This article provides the first extensive study of Emanuel Swedenborg’s (1688–1772) views on Africans and slavery. Although significant scholarship has been devoted to Swedenborg’s influence on the British abolitionist movement in the 1780s-1790s, comparably little has been written on the ideas and context which inspired this influence in the first place. This article explores Swedenborg’s ties to networks and debates about African evangelization, colonization, and slavery during the neglected period of the Swedish Age of Liberty (1719–1772). It shows that Swedenborg (...) was the first Swede to condemn slavery, as early as 1741, explains why he regarded slavery as a divine punishment in the afterlife for European missionaries, and why he presented sub-Saharan Africans as superior, in contrast to the dominant dismissive views of Linnaeus, Bäck, Kant, or Buffon. Like most Lutherans of his time, Swedenborg did not advocate the abolition of slavery, yet within a generation his provocative views about African superiority and spiritual emancipation were used by his followers to articulate their abolitionist agenda. Swedenborg’s millenarian doctrines more broadly re-harnessed biblical traditions about Africa and tropes about the bon sauvage, in a counter-example to narratives about the trope’s decline in the second half of the eighteenth century. (shrink)

The northern Mandara Mountains of Cameroon have been a focus of slave raiding for the past five centuries, according to historical sources. Some captives from the area were enslaved locally, primarily in Wandala and Fulbe communities, while others were exported to Sahelian polities or further abroad. This chapter examines ethnohistorical and archaeological data on nineteenth- and twentieth-century slave raiding, derived from research in montagnard communities along the north-eastern Mandara Mountains of Cameroon. Enslavement and slave raiding existed within larger structures (...) of day-to-day practice in the region, and were closely tied to ideas about sociality, social proximity and violence. Through the mid-1980s at least, enslavement in the region was understood as a still-relevant political and economic process, with its chief material consequence the intensely domesticated Mandara landscape. (shrink)

This paper uses the concepts of slavery, citizenship, the body and political subjectivity to interrogate how gendered bodies are produced, regulated and normalised. It explores the ‘wrong body’ claim within transsexual narratives to analyse how we can be enslaved by/to our body. The coercive force of embodied existence is demonstrated by examining how gender norms act on us through our bodies, thus identifying the body as a major conduit of power. It argues that the ‘wrong body’ claim must be understood (...) as a discursive construction that is rendered possible by established gender norms and practices, which place heavy restrictions on the available actions of individuals. These norms and practices are linked to the normalising processes of becoming an acceptable citizen. It is argued that the enslaving effects of embodiment can be mitigated through constructing alternative narratives of gender based upon performativity and fluidity. Such alternative gender narratives are used to contest and disrupt the meaning of the acceptable citizen, thus opening up new claims for citizenship and new forms of embodied subjectivity. These narratives are then used to critique the medical community's understanding and treatment of transsexuality, which is itself a site of coercion and normalisation. (shrink)

In Republic 8–9, Socrates describes four main kinds of vicious people, all of whose souls are “ruled” by an element other than reason, and in some of whom reason is said to be “enslaved.” What role does reason play in such souls? In this paper, I argue, based on Republic 8–9 and related passages, and in contrast to some common alternative views, that for Plato the “enslavement” of reason consists in this: instead of determining for itself what is good, (...) reason is forced to desire and pursue as good a goal determined by the soul’s ruler. (shrink)

This article is the keynote address of the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill, Barbados, philosophy symposium in celebration of the 200th Anniversary of the British outlawing the Atlantic Slave Trade. The paper explores questions of enslavement and freedom through challenges of philosophical anthropology, philosophy of social change, and metacritical reflections posed by African Diasporic or Africana philosophy. Such challenges include the relevance and legitimacy of philosophical reflection to the lives of racialized slaves and concludes with a (...) discussion of the implications of the analysis for an understanding of the “face” of political life and the importance of the concept of “home” for a cogent theory of freedom. (shrink)

Whether second language teaching contributes to the enslavement or empowerment of learners has become a branch in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages research. More and more discussions are emerging, and they tend to base on more and more diverse theoretical frameworks. This article aims to shed light on this issue by exploring it from a Hegelian framework of language. Among Hegel’s theories of language, two notions, namely, mutual recognition and universalisation of culture are selected for discussions. The (...) conclusion is that based on Hegel’s theories of language L2 teaching has a stronger tendency of contributing to the empowerment of learners. (shrink)

A recently published fragment of the fourth-century speechwriter Hyperides contains a speech for the prosecution of Timandrus, accused of mistreating four orphans in his care. This article draws out from the fragment three important contributions to our understanding of Athenian conceptions of family relationships, particularly the relationships of marginalized groups: girls and enslaved people. First, the fragment constitutes a rare portrayal of a relationship between two sisters. Second, the fragment clearly articulates the idea that affective family relationships are not a (...) biological inevitability but arise from socialization, a departure from other fourth-century thinking. Third, the speaker applies this statement to enslaved people, claiming that the separation of children from close family members is so cruel that even slave-traders avoid it in their sale of human beings. Though this claim seems to have been untrue except in a very limited sense, its place in the argumentation of the speech assumes broad recognition of the existence and value of family relationships between enslaved people, vivid evidence of the paradox that slave societies recognized the humanity of people they simultaneously insisted were subhuman. (shrink)

The week, twenty-five years ago, of the Apollo spacecraft's return visit to the moon was described by Richard Nixon as the greatest since the Creation. Across the Atlantic, a French Academician judged the same event to matter less than the discovery of a lost etching by Daumier. Attitudes to technological achievement, then, differ. And they always have. Chuang-Tzu, over 2,000 years ago, relates an exchange between a Confucian passer-by and a Taoist gardener watering vegetables with a bucket drawn from a (...) well. ‘Don't you know that there is a machine with which 100 beds are easily watered in a day?’—‘How does it work?’—‘It's a counterbalanced ladle’—‘too clever to be good … all machines have to do with formulae, artificiality [which] destroy native ingenuity … and prevent the Tao from residing peacefully in one's heart’. ‘Engines of mischief, in the words of the Luddite song, or testaments to ‘the nobility of man [as] the conqueror of matter’, in those of Primo Levi, the products of technology continue to inspire phobia and philia. (shrink)

The week, twenty-five years ago, of the Apollo spacecraft's return visit to the moon was described by Richard Nixon as the greatest since the Creation. Across the Atlantic, a French Academician judged the same event to matter less than the discovery of a lost etching by Daumier. Attitudes to technological achievement, then, differ. And they always have. Chuang-Tzu, over 2,000 years ago, relates an exchange between a Confucian passer-by and a Taoist gardener watering vegetables with a bucket drawn from a (...) well. ‘Don't you know that there is a machine with which 100 beds are easily watered in a day?’—‘How does it work?’—‘It's a counterbalanced ladle’—‘too clever to be good … all machines have to do with formulae, artificiality [which] destroy native ingenuity … and prevent the Tao from residing peacefully in one's heart’. ‘Engines of mischief, in the words of the Luddite song, or testaments to ‘the nobility of man [as] the conqueror of matter’, in those of Primo Levi, the products of technology continue to inspire phobia and philia. (shrink)

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) has successfully combated modern-day slavery by transforming the ways that over a dozen major brands, including Taco Bell, Subway, and Wal-Mart, manage their supply chains. The CIW’s efforts over more than 20 years have effectively stopped enslavement practices, including abuses such as wage theft and peonage indebtedness. We conducted a field ethnography, interviews, and archival analyses to understand this success. We find that the CIW employs a decentered, egalitarian, and ensemble approach to their (...) multiplicities of alliances by collectively “animating” themselves and their partners through ensemble leadership. This combination of alliances, along with worker-driven monitoring, brings life to the CIW motto “We are all leaders.” Translating this motto into daily practice is how the CIW virtually eradicates enslavement practices in corporate supply chains. (shrink)

Since 1973 the experts of O.C.D.E. have been presenting the development of systems born of computer science and telecommunication as a “ second industrial revolution.” A year earlier the Japan Computer Usage Development Institute announced for the year 2000 the advent of a “society of information.”.

Less Than Human is a chilling indictment of our nature, and is as timely as it is relevant.

This article examines the antebellum popular culture that was created by pro-slavery intellectuals and that contributed to the subordination of female African slaves. It argues that southern ideologues produced a dominant ideology that facilitated the exploitation of enslaved Black women and contributed to the social construction of their gender. This article contributes to Black feminist theory that, since the early 1970s, has been developing as a counter-hegemonic advocate for the subaltern African American woman.

In this methods-building article, I show how attention to long-term continuities in female enslavement patterns helps us understand the emergence of the Black Atlantic. Slavery, I argue, is one form of human parasitism. I extend Orlando Patterson’s theory of human parasitism to examine the phenomenon of parasitic intertwining, wherein the forced labor of women became integral to broader social projects including household functioning, elite status maintenance, and population expansion. The thousand-year period between the fall of Rome and the rise (...) of the transatlantic slave trade was once described as a rupture in European slavery, with serfdom gradually supplanting slavery. The mass capture, transport, and enslavement of women, however, continued even as male slaves and ex-slaves gained significant status changes. The entrenchment of women in zonal slave trades generated both a potent cultural logic and a structural blueprint for the transatlantic trade. (shrink)

Dans ce livre, l’historienne Marisa J. Fuentes évoque la fuite d’une femme, Jane, qui réussit à s’échapper, en quête d’une liberté relative dans la ville de Bridgetown, à la Barbade, en 1789. Les sources archivistiques ne nous permettent pas de savoir quelle était sa vie antérieure, mais Jane a préféré risquer sa vie plutôt que de rester esclave. Comme toute fugitive, Jane a fait l’objet d’avis de recherche dans les journaux, qui mentionnent une récompense pour sa capture. Sa présence dans (...) le... (shrink)

Frederick Douglass, in his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, describes how his sociopolitical identity was scripted by the white other and how his spatiotemporal existence was likewise constrained through constant surveillance and disciplinary dispositifs. Even so, Douglass was able to assert his humanity through creative acts of resistance. In this essay, I highlight the ways in which Douglass refused to accept the other-imposed narrative, demonstrating with his life the truth of his being—a human being unwilling to (...) be classified as thing or property. As I engage selected passages and key events from Douglass's narrative, I likewise explore the ways in which the resistance tactics. (shrink)

Slavery and the Roman Literary Imagination. By William Fitzgerald, 129 pp. £12.95/$18.95 cloth; £35.00/$49.95 paper. The End of the Past: Ancient Rome and the Modern West. By Aldo Schiavone. Translated by Margery J. Schneider, viii +278 pp. £30.95/$45.00 cloth.

A sequence of theoretical models is constructed as an extension to Leszek Nowak's theory of socialist society to explain important characteristics of the violent party purges in Soviet Stalinism. According to these models, purges are a regular and systemic feature of a socialist system during a certain phase of development (modelled as the phase of social enslavement). Contrary to traditional conceptions which interpret the purges essentially as resulting from the actions of an almost omnipotent, and partly irrational, despot, the (...) models presented here provide an explanation which does not need to conceive Stalin as the architect of terror (Robert Conquest), i.e. as the long-term planner of the terror. However, the concepts presented here preserve the vital arguments of the traditional approach, thereby contradicting the revisionist pattern of interpretation. In particular the models seek to provide a theoretical base for an explanation of the moderation of inner-party terror from 1938. This moderation is interpreted as resulting from a modification of the then existing ideology (and corresponding habits of the party's leadership); a modification which in itself had been stimulated by the disastrous effects of the great purge in 1937/38. This modification can be theoretically conceived as a process of ideological learning. The historical fact that the post-war purges (i.e. the Leningrad affair in 1949 and the Mingrelian affair 1951/52) did not reach such an enormous extent as the purges of the late 1930s may thus be attributed to a process of ideological learning. (shrink)

Computer ethicists have for some years been troubled by the issue of how to assign moral responsibility for disastrous events involving erroneous information generated by expert information systems. Recently, Jeroen van den Hoven has argued that agents working with expert information systems satisfy the conditions for what he calls epistemic enslavement. Epistemically enslaved agents do not, he argues, have moral responsibility for accidents for which they bear causal responsibility. In this article, I develop two objections to van den Hoven’s (...) argument for epistemic enslavement of agents working with expert information systems. (shrink)

The enslavement of Africans did strike the young, hopeful and radical Romantic poets of nineteenth-century England as the most blatant example of human oppression and the clearest example of humans being deprived of liberty. Although their poetry refers to and draws on the imagery of African slavery, the major poetic figures of the Romantic Movement in England rarely spoke directly against the slave trade and colonial slavery. Thus the issue of slavery, the transatlantic trade, and Britain's role in it, (...) though well established in the nineteenth-century historical context, remained a subject only partially explored by the English Romantic poets, who were, at the time, more preoccupied with British domestic policy and the enslavement of their own nation. (shrink)

There is a growing sense of unease around algorithmic modes of governance ('algocracies') and their impact on freedom. Contrary to the emancipatory utopianism of digital enthusiasts, many now fear that the rise of algocracies will undermine our freedom. Nevertheless, there has been some struggle to explain exactly how this will happen. This chapter tries to address the shortcomings in the existing discussion by arguing for a broader conception/understanding of freedom as well as a broader conception/understanding of algocracy. Broadening the focus (...) in this way enables us to see how algorithmic governance can be both emancipatory and enslaving, and provides a framework for future development and activism around the creation of this technology. (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)

Since their enslavement in the U. S. Black Americans have longitudinally suffered some of the most heinous crimes against humanity. Yet, despite cultural policies intended to discriminate against, marginalise, oppress, and subjugate them, Black folx have unfailingly demonstrated remarkable creative resilience. This conceptual article explores three research questions: (1) in what ways have exclusionary U. S. cultural policies discouraged Black Americans’ cultural engagement, (2) how have Black Americans responded to exclusionary cultural policies in the U. S. and (3) what (...) longitudinal impacts might exclusionary cultural policies have on Black Americans’ creative and expressive lives, and the U. S. creative sector? This article used Critical Race Theory (CRT) and interpretive policy analysis to identify the ways in which racism has and continues to shape Black Americans’ creative and expressive lives. I conclude this article by making the case for a research agenda that comprehensively investigates Black Americans’ cultural engagement as well as other historically and continuously oppressed groups. (shrink)

This analysis of enslavement in an American South subregion provides an historical microcosm for understanding the complexities of provincial culture formation in the modern world-system. Simultaneously rooted in multiple points of local and world-systemic origin, peoplehood is an historical product of the capitalist world-system. Despite widespread notions to the contrary, low black population density and geographical isolation did not forestall slave community building on small plantations. Despite extreme repression, slaves dialectically preserved and altered hidden transcripts in order to recapture (...) pasts that had been silenced by the capitalist system. Embracing the collective diasporic memory of many disparate communities, small slave populations shared the collective grievance and the counter-hegemonic culture of all who had been forced to participate in international and domestic labor migrations. (shrink)

Illustrates the similarities between the enslavement of Black people and the enslavement of animals in both the past and the present.

Despite a high and growing global average income, billions of human beings are still condemned to lifelong severe poverty, with all its attendant evils of low life expectancy, social exclusion, ill health, illiteracy, dependency, and effective enslavement. This problem is solvable, despite its magnitude.

The portrayal of the enslaved woman Fotis in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses exposes the intersection of gender, sexuality, and slavery. Apuleius’ novel allows a window into interactions beyond the relationship of slaveholder and the enslaved person over whom s/he claimed dominium. Centering Fotis in Apuleius’ narrative shows how a discourse of slavery worked: an enslaved woman is made present as a body that may be sexualized and surrounded with fantasies of sex and violence. The sexual episodes of Lucius and Fotis reveal an (...) aesthetic, facilitated by the system of slavery, of consuming bodies, watching bodies consumed by violence, and framing effacement and degradation as romance, an operation of power at the core of chattel slavery. (shrink)