Pathologizing Black Bodies reconsiders the black body as a site of cultural and corporeal interchange; one involving violence and oppression, leaving memory and trauma sedimented in cultural conventions, political arrangements, social institutions and, most significantly, materially and symbolically engraved upon the body, with "the self" often deprived of agency and sovereignty. Consisting of three sections, this text focuses on works of the 20th and 21st century fiction and cultural narratives by mainly African American authors, aiming to highlight the different ways (...) in which race has been pathologized in America and examine how the legacies of plantation ideology have been metaphorically inscribed on black bodies. The variety of analytical approaches and thematic foci with respect to theories and discourses surrounding race and the body allow us to delve into this thorny territory in the hope of gaining perspectives about how African-American lives are still shaped and haunted by the legacies of plantation slavery. Furthermore, this volume offers insights into the politics of eugenic corporeality in an illustrative dialogue with the lasting carceral and agricultural effects of life on a plantation. Tracing the degradation and suppression of the black body, both individual and social, this text includes analysis of the pseudo-scientific discourse of social Darwinism and eugenics; the practice of mass incarceration and the excessive punishment of black bodies; and food apartheid and USDA practices of depriving black farmers of individual autonomy and collective agency. Based on such an interplay of discourses, methodologies and perspectives, this volume aims to use literature to further examine the problematic relationship between race and the body and stress that black lives do indeed matter in the USA. (shrink)

This essay examines the aims, labor regime, and workers of the St. Vincent botanic garden to highlight differences in the infrastructure of government‐funded botany across the British empire. It argues that slavery was a foundational element of society and natural history in the Anglo‐Caribbean, and the St. Vincent botanic garden was both put into the service of slavery and transformed by it. When viewed from the Caribbean context and the perspective of enslaved workers, the St. Vincent garden's affiliation (...) with imperial improvement becomes less salient than its support of the status quo of slavery as a system and labor regime. The garden was dependent on enslaved laborers, yet the conditions of work and contemporary prejudices led superintendents to see them as undifferentiated labor. The politics of the archive make it impossible for historians to reconstruct the experiences of the garden's enslaved workers as individuals, including the specific labor that they performed or skills that they possessed. Plantation slavery's appropriation of and influence on the infrastructure of colonial botany through the St. Vincent botanic garden suggests that historians should center the local logics of the societies where scientific knowledge making took place to reveal the many meanings of science. (shrink)

Plantation slavery in the New World, in particular its relationship to the emergence of capitalism in Europe and North America, has long been a subject of debate and discussion among historians and social scientists. While there are literally thousands of monographs studying various aspects of chattel slavery in the US South, the Caribbean and Brazil, only a handful of works attempt to provide a synthetic account of its rise and decline from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Few (...) scholars, on the Left or Right, have made as profound a contribution to such a history as Robin Blackburn. Blackburn’s latest work, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights, does not simply summarise and update his earlier work, but extends his analysis to the rise and decline of ‘second slavery’ in nineteenth-century Cuba, Brazil and the US South. The American Crucible provides a multi-causal explanation of the origins and abolition of New World plantation slavery, examining the complex interactions between the rise of capitalism, political crises in the metropolitan countries, the transformation of popular and elite attitudes toward slavery, and the struggles of the slaves themselves. However, Blackburn’s inability to grapple with the specific structure and dynamics of capitalist and slave social-property relations, and their changing historical relationship, weakens key elements of his analysis. (shrink)

This essay develops a loosely understood Marxist notion of material conditions in light of the Caribbean plantation complex. The racial order endemic to the plantation and its continuation in post-emancipation contexts undermines any spurious base/superstructure distinction at work in an understanding of material conditions even in some accounts of racial capitalism. Material conditions are as ideological as they are “infrastructural” (Sylvia Wynter) in being ongoingly articulated by anti-black coordinates of sense. The ongoing actualization of the racial order of (...) slavery is understood not as required by altered material conditions, but rather as altering material conditions. The essay considers the continuity of the racial order of the plantation through the contract in a specific site, namely, post-emancipation Puerto Rico. (shrink)

Between February of 1797 and July of 1798, Francisco Barrera y Domingo, a Spanish surgeon, wrote an extensive treatise on slave medicine in the Caribbean. Entitled Reflexiones Historico Fisico Naturales Medico Quirurgicas, this 894-page manuscript accounts for eighteen years of its author's professional practice in the region. It provides a clear picture of daily life in the sugar plantations as seen through the eyes of a modest surgeon, thus presenting us with an opportunity to explore the ideological and intellectual universe (...) of this “invisible” category of colonial practitioners. Despite its importance, Barrera's Reflexiones remains almost unknown. Only a handful of scholars have even acknowledged the existence of the volume and no systematic analysis of its content is available in English. (shrink)

Marx’s critical theory of slavery is the operational subtext throughout his critique of political economy. For Marx, the movement from modern slavery to capital represents a historical transition of significance, not only (or foremost) as an empirical transition but also as a transformation of social substance. Marx reveals why, in retrospect, production based on slavery, as logical configuration, must give way to the generalising logic of wage labour. Marx’s critical theory of slavery historicises wage labour (qua (...) category) as the dissolution and inversion of enslaved labour (qua category). Plantation slavery production in the colonised territories initiates a qualitative development that constitutes the historical condition for the emergence of a mode of sociality that we can call ‘value’. Marx’s theoretical account of modern slavery is a lever in his broader critique of capital and is fundamentally distinct from empirical, historical accounts. (shrink)

Mississippi Representative L.Q.C. Lamar was one of the most aggressive slavery supporters in Congress on the eve of the Civil War. Lamar had a personal stake in slavery, owning a plantation and 26 slaves in north Mississippi. In a speech delivered at the height of national debate on the slavery issue, Lamar attacked abolitionism and sought to justify slavery based on the supposed natural inferiority of blacks. His chief authority in the speech was Hegel.

ABSTRACTThe Scottish Enlightenment has long been identified with abolitionism because of the writings of the moral and economic philosophers and the absence of slaves in Scotland itself. However, Scots were disproportionately represented in the ownership, management, and especially medical treatment of slaves in the British Caribbean. Sugar and cotton flowed into Glasgow and young, educated Scots looking for work as traders, bookkeepers, doctors made the return trip back to the Caribbean to manage the plantations. Chemically trained doctors and agriculturalists tested (...) their theories in the plantations and developed new theories based on their experimentation on the land and slaves. In foregrounding the participation of Scottish trained chemists in the practice of slavery, I argue that the development of eighteenth-century chemistry and the broader intellectual Enlightenment were inextricably entangled with the economic Improvement Movement and the colonial economy of the British slave trade. (shrink)

The Emancipation Proclamation is one of the most important documents in American history. As we commemorate its 150th anniversary, what do we really know about those who experienced slavery? In their pioneering book, Envisioning Emancipation, renowned photographic historian Deborah Willis and historian of slavery Barbara Krauthamer have amassed 150 photographs—some never before published—from the antebellum days of the 1850s through the New Deal era of the 1930s. The authors vividly display the seismic impact of emancipation on African Americans (...) born before and after the Proclamation, providing a perspective on freedom and slavery and a way to understand the photos as documents of engagement, action, struggle, and aspiration. Envisioning Emancipation illustrates what freedom looked like for black Americans in the Civil War era. From photos of the enslaved on plantations and African American soldiers and camp workers in the Union Army to Juneteenth celebrations, slave reunions, and portraits of black families and workers in the American South, the images in this book challenge perceptions of slavery. They show not only what the subjects emphasized about themselves but also the ways Americans of all colors and genders opposed slavery and marked its end. Filled with powerful images of lives too often ignored or erased from historical records, Envisioning Emancipation provides a new perspective on American culture. (shrink)

To rethink history from the perspective of an economy of affects as they are engendered by beings ousted from the definition of the human, I will draw on two Caribbean texts, Anim-Addo's Imoinda: Or She Mho will Lose Her Name and Philip's Zong!. This essay discusses how these two Caribbean texts counterwrite the history of the slave plantation by staging and embodying the work of what I call an affective memory drawn from the history of the black subject as (...) a history of absence and reconstellated in the present as a history of being and community. This affective memory represents the being of the ‘living corpse’ and her making of a community as the subject of a new polity, the polity of decolonised beings. By drawing on these texts to demonstrate how they write the history of spectres, ruins and other communities, I discuss affective memory not as the absolute possession of a body, but rather as the alienated property of the body that can be reclaimed only by a community that, precarious and tentative as it is for it is a community of slaves and subjected bodies, remains the only promise for the future. (shrink)

This article considers the expropriation, description, and cultivation of land as a central problem for media history and political ecology. Recent work in the history and theory of media has posited the cultivation of land as a primordial cultural technique or a material operation that underlies signification. Such work stops short, however, of considering that operation—which begins with the drawing of lines on the ground—as a form of labor and hence a dimension of political economy comparable to Rousseau’s account of (...) the origin of property. John Bellamy Foster has shown how Marx’s early development of a neo-Epicurean materialism led, when informed by mid-nineteenth-century scientific agriculture, to what Foster calls Marx’s theory of “metabolic rift,” the disruption of the metabolic interchange between nature and society mediated by human labor. This article returns to the unfinished business of critical theory that rejoins the critique of culture with the critique of nature, by showing how a mediapolitics of land governs the dialectical processes described by eco-Marxists like Foster. Specifically, the article considers the material production of land for both agriculture and industry, informed by scientific agriculture and with plantation slavery as a limit case, through the work of Henry Charles Carey. Rethinking the political economy of land in this way extends the cultural materialism predominant in media history and theory into a more fully historical materialism adequate to an ecological situation in which all that may once have been solid has truly melted, or burned, into air. (shrink)

In 1815, two benevolent organizations commenced operation in Antigua, the Female Refuge Society based in English Harbour and the Distressed Females’ Friend Society based in St John's. The driving force behind the establishment of the Female Refuge Society, on which the Distressed Females’ Friend Society was modelled, was Anne Hart Gilbert (1768–1834), the earliest known published African-Caribbean woman writer, the agent of the Female Refuge Society. The organizations were run on principle by women and the executive committees were multi-racial. They (...) accepted female subscribers only, but donations from women and men. For Gilbert, an affective poetics of life story and writing is crucial to the formation of an ethical community that she situates as an emerging and modernizing counter-culture to plantation slavery. Her civic ethic of caring centres on development and engagement of the ‘finer sensibilities’ in creating ‘bands of amity and love that are the ornament and glory of our nature’ (Female Refuge Society, 1822: 12). The annual reports of the Female Refuge Society had a profound impact on the direction of female anti-slavery activism in Britain. In this essay, I analyse the inscription of affect in extant letters, annual reports and published material about the work of the Female Refuge Society and Distressed Females’ Friend Society. I am interested in how the women in the Creole organizations and their male supporters represent their affective relations to the objects of their benevolence and appeals for funding, and how these relations are racialized, gendered and classed in the grounding of activism. I draw out the local and British affective reception of these relations. In the field of affect studies, the essay might be compared with projects that address ‘the cultural and historical contingency of emotions, and … emotions and emotion cultures as contingent technologies of subjects’ (Koivunen, 2010: 19). (shrink)

"East India Sugar Not Made By Slaves"-with these words on a sugar bowl, consumers of the early nineteenth century declared their power to change the global economy. Bronwen Everill examines how abolitionists in the Atlantic world shaped emerging ideas of ethical commerce to fight the system of plantation slavery that had become an engine of modern capitalism. How did consumers define ethical commerce? How did producers create markets for their products? Everill focuses on the everyday economy of the (...) Atlantic world rather than on the more familiar boycott movements against slave-produced goods. Different approaches to making money in ethical commerce-through commercial agriculture, government contracts, international trade, and money management-shaped the relationship between production, consumption, and morality in ways that determined how slavery and freedom came to be defined in the market economy. Companies such as Macaulay & Babington in Sierra Leone, Roberts & Colson in Liberia, and Forster & Smith in the Gambia used commercial networks and government subsidies to make "legitimate" commerce pay. Ethical commerce was also promoted by former slaves in such organizations as the Colored Free Produce Society, which promoted the idea that consumers bore responsibility for the plight of the slave and could change their buying behavior. This book illuminates global consumer society and industrial capitalism at the turn of the nineteenth century, as well as underscores the roles of slavery and antislavery movements in the development of international capitalism. It also reminds us that concerns over fair trade and labor conditions remain relevant today. (shrink)

The ideas and political commitments of the revolutionary abolitionist and Spencean Robert Wedderburn (1762–1835) represent a compelling example of a form of universality, articulated in the midst of the Age of Revolution, which defied European colonialism and plantation slavery. An engagement with Wedderburn’s writings on the Haitian Revolution, maroon warfare and his proposal of a Spencean communist programme will clarify ongoing debates about Enlightenment, empire, slavery and universality, and might inform a re-engagement with the idea of universal (...) emancipation in the political present. (shrink)

This article presents a unified, multidimensional, and relational approach to Atlantic history by treating the Atlantic as a historical region of the capitalist world economy. In contrast to more conventional comparative approaches, the approach presented here grounds Atlantic history in the longue durée geographical historical structure of the maritime Atlantic and construes particular political, economic, social, or cultural units as parts of the more encompassing Atlantic and world economies. Within this framework, particular units or relations are viewed as complex historical (...) outcomes of relations and processes operating across diverse spatial and temporal scales. Thus each unit is related to the others, and each occupies a distinctive location in the maritime Atlantic division of labor. Through an example of plantation slavery, the article examines the ways in which specific units are formed within the larger historical field and examines the variation among them. By calling attention to the relations among units over time and in space within a unified historical field, it identifies specific conjunctures and contingencies shaping Atlantic history. (shrink)

What was distinctive about the evil of the transatlantic slave trade and New World slavery? In what ways can the present seek to rectify such historical wrongs, even while recognizing that they lie beyond repair? Irreparable Evil explores the legacy of slavery and its moral and political implications, offering a nuanced intervention into debates over reparations. David Scott reconsiders the story of New World slavery in a series of interconnected essays that focus on Jamaica and the Anglophone (...) Caribbean. Slavery, he emphasizes, involved not only scarcely imaginable brutality on a mass scale but also the irreversible devastation of the ways of life and cultural worlds from which enslaved people were uprooted. Colonial extraction shaped modern capitalism; plantation slavery enriched colonial metropoles and simultaneously impoverished their peripheries. To account for this atrocity, Scott examines moral and reparatory modes of history and criticism, probing different conceptions of evil. He reflects on the paradoxes of seeking redress for the specific moral evil of slavery, criticizing the limitations of liberal rights-based arguments for reparations that pursue reconciliation with the past. Instead, this book argues, in making the urgent demand for reparations, we must acknowledge the fundamental irreparability of a wrong of such magnitude. (shrink)

Daniel Gaido’s The Formative Period of American Capitalism provides a thorough accounting of classical Marxist writing on the history of US capitalism. He combines insights from the classical Marxist and US Trotskyist traditions with an engagement with a selection of recent historical research to produce a provocative interpretation of the origins and rise of capitalism in the US. However, his failure to critically interrogate the classical Marxist and US Trotskyist traditions on the US or engage with the growing historical research (...) on the origins and trajectory of US capitalism weakens his contribution. (shrink)

As Louisiana and Cuba emerged from slavery in the late nineteenth century, each faced the question of what rights former slaves could claim. Degrees of Freedom compares and contrasts these two societies in which slavery was destroyed by war, and citizenship was redefined through social and political upheaval. Both Louisiana and Cuba were rich in sugar plantations that depended on an enslaved labor force. After abolition, on both sides of the Gulf of Mexico, ordinary people-cane cutters and cigar (...) workers, laundresses and labor organizers-forged alliances to protect and expand the freedoms they had won. But by the beginning of the twentieth century, Louisiana and Cuba diverged sharply in the meanings attributed to race and color in public life, and in the boundaries placed on citizenship. Louisiana had taken the path of disenfranchisement and state-mandated racial segregation; Cuba had enacted universal manhood suffrage and had seen the emergence of a transracial conception of the nation. What might explain these differences? Moving through the cane fields, small farms, and cities of Louisiana and Cuba, Rebecca Scott skillfully observes the people, places, legislation, and leadership that shaped how these societies adjusted to the abolition of slavery. The two distinctive worlds also come together, as Cuban exiles take refuge in New Orleans in the 1880s, and black soldiers from Louisiana garrison small towns in eastern Cuba during the 1899 U.S. military occupation. Crafting her narrative from the words and deeds of the actors themselves, Scott brings to life the historical drama of race and citizenship in postemancipation societies. (shrink)

Paradoxically, abolitionism contained the seeds of empire. If we accept the general outline of Eric Williams’ thesis in Capitalism and Slavery that abolition was not purely altruistic but was as economically conditioned as Britain’s later empire building in Africa, the contradiction between the ideologies of antislavery and imperialism seems more apparent than real. Although the idealism that motivated the great abolitionists such as William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson is unquestionable, Williams argues that Britain could afford to legislate against the (...) slave trade only after that trade had helped to provide the surplus capital necessary for industrial “take-off.” Britain had lost much of its slave-owning territory as a result of the American Revolution; as the leading industrial power in the world, Britain found in abolition a way to work against the interests of its rivals who were still heavily involved in colonial slavery and a plantation economy.3The British abolitionist program entailed deeper and deeper involvement in Africa—the creation of Sierra Leone as a haven for freed slaves was just a start—but British abolitionists before the 1840s were neither jingoists nor deliberate expansionists. Humanitarianism applied to Africa, however, did point insistently toward imperialism.4 By mid-century, the success of the antislavery movement, the impact of the great Victorian explorers, and the merger of racist and evolutionary doctrines in the social sciences had combined to give the British public a widely shared view of Africa that demanded imperialization on moral, religious, and scientific grounds. It is this view that I have called the myth of the Dark Continent; by mythology I mean a form of modern, secularized, “depoliticized speech” —discourse which treats its subject as universally accepted. Scientifically established, and therefore no longer open to criticism by a political or theoretical opposition. In The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800-1960, Nancy Stepan writes:A fundamental question about the history of racism in the first half of the nineteenth century is why it was that, just as the battle against slavery was being won by abolitionists, the war against racism was being lost. The Negro was legally freed by the Emancipation Act of 1833, but in the British mind he was still mentally, morally and physically a slave.5It is this “fundamental question” which a genealogy of the myth of the Dark Continent can help to answer. Patrick Brantlinger, professor of English at Indiana University, is the editor of Victorian Studies. He has written The Spirit of Reform: British Literature and Politics, 1832-1867 and Bread and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture and Social Decay. (shrink)

What political problem can autobiography solve? This article examines the politics of Frederick Douglass’s antebellum personal narratives: his 1845 slave narrative, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, and his 1855 autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, written at the opposite ends of Douglass’s transition from the abolitionist politics of William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips to Douglass’s defense of political action and the Constitution as anti-slavery. Placing the two texts alongside Douglass’s distinction “to narrate (...) wrongs” and “denouncing them,” I argue that Douglass writes My Bondage and My Freedom as a mode of denunciation: an autobiographical critique of injustice that balances analysis of collective oppression with advocacy for communal emancipation. Whereas to narrate wrongs encouraged readers to judge Douglass’s story alongside popular criteria of justice, to denounce wrongs is to implicate readers within the structures that create antebellum subjects on and off the plantation, by revealing the coercions and conditionings of society that make not simply slaves but slaveowners, sympathizers, and abolitionists. This article claims that autobiography is a distinct genre of political theory, one that challenges present relations between the individual and the collective by representing not simply its author but an expanded view of “the people.”. (shrink)

This is an study of phrases and topics by which was known the Cuba island during the XIX century. Analysis of the origins of phrases such as "la Albión ofAn-ierica". "La Siempre Fiel Isla de Cuba", "La perla de las Antillas", "La llave del Golfo": of systems as slavery, plantations, miscegenation, the idea of death, and the myth of mulatto. It is concluded that travelers, and well-read, even the own inhabitants, generated upon this extremely complex society, a series of (...) ideas, coined images. and spred expressions from subjective and particular forms of envisaging reality. (shrink)

Because computers zoom across magnifications, it is easy to conclude that both knowledge and things exist by nature in precision-nested scales. The technical term is “scalable,” the ability to expand without distorting the framework. But it takes hard work to make knowledge and things scalable, and this article shows that ignoring nonscalable effects is a bad idea. People stumbled on scalable projects through the same historical contingencies that such projects set out to deny. They cobbled together ways to make things (...) and data self-contained and static, and thus amenable to expansion. In European New World plantations, the natives were wiped out; coerced and alienated plants and workers came to substitute for them. Profits were made because extermination and slavery could be discounted from the books. Such historically indeterminate encounters formed models for later projects of scalability. This essay explores scalability projects from the perspective of an emergent “nonscalability theory” that pays attention to the mounting pile of ruins that scalability leaves behind. The article concludes that, if the world is still diverse and dynamic, it is because scalability never fulfills its own promises. (shrink)

This article draws on 35 months of ethnographic fieldwork and apprenticeship in a boxing gym located in Chicago's black ghetto to explicate how prizefighters apperceive and express the fact of being live commodities of flesh and blood, and how they practically reconcile themselves to ruthless exploitation in ways that enable them to maintain a sense of personal integrity and moral purpose. The boxer's experience of corporeal exploitation is expressed in three kindred idioms, those of prostitution, slavery and animal husbandry. (...) The first likens the fighter-manager combo to the prostitute-pimp duo; the second depicts the ring as a plantation and promoters as latter-day slave masters; the third intimates that boxers are used in the manner of livestock. All three tropes simultaneously enounce and denounce the immoral marketing of disquiescent bodies. But this acute consciousness is neutralized by the doxic belief in the normalcy of exploitation, in the `agency' of corporeal entrepreneurship, and in the possibility of individual exceptionalism. This practical belief, inscribed in the bodily dispositions of the fighter, helps produce the collective misrecognition whereby boxers collude in their own commercialization. (shrink)

The character of Tom has the proportions of a mythic figure. His story has little of the melodrama of the secondary plot for his heroism in meeting the trials of slavery is manifested not in outward risks and adventures but in inner strength. In Simon Legree, Tom's final adversary, Stowe provides a perfect antithesis, an ultimate image of what slavery must do to the master who takes advantage of his position and uses his power without restraint; for Legree (...) is an ambitious Vermonter, not a Southern, an owner, not an overseer, and a product of the raw, final phase of slavery in the cotton plantations of the deep South. Legree bends every effort to brutalize Tom as though of necessity to prove that he and the South are right about Negroes and slavery, and Tom remains firm in his humanity and so disproves the sordid myth of his oppressor. It is Legree who is dehumanized by the institution of slavery. Tom emerges from the struggle as an example not simply of a black Christian slave, but of a heroic man in the face of intimidating and humiliating power. Moody E. Prior, emeritus professor of English and former dean of the graduate school of Northwestern University, is the author of The Language of Tragedy, Science and the Humanities, and The Drama of Power-Studies in Shakespeare's History Plays. See also: "The Ethics of Uncle Tom's Children" by Tommie Shelby in Vol. 38, No. 3. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Learning to BreatheFive Fragments Against RacismB. Venkat Mani (bio)For Dr. JLW, for all Black academics and students1. Air HungerI know you, Derek Chauvin. You may think that we first met on May 25, 2020, in Minneapolis. I was called George Perry Floyd. For you, I was just another Black man, a potential criminal. For me, you were not a police officer, but the knee that stands for racism. You (...) kneeled on my windpipe for 9 minutes and 29 seconds. Those were neither my first nor my last memories.You may choose not to recognize me, as you always have. But I do. I recognize every bone, muscle, tendon, pointy curve of the cap, every contour of your strong, heavy, determined, calculating, conniving knee that presses on my windpipe with a false sense of racist superiority. 9 minutes and 29 seconds. As often as you can.We have a history. You have never missed the opportunity of kneeling on my windpipe. You hauled me into your slave ships from various African ports along the Atlantic, then you kneeled on my windpipe all over your cotton and tobacco plantations in the Americas. We met again on schooners from Indian shores journeying across the Indian and Pacific oceans. With slavery banned in the British empire, you turned me into an indentured laborer. You made me put my thumb imprint on a document you created, in a script I could not read, of a language I could not speak. Then you threw me thousands of miles away in Mauritius, Fiji, and numerous Caribbean islands, pressing on my windpipe on sugarcane plantations. My wife, children, sisters, mothers, aunts, brothers, uncles, nephews, nieces, grandparents, great grandparents, we all have lived through those fatal 9 minutes and 29 seconds: on water and land. Repeatedly. Consistently. Incessantly.You want specific dates? April 8, 1857, Barrackpore, Northern India. My name was Mangal Pandey, you called me a Sepoy. You hanged me for standing up against my subjugation by your British East India Company. Against your rule over my land and my people. With your many titles [End Page 41] and names: Major-General Sir Henry Havelock, Lieutenant-General Sir Colin Campbell, Brigadier-General Charles Windham, you rampaged through the streets of Delhi, Meerut, Lucknow, killing anyone in your way so I could be a jewel in Victoria's crown. January 29, 1863, Bear River, Idaho. I was one among the Shoshone of Bia Ogoi, you were Colonel Patrick Connor. You came to us on a frigid morning and killed us by the hundreds. November 15, 1884, the Congo Conference, Berlin. You were called Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and were acting at the behest of sharecropping interests of King Leopold the Second. Your name for me was a "savage." You set up a society to civilize me while you plundered my bounty. You started drawing lines through land, rivers, mountains, deserts. For you, it was the Scramble for Africa. For me, bloody murder. You knelt on my windpipe, smoking a pipe with tobacco my people had grown. April 13, 1919, Jallianwala Bagh, Amritsar. You were called Brigadier General Reginald Edward Harry Dyer. For you, I was just a troublemaking native disrupting the civilized business of the Empire. You surrounded our peaceful gathering in Amritsar and opened fire. Your Nobel Laureate Rudyard Kipling claimed that "you did your duty as you saw fit." By killing us in thousands until the bullets ran out. Rikki Tikki Tavi. May 31, 1921, Tulsa, Oklahoma. Inspired by Jim Crow, your knees came running to us in mobs to massacre us. October 19, 1926, Imperial Conference, London. Your name was Field Marshall the Right Honorable Jan Christian Smuts. For you, I was one among the many "colored" subjects from the Cape Colony. You spoke vehemently against mixing my people with your people. Eloquently, I was told, in favor of apartheid.You know very well, Chauvin, that our acquaintance neither begins in 1857 nor ends in 1926. I could take you on a grand tour of the world and give you all the dates when you appeared in different forms. Your self-induced conviction of racial supremacy over me remained the same... (shrink)

R. M. Hare has argued1 that there are conceivable circumstances in which it would be right not to abolish the institution of slavery: in the imaginary land of Juba established slave-plantations are managed by a benevolent elite for the good of all, no ‘cruel or unusual ’ punishments are in use, and citizens of the neighbouring island of Camaica, ‘free ’but impoverished, regularly seek to become slaves. Hare adds that it is unlikely, given human nature, that ‘masters ’would treat (...) ‘slaves ’humanely, and avoid a gradual corruption of their moral consciousness which would cancel out any possible advantages of the system. Slavery is wrong, he argues, not because it violates ‘fundamental human rights’, but I because it would in practice generally increase misery. (shrink)

Cet article étudie l'aspect sociologique des recherches de Lefebvres des Noëttes, plus particulièrement son ouvrage : „L'attelage. Le cheval de selle à travers les âges“. Comme le sous-titre de cet ouvrage („Contribution à Thistoire de l'esclavage“) l'indique déjà, le savant français y étudie la technique de l'attelage des animaux de trait. Il tend à démontrer que ce fut l'insuffisance de ces derniers, phénomène resté inchangé jusqu'au vu® siècle de l'ère chrétienne, qui joua un rôle principal dans le maintien de l'esclavage. (...) Les travaux les plus pénibles, le transport des grosses charges en particulier, qui furent accomplis plus tard par les animaux et qui le sont aujourd'hui essentiellement par des moyens mécaniques, ne pouvaient en effet être exécutés à cette époque qu'en recourant au travail forcé, élément caractéristique de l'esclavage. L'histoire nous montre qu'il existe un rapport direct entre l'ampleur des réalisations de l'homme, tout particulièrement des constructions et des routes, et la rigueur avec laquelle on traitait les êtres privés de liberté. Même dans les temps modernes, l'institution de l'esclavage réapparaît, sous une forme ou sous une autre, partout où la force animale est insuffisante (plantations en Amérique du Sud, portage en Afrique centrale). La question de l'esclavage peut donc aujourd'hui être traitée comme une branche de 1' „histoire critique de la technique“, comme un chapitre de la grande controverse entre l'homme et la nature, retirant ainsi tout fondement aux vagues explications politiques ou morales concernant l'origine et le déclin de l'esclavage.This essay deals with the sociological significance of Lefebvres des Noettes' researches, in particular with his work „Harnessing. The Saddle- Horse throughout the Ages“. As the sub-title of his book „Contribution to the History of Slavery“ indicates, the French scholar studies the technical art of harnessing draught-animals, and endeavours to show how its inadequacy, which remained unchanged right into the seventh century A. D. was an essential condition for the maintenance of slavery. For the heavy labour-tasks, above all the transport of huge loads, which later were based on animal-power and to-day are largely accomplished by mechanised locomotion, were then only to be achieved by man-power, by the use of force, as exemplified in slavery. In history there obtains a direct relationship between the extent of cultural achievements, shown especially in buildings and roads, and the severity in the treatment of slaves. Wherever in more recent times, there was not at hand, an extensive draught-animal apparatus, there arose, in some form or other, the institution of slavery (plantations in South America, porters in Central Africa). Such an interpretation makes it possible to consider the question of slavery, as a part of the „critical history of technology“, and as a chapter in the struggle of man against nature. In this way, vague political or moral explanations of the rise and fall of slavery lose all their force. (shrink)

While the field known as ‘Whiteness Studies’ has been thriving in Anglophone criticism and theory for over 25 years, it is almost unknown in France. This is partly due to epistemological and political differences, but also to demographic factors — in contrast with the post-plantation culture of the US, for example, whites in Martinique and Guadeloupe are a tiny minority of small island populations. Yet ‘whiteness’ remains a phantasized and a fetishized state in the Antillean imaginary, and is strongly (...) inflected by gender. This article sketches the emergence of ‘white’ femininity during slavery, then examines its representation in the work of a number of major Antillean writers. In their work, a cluster of recurring images and leitmotifs convey the idealization or, more commonly, the pathologization, of the white woman; these images resonate strongly with Bhabha's ‘unhomely’, and convey the disturbing imbrication of sex and race in Antillean history. (shrink)

R. M. Hare has argued 1 that there are conceivable circumstances in which it would be right not to abolish the institution of slavery: in the imaginary land of Juba established slave-plantations are managed by a benevolent elite for the good of all, no ‘cruel or unusual ’ punishments are in use, and citizens of the neighbouring island of Camaica, ‘free ’but impoverished, regularly seek to become slaves. Hare adds that it is unlikely, given human nature, that ‘masters ’would (...) treat ‘slaves ’humanely, and avoid a gradual corruption of their moral consciousness which would cancel out any possible advantages of the system. Slavery is wrong, he argues, not because it violates ‘fundamental human rights’, but I because it would in practice generally increase misery. (shrink)

Because computers zoom across magnifications, it is easy to conclude that both knowledge and things exist by nature in precision-nested scales. The technical term is “scalable,” the ability to expand without distorting the framework. But it takes hard work to make knowledge and things scalable, and this article shows that ignoring nonscalable effects is a bad idea. People stumbled on scalable projects through the same historical contingencies that such projects set out to deny. They cobbled together ways to make things (...) and data self-contained and static, and thus amenable to expansion. In European New World plantations, the natives were wiped out; coerced and alienated plants and workers came to substitute for them. Profits were made because extermination and slavery could be discounted from the books. Such historically indeterminate encounters formed models for later projects of scalability. This essay explores scalability projects from the perspective of an emergent “nonscalability theory” that pays attention to the mounting pile of ruins that scalability leaves behind. The article concludes that, if the world is still diverse and dynamic, it is because scalability never fulfills its own promises. (shrink)

In our emerging climate future, devastation will not land evenly. “Climate apartheid” names a world where the rich insulate themselves from its most catastrophic effects, while the global poor stand increasingly subject to rising seas, failing crops, intensifying weather events (floods, hurricanes, wildfires) and thus to the necessity of movement: some project a billion climate refugees by 2050. Yet analyses often fail to link climate apartheid to the existing systems mobilized to execute it—policing, prisons, borders—and so fail to connect climate (...) politics to enduring racialized projects of carceral control, as well as to Black, Native, and Latinx struggles against them. A key task is to develop capacious conceptual frameworks for understanding how religious actors are addressing the deep entanglements of political ecology and racial violence. This paper pursues that task in four parts. Part 1 introduces climate apartheid and proposes “cross-border solidarity” as an organizing concept for response, while underscoring that solidarity's chief virtue—its being already in use across diverse moral communities—is also what requires rigorous specification. What is the shape of “solidarity” amid climate futures? Parts 2 and 3 critique two frameworks ethicists might employ in facing that question: anthropocene discourse obscures race, while mestizaje discourse addresses race but risks reproducing its deepest logics. Part 4 proposes an alternative I will call cimarronaje. Of Taíno-Arawak and Spanish origin, the word refers to the historical experience, across slaveholding societies of the Americas, whereby enslaved African people fled plantations, escaped to surrounding hills and swamps, and reimagined forms of life with Indigenous communities, forged new ecologies together and, in the shadows of colonial empire, prefigured the theory and practices of cross-border solidarity we need today. (shrink)

In the first part of this essay, I develop the argument that Michel Foucault's work should be read with geographical and topological ideas in mind. I argue that Foucault's archeology and genealogy are fundamentally determined by spatial, topological, geographical, and geometrical metaphors and concepts. This spatial dimension of genealogy is explicitly related to racism and the regimes that domesticate agents through the practices, institutions and ideologies of racialization. The second part offers a genealogical reading of US history and spatiality in (...) terms of its racial institutions. I suggest that if we want to read the US geographies of topographies and cartographies of racism in a Foucauldian manner, then we must focus on plantations, ghettos, and prisons as the spaces‐institutions‐geographies that consolidated the racial matrix of US polity. My goal is to acculturate Foucauldian racial genealogy to the US racial matrix, and, conversely, to read US geo‐history in terms of racializing spatialities. (shrink)

This study analyzes the gendered nature of recent production and labor force restructuring in the Dominican Republic. Using a longitudinal case study of work relations on a large transnational corporate pineapple plantation, the author explores the production politics involved in the initial corporate attempt to create a wage labor force and the subsequent replacement of employees with contracted labor crews. She demonstrates how female, and then male, labor forces were negotiated in this process and how labor relations became embedded (...) in local gendered institutions. The study reveals how workforces and spheres of work are constituted through struggles over gender, as well as ethnicity and class, in intersecting arenas linking the local community to the global economy. In this case, gender proves critical in shaping both worker identity and the shifting scope and form of resistance to plantation practices. (shrink)

“Modern slavery,” a term used to describe severe forms of labor exploitation, is beginning to spark growing interest within business and society research. As a novel phenomenon, it offers potential for innovative theoretical and empirical pathways to a range of business and management research questions. And yet, development into what we might call a “field” of modern slavery research in business and management remains significantly, and disappointingly, underdeveloped. To explore this, we elaborate on the developments to date, the (...) potential drawbacks, and the possible future deviations that might evolve within six subdisciplinary areas of business and management. We also examine the value that nonmanagement disciplines can bring to research on modern slavery and business, examining the connections, critiques, and catalysts evident in research from political science, law, and history. These, we suggest, offer significant potential for building toward a more substantial subfield of research. (shrink)

What should we do with statues and place‐names memorializing people who committed human‐rights abuses linked to slavery and postslavery racism? In this article, I draw on UN principles of transitional justice to address this question. I propose that a successful approach should meet principles of transitional justice recognized by the United Nations, including affirming rights to justice, truth, reparations, and guarantees of nonrecurrence of human rights violations. I discuss four strategies for handling contested heritage, examining strengths and weaknesses of (...) each strategy. Examples from Bristol, England, highlight common challenges and positive lessons. (shrink)

In the 1780s through the end of 1790s, Kant made various references to slavery (in its different forms) and the transatlantic slave trade in the context of his political philosophy or philosophy of right; he thereby had opportunities to speak in favor of abolitionism, which was gaining momentum in parts of Europe, or at least to articulate a normative critique of the race-based chattel slavery or Atlantic slavery and the associated slave trade qua (legalized) INSTITUTIONS; but he (...) did neither. Why? In raising and seeking an answer to this question, I am not interested in what Kant’s normative silence about the institutions of Atlantic slavery and slave trade may tell us about him as a person (for example, whether he was blinded by his own racist prejudices or whether he was affected by some kind of cognitive dissonance). Rather, I will focus on what it may tell us about certain limitations of his political philosophy, limitations that might have made it THEORETICALLY DIFFICULT for him to figure out exactly what to DO about those institutions as entrenched political realities. (shrink)

Hegel's lord-bondsman dialectic has been of especially great interest to progressive and radical Hegelians—broadly speaking, politically left-leaning interpreters of Hegel who object to certain social hierarchies and demand their abolition. They read Hegel as giving an account of how ‘lordship’ over others is an inherently unstable and unsatisfying social formation, even for its supposed beneficiaries. Marxists, feminists and post-colonial theorists have all found inspiration in Hegel's analysis of the lord and bondsman by applying it to concrete relations of oppression, such (...) as capitalism, patriarchy, or racism. In contrast, recent scholarship on Hegel's views on race and colonialism has cast doubt on whether his systematic political philosophy and philosophy of history can be of similar use to progressives. Hegel was undeniably a Eurocentric thinker, but philosophers like Robert Bernasconi and Alison Stone have convincingly shown that he was also a racist and a defender of colonialism. Crucially, however, few of the scholars who write on Hegel's pro-colonialism have analysed this feature of Hegel's thought in connection with the lord-bondsman dialectic. In this article, I argue for two connected theses. First, I argue that contrary to the hopes of some progressive defenders of Hegel, we cannot easily separate the lord-bondsman dialectic from Hegel's pro-colonialism. This is because Hegel himself appealed to the lord-bondsman dialectic to argue that colonial slavery educated its victims, and could therefore be temporarily justified. Second, I argue that this pro-colonial reading of the dialectic, though largely ignored by contemporary interpreters, was in fact recognized and embraced by a group of Hegelians in North America known as the St Louis Hegelians. They used the lord-bondsman dialectic as a basis for a qualified defence of pre-Civil War American slavery. (shrink)

Discussions about the morality of slavery are a central part of the history of early modern philosophy. This book explores the philosophical ideas, theories, and arguments that occur in eighteenth-century debates about slavery, with a particular focus on the role that race plays in these debates. This exploration reveals how closely Blackness and slavery had come to be associated and how common it was to believe that Black people are natural slaves, or naturally destined for slavery. (...) The book examines not just well-known authors like David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but also less widely studied philosophers like Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Lemuel Haynes, and Olympe de Gouges. By presenting philosophically important aspects of debates about slavery in eighteenth-century North America and Europe, the book aims to be a valuable resource for scholars, instructors, and students who are curious about a topic that historians of philosophy have so far neglected. (shrink)

In republican political philosophy, citizenship is a status that is constituted by one’s participation in the public life of the polity. In its traditional formulation, republican citizenship is an exclusionary and hierarchical way of defining a polity’s membership, because the domain of activity that qualifies as participating in the polity’s public life is highly restricted. I argue that Black American abolitionist Frederick Douglass advances a radically inclusive conception of republican citizenship by articulating a deeply capacious account of what it means (...) to participate in the public life of the polity. On Douglass’s conception of republican citizenship, what it means to contribute to the polity, and thereby be a citizen, is to act in ways that contest and shape what the polity values. We contest and shape what the polity values not only through public discourse traditionally conceived or grand political acts like revolt, but also through quotidian forms of social interaction. In his pre-American Civil War political thought, Douglass deployed his radically inclusive account of republican citizenship as the conceptual foundation of his stance that enslaved and nominally free Black Americans were already, in the 1850s, American citizens whom the polity ought to acknowledge as such. The everyday resistance in which enslaved Black Americans engaged—their plantation politics—is, for Douglass, a paradigmatic type of citizenship-constituting activity, because it involves modes of collaboration and confrontation that enact a recognition of mutual vulnerability and embody the assertion that one matters. Douglass’s conception of republican citizenship offers a normative framework for emancipatory struggles that strive to secure meaningful membership for the marginalized through the transformation of unjust polities. (shrink)

The permissibility of actions depends upon facts about the flourishing and separateness of persons. Persons differ from other creatures in having the task of discovering for themselves, by conjecture and refutation, what sort of life will fulfil them. Compulsory slavery impermissibly prevents some persons from pursuing this task. However, many people may conjecture that they are natural slaves. Some of these conjectures may turn out to be correct. In consequence, voluntary slavery, in which one person welcomes the duty (...) to fulfil all the commands of another, is permissible. Life-long voluntary slavery contracts are impermissible because of human fallibility; but fixed-term slavery contracts should be legally enforceable. Each person has the temporarily alienable moral right to direct her own life. (shrink)

My goal in this paper is to shed light on how moral progress actually occurs. I begin by restating a conception of moral progress that I set out in previous work, the “Naïve Conception,” and explain how it comports with various normative and metaethical views. I go on to develop an index of moral progress and show how judgments about moral progress can be made. I then discuss an example of moral progress from the past—the British abolition of the Atlantic (...) slave trade—with a view to what can be learned from this for a contemporary struggle for moral progress: the movement to decarbonize the global economy. I close with some thoughts about how moral progress actually occurs. (shrink)

Slavery has long stood as a mirror image to the conception of a free person in republican theory. This essay contends that slavery deserves this central status in a theory of freedom, but a more thorough examination of slavery in theory and in practice will reveal additional insights about freedom previously unacknowledged by republicans. Slavery combines imperium and dominium in a way that both destroys freedom today and diminishes opportunities to achieve freedom tomorrow. Dominium and imperium (...) working together are a greater affront to freedom than either working alone. However, an examination of slavery in practice, focusing on the experiences of American slaves, demonstrates that republicanisms’ acknowledged strategies for freedom-seeking, acquiring insulation from domination through law and through norms, do not encompass the full range of options. Slaves also seek freedom through physical absence, economic activity, and culture. The account of slavery and freedom developed here suggests republican accounts of freedom should either give up their focus on thresholds of freedom, or consider the possibility of a plural conception of freedom that extends beyond just freedom as non-domination to include freedom as collective world-making, or both. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to problematise a particular social transparency and disclosure regulation in the UK, that transcend national boundaries in order to control slavery in supply chains operating in the developing world. Drawing on notions from the regulatory and sociology literature, i.e. transparency and normativity, and by interviewing anti-slavery activists and experts, this study explores the limitations of the disclosure and transparency requirements of the UK Modern Slavery Act and, more specifically, how anti-slavery (...) activists experience and interpret the new regulations and the regulators’ implementation of the regulation. This research found limited confidence among anti-slavery activists regarding the Act’s call for transparency in relation to the elimination of slavery from global supply chains. The research also found that the limits of the transparency provisions within the Act appear to hinder the attainment of normativity. This study provides new and unique insights into the critical role that social activists play in exposing the lack of corporate transparency and failures of responsibility to protect workers within global supply chains. (shrink)