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
