The Audacity Comes From Here: On emancipation, scaffolding and the work of self-authorship

What gives you the audacity?

The audacity to enter unfamiliar spaces, convene conversations and develop ideas that exceed the boundaries others have drawn around your expertise. The audacity to believe that where you stand gives you something consequential to say about the world.

I recently asked myself that question and the answer was that the audacity comes from here.....my island home of Saint Lucia. An island that taught me to look beyond the horizon, an island made small on maps but never contained by them. The island taught me that where you are born has little to do with the scale of your contribution.

View from the balcony of my childhood home in La Clery, Castries, Saint Lucia. 2 June 2026.

The long project of freedom

But as my island home and the Caribbean region celebrate Emancipation Day to mark the abolition of slavery across the British Caribbean on 1 August 1834 , that answer takes on a deeper meaning. My here is much, much bigger.

My audacity is also historical and collective. It was carried across generations by people who imagined freedom while standing inside a world built to deny it.

The audacity is also historical and collective.

It comes from a long line of people who refused the limits imposed upon them by chains, imagined freedom before they could fully possess it and created possibilities they might never live to see. The audacity is my inheritance.

This is why audacity remains necessary to the continuing project of emancipation. The abolition of slavery ended the legal ownership of Black bodies, but it did not complete the work of freedom. Emancipation began a much longer struggle to claim the authority to define ourselves, interpret the world, build institutions, produce knowledge and imagine futures that sometimes feel ever suspended.

Audacity then is not arrogance; it is the confidence to believe that you can interpret the world from where you stand and that the knowledge produced from that position has value. It is the willingness to imagine beyond structures that have defined your possibilities and to create spaces where that imagination can take material form.

We are not scaffolding

The history of the Caribbean helps explain why the project of emancipation remains unfinished. The Caribbean was made the plantation centre of the colonial world. Its land, economies, institutions and social relations were reorganised around the enslavement of African people and the extraction of their labour.

Caribbean societies became essential to constructing a global economic order while being denied authority over the systems of power and wealth they helped to build.

The abolition of slavery took effect on 1 August 1834 but full emancipation didn't occur until 1840.

We were made integral to somebody else's systems; we were made scaffolding.

Scaffolding has a particular use: unless you understood the design you could make mistake it for the building itself. But scaffolding's sole purpose is to provide support while a structure rises.

It does not determine the architecture, decide what is being built, whose purposes the structure will serve or who will eventually inhabit it. When construction is complete, the scaffolding disappears from view.

The image of scaffolding offers a way of understanding not only the historical positioning of Caribbean societies, but a pattern that continues to shape nations, regions and individuals. Countries and regions may be valued for what they contribute to projects conceived elsewhere through their labour, natural resources, markets, strategic location, data, cultural production or political legitimacy.

They may be invited into global conversations without possessing equivalent authority to establish the agenda, define the problem or determine the future being constructed.

People may be invited to help build the road but not seen as eligible to lay claim to its destination.

The same pattern can emerge inside institutions. People may be invited into projects because their knowledge, identity, experience and relationships enable something to be built. Yet the invitation to contribute does not necessarily include the authority to shape what is being constructed or inform what questions are being asked.

Nor does it guarantee that their ideas, ambitions or intellectual development will be recognised and nurtured. People may be invited to help build the road but not seen as eligible to lay claim to its destination.

Girls preparing for assembly at my alma mater, St Joseph’s Convent, Castries, Saint Lucia. No teenage girl dreams of becoming scaffolding.

From representation to authorship

The issue is therefore not just representation but authorship. Authorship is not simply about having our voices heard. It is about creating the conditions in which our questions, our histories and our ways of seeing become legitimate starting points for knowledge rather than contributions to somebody else's conversation.

What could I create, what futures can I make real if I stopped asking this system to contain the full range of my imagination?

Authorship moves us beyond asking how we secure a fuller place within an existing system to asking: What could I create if I stopped asking this system to contain the full range of my imagination?

That I believe is the project of emancipation in our time: the move to authorship and the refusal by individuals, nations and regions to remain scaffolding for visions conceived elsewhere when they possess the capacity to construct their own.

The movement from scaffolding to authorship is not a rejection of institutions or of the work of transforming them. Many institutions exercise too much influence over our lives for us to abandon that work. But transformation cannot become the limit of our imagination.

If all our intellectual energy is spent trying to make existing institutions and systems more accommodating, we risk neglecting the equally important work of creating those of our own.

That is what the continuing project of emancipation demands. It asks individuals, nations and regions not only to participate in shaping the future, but also to create the spaces from which that future can be imagined.

This is the conviction from which I founded Saltwater Insights. Based on the simple proposition that where we stand shapes what we can see, Saltwater Insights embodies my commitment to constructing knowledge from where we stand and to creating a home for ideas that do not ask permission to exist.

It explores development, governance, institutions and power through political economy, history and lived experience from the premise that the Caribbean, Small Island Developing States and the wider Global South are not merely places where theory is applied but places from which theory is made.

It is a refusal to be scaffolding for visions conceived elsewhere and claim to the authorship to ask different questions, develop different explanations and imagine different futures.

My hope is that we continue the long project of emancipation... to claim authorship over the questions we ask, the knowledge we create, and the futures we imagine.

So, as the sun sets on another Emancipation Day, my hope is that we continue the long project of our emancipation. That we continue to claim authorship over the questions we ask, the knowledge we create and the futures we imagine. And that we continue to have the audacity to create new spaces of our own. After all, the audacity was carried through history, held collectively and passed down as our inheritance.