This article examines the significance of spatial and landscape experience in the constitution of generative relations in village settlements established on former plantations during the post-emancipation period in Guyana, then British Guiana. Working closely with lesser-known writings of Guyanese historian, Walter Rodney, on labour in the post-emancipation period, the article is attentive to Rodney's concern to ground the historical question in a manner that aims at the concrete experience of persons. This intention suggests theoretical problems regarding the relation between spatiality and generativity. The problems are implied in a surprising meditation of Edmund Husserl on the "relation of slavery" (Sklavenverhältnis). Taken in the wider context of Husserl's writings on space, embodiment, and intersubjectivity, this meditation on the "relation of slavery", the article proposes, draws our attention to the spatiality of emancipation in a way that has implications for our understanding of the generative possibilities that emerged in the post-emancipation period.
Tao DuFour (Thu,) studied this question.