ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the 1794 trial held in New Orleans against Pierre Bailly, a free mulatto, to offer a new interpretation of popular political cultures shaped by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution in late eighteenth-century America. It highlights the significance of the embodied subjective experiences and unique sensibilities of the free Afrodescendant populations in the Caribbean and Atlantic World colonies. These populations, with their embodied and emotional memories rooted in a history of slavery and subjugation, played a pivotal role in adapting and incorporating revolutionary and libertarian ideas into distinct colonial contexts. Recognizing the affective, embodied aspects of colonial historical subjects can provide new insights into the political agency of American populations and the construction of alternative modernities.
