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The Paradox of Freedom
A Biographical Dialogue
David Scott (Author), Orlando Patterson (Author)
9781509551170, Polity Press
Paperback / softback, published 12 May 2023
296 pages
22.6 x 15.2 x 2.3 cm, 0.454 kg
"The Paradox of Freedom retraces the unique odyssey of the world's most eminent scholar of slavery and race in history, at the unlikely crossroads of Jamaica, literature, New Left politics, and sociology at Harvard. Read it: you will be swept along, thrilled, and educated all at once."
Loïc Wacquant, University of California, Berkeley
"Forged in a crucible of life experience as a Jamaican, Orlando Patterson's lifelong exploration of the dialectical tension between freedom and slavery is brilliantly elucidated through dialogic conversation with David Scott, who traces the trajectory of a remarkable and still unfolding intellectual and artistic journey."
John Bodel, Brown University
"I believe The Paradox of Freedom is the best single-volume introduction to Patterson's work currently in print."
Christopher Muller, European Journal of Sociology
"The Paradox of Freedom allows us to appreciate the extent to which Patterson is a West Indian intellectual, part of an intellectual tradition that includes key figures such as C.L.R. James and Eric Williams."
Adom Getachew, European Journal of Sociology
"One thing that has always been compelling about Patterson's work, which comes across with special intensity in the interview with David Scott that forms the core of The Paradox of Freedom, is a determined willingness to face reality. Not just reality in its generic, contradictory messiness, but in its tragic and morally unsettling objectivity."
Alexander Gourevitch, European Journal of Sociology
"A stirring work, embodying a profound intellectual biography of Patterson as a person and of the collective experience of the anti-colonial and postcolonial eras."
Aziz Rana, European Journal of Sociology
"Over six decades, Orlando Patterson has produced a body of work characterized by exceptional diversity, breadth, depth, scholarship, audacity, and impact."
Christoph Menke, European Journal of Sociology
The Paradox of Freedom is an exploration of the life and work of Orlando Patterson, probing the relationship between the circumstances of his life from their beginnings in rural Jamaica to the present and the complex development of his intellectual work. A novelist and historical sociologist with an orientation toward public engagement, Patterson exemplifies one way of being a Jamaican and Black Atlantic intellectual. At the generative center of Patterson’s work has been a fundamental inquiry into the internal dynamics of slavery as a mode of social and existential domination. What is most provocatively significant in his work on slavery is the way it yields a paradoxical insight into the problem of freedom – namely, that freedom was born existentially and historically from the degradation and parasitic inhumanity of slavery and was as much the creation of the enslaved as of their enslavers. The Paradox of Freedom elucidates the pathways by which Patterson has both uncovered the relationship between domination and freedom and engaged intellectually and publicly with the struggles for equality and decolonization among descendants of the enslaved. It will be of great interest to students and scholars throughout the humanities and social sciences and to anyone interested in the work of one of the most important public intellectuals of our time.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INTRODUCTION: ORLANDO PATTERSON AND THE PARADOX OF FREEDOM’S BIRTH FROM SLAVERY The Paradox of Slavery and Freedom The Existential Birth of Freedom from Slavery The Historical Birth of Freedom from Slavery Dialogical Generations, Intellectual Traditions, and Problem-Spaces Notes THE PARADOX OF FREEDOM A Mother’s Project Years of Decolonization Kingston College University College of the West Indies The Repairer of the Breach The Rise of the Social Sciences The London School of Economics West Indian Fiction The Children of Sisyphus The Sociology of Slavery The Caribbean Artists Movement An Absence of Ruins Returning Home Not Much of a Joiner Die the Long Day Arrival at Harvard Engaging Black America Making Public Policy in Socialist Jamaica Slavery and Social Death The Paradox of Freedom The Ordeal of Integration Rituals of Blood The Confounding Island The Perspective of an Historical Sociologist Notes INDEX
Subject Areas: Sociology & anthropology [JH]
