Archaeology below the Cliff: Race, Class, and Redlegs in Barbadian Sugar Society
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BOOK REVIEW
Archaeology below the Cliff: Race, Class, and Redlegs in Barbadian Sugar Society Matthew C. Reilly, University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, 2019. 247 pp., 23 figs., 1 table, index. $59.95 cloth Konrad A. Antczak Accepted: 24 June 2020 # Society for Historical Archaeology 2020
Candid, yet sensitive, methodologically rigorous, and conceptually fresh, Archaeology below the Cliff is a noteworthy book. In it Matthew C. Reilly expertly guides us on a tour into the shadowy underbelly of colonial Barbadian sugar society, where this time we are not presented with new archaeological perspectives on the lives of the island’s enslaved, but rather, with the unfamiliar lives of its poor whites—the Redlegs. Much maligned throughout the centuries and cast off to the rugged margins of the plantation landscape, the Redlegs have been widely misrepresented and misunderstood. By carefully weaving together archaeological evidence with documentary and oral sources, Reilly provides an inclusive interpretation of the poor whites and sets their record straight, returning them their rightful dignity in Barbadian and Caribbean history. In the introduction, the author lays out his research strategy and reveals that his original research design underwent significant reimaginings in the field by virtue of his interactions with Barbadians and his growing awareness of the local political climate. This resulted in a nuanced and organic project that was attuned to and shaped by local contingencies. Navigating local politics, colonial/postcolonial legacies, and past and present conceptions of race and class that have stigmatized poor whites, Reilly negotiates an archaeological analysis that is “careful to avoid reifying stereotypes” or to
K. A. Antczak (*) Departament d’Humanitats, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain e-mail: [email protected]
“legitimate discriminatory ideologies” (p. 18). He sets a firm decolonializing tone to his study in which, as an outsider, he prioritizes self-reflexivity and situated openness and stresses the importance of treating people in the field as people and not as data. This scholarly yet refreshingly human sensitivity permeates the book. The premise of the book is that, even though they have been presented as an anomalous and exceptional case, the Redlegs have been inextricably bound up with local plantation society. In chapter 1 Reilly questions why the Barbadian poor whites have been viewed as idle, isolated, and exceptional. Interrogating this “poor white problem,” he reveals how the overbearing designs of modernity and top-down ideologies of race and class have shaped this portrayal. He mobilizes a broad range of local and global anthropological, historical, and postcolonial scholarship to challenge these dominant discourses. By going beyond the tired planter/enslaved dichotomy in historical archaeology to explore the heterogeneous white population and nonenslaved laborers, he suggests that the Redlegs, living in tenantries on the margins of the plantation landscape, did not neatly fit
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