Tom Zoellner’s book Island on Fire is an important contribution to our understanding of what Saidiya Hartman has described as the “afterlife” of slavery. Zoellner documents in vivid detail the base violence and inhumanity of institutionalised slavery in plantation-era Jamaica. But he also tells a story of irrepressible resistance and self-organisation that generated the slave rebellion of 1831.
It was a mass uprising that became a critical turning point in the demise of a system that had sustained Europe’s empires for centuries. Island on Fire is not light reading. The details recounted by Zoellner, who draws on extensive historical documentation, are often harrowing. However, his storytelling ability makes this history extremely readable, if not less painful.
Suburb of Hell
The author describes white plantation society in colonial Jamaica as “a suburb of Hell,” where “the stultifying class system that reigned back home in England was completely
— source jacobinmag.com | Abigail Bakan | 18/Jul/2021