailing of the Cora, from the Caribbean island of Barbados to the newly-created African nation of Liberia, marked a significant moment in colonial, Atlantic world history. Carrying 346 African-descendant subjects of the British empire, the migrants on board, many of them formerly enslaved, were part of a colonizing mission to repatriate sons and daughters of Africa who would simultaneously assist in building a civilized, industrious, and Christian nation. These intrepid settlers carried with them worldviews based on the lived realities of a racialized, colonial plantation society in the West Indies. Building on Fields and Fields’ notion of racecraft, I explore the everyday elements and broader structural worlds of racial being that were made and remade in Barbados and Liberia. Through an expansion of African-Diasporic archaeology that includes post-emancipation freedom-making, I suggest that archaeology can be a means through which to engage with contemporary postcoloniality in the Caribbean and post-conflict heritage in West Africa.