Black Suffering for/from Anti-trafficking Advocacy

This article analyses the images that Antislavery Usable Past creates to promote its cause of ‘making the antislavery past usable for contemporary abolition’. Drawing on collective memory studies, I discuss the political implications of how pasts are used for present issues. I argue that Antislavery Usable Past appropriates black suffering by reducing the memory and imagery of slavery to objects that are compatible with the anti-trafficking narrative, without regard for the ongoing black liberation struggle. I conclude by discussing the troubling trend of incorporating anti-trafficking exhibitions into institutions that preserve the history of slavery and abolition. Such inclusions redirect the history lessons of slavery away from understanding and addressing anti-blackness in the present and towards supporting advocacy campaigns articulated in the logics that underpinned racial chattel slavery in the first place

DIY Methods 2022 Conference Proceedings

As the past years have proven, the methods for conducting and distributing research that we’ve inherited from our disciplinary traditions can be remarkably brittle in the face of rapidly changing social and mobility norms. The ways we work and the ways we meet are questions newly opened for practical and theoretical inquiry; we both need to solve real problems in our daily lives and account for the constitutive effects of these solutions on the character of the knowledge we produce. Methods are not neutral tools, and nor are they fixed ones. As such, the work of inventing, repairing, and hacking methods is a necessary, if often underexplored, part of the wider research process. This conference aims to better interrogate and celebrate such experiments with method. Borrowing from the spirit and circuits of exchange in earlier DIY cultures, it takes the form of a zine ring distributed via postal mail. Participants will craft zines describing methodological experiments and/or how-to guides, which the conference organisers will subsequently mail out to all participants. Feedback on conference proceedings will also proceed through the mail, as well as via an optional Twitter hashtag. The conference itself is thus an experiment with different temporalities and medialities of research exchange. As a practical benefit, this format guarantees that the experience will be free of Zoom fatigue, timezone difficulties, travel expenses, and visa headaches. More generatively, it may also afford slower thinking, richer aesthetic possibilities, more diverse forms of circulation, and perhaps even some amount of delight. The conference format itself is part of the DIY experiment

Trafficking In Anti-Blackness: The Political Stakes Of “Modern Day Slavery” Discourse In Global Campaigns To End Human Trafficking

Trafficking in Anti-blackness shows how global campaigns to end human trafficking employ the memory and discourses of 19th-century slavery and abolition to advance their cause across sectors: news media, policy, NGOs, museums, philanthropy, and universities. The moniker “modern day slavery” has become a popular transnational social movement fundamentally constituted through digital media circulations and opportunistic historical conflation. I argue that by naming a new slavery—human trafficking—amid the persistent material and symbolic effects of historic racial slavery, liberal state and non-state actors appropriate black suffering. Such appropriations circumvent Western historical responsibility for enslavement by positioning the West as always freedom-granting: only ever abolitionists then and only ever global liberators now. Anti-trafficking advocates also use black suffering to advocate for market-based and carceral solutions to unsafe migration. In short, anti-trafficking work is being done in the name of slavery, through the imagery of abolition, in ways that end up legitimizing the governing structures that produce global suffering. This dissertation uses visual and ethnographic discourse analysis to investigate how the phrase “human trafficking is modern day slavery” operates within four case studies. Drawing on critical ethnic studies and media studies, I contribute to the current critical anti-trafficking literature by demonstrating the central role that race, racism, and anti-blackness play in the discourse to end modern day slavery

Trafficking In Anti-Blackness: The Political Stakes Of “Modern Day Slavery” Discourse In Global Campaigns To End Human Trafficking

Trafficking in Anti-blackness shows how global campaigns to end human trafficking employ the memory and discourses of 19th-century slavery and abolition to advance their cause across sectors: news media, policy, NGOs, museums, philanthropy, and universities. The moniker “modern day slavery” has become a popular transnational social movement fundamentally constituted through digital media circulations and opportunistic historical conflation. I argue that by naming a new slavery—human trafficking—amid the persistent material and symbolic effects of historic racial slavery, liberal state and non-state actors appropriate black suffering. Such appropriations circumvent Western historical responsibility for enslavement by positioning the West as always freedom-granting: only ever abolitionists then and only ever global liberators now. Anti-trafficking advocates also use black suffering to advocate for market-based and carceral solutions to unsafe migration. In short, anti-trafficking work is being done in the name of slavery, through the imagery of abolition, in ways that end up legitimizing the governing structures that produce global suffering. This dissertation uses visual and ethnographic discourse analysis to investigate how the phrase “human trafficking is modern day slavery” operates within four case studies. Drawing on critical ethnic studies and media studies, I contribute to the current critical anti-trafficking literature by demonstrating the central role that race, racism, and anti-blackness play in the discourse to end modern day slavery

Trafficking in Anti-Blackness: The Political Stakes of Modern Day Slavery Discourse in Global Campaigns to End Human Trafficking

Trafficking in Anti-blackness shows how global campaigns to end human trafficking employ the memory and discourses of 19th-century slavery and abolition to advance their cause across sectors: news media, policy, NGOs, museums, philanthropy, and universities. The moniker modern day slavery has become a popular transnational social movement fundamentally constituted through digital media circulations and opportunistic historical conflation. I argue that by naming a new slavery—human trafficking—amid the persistent material and symbolic effects of historic racial slavery, liberal state and non-state actors appropriate black suffering. Such appropriations circumvent Western historical responsibility for enslavement by positioning the West as always freedom-granting: only ever abolitionists then and only ever global liberators now. Anti-trafficking advocates also use black suffering to advocate for market-based and carceral solutions to unsafe migration. In short, anti-trafficking work is being done in the name of slavery, through the imagery of abolition, in ways that end up legitimizing the governing structures that produce global suffering.^ This dissertation uses visual and ethnographic discourse analysis to investigate how the phrase human trafficking is modern day slavery operates within four case studies. Drawing on critical ethnic studies and media studies, I contribute to the current critical anti-trafficking literature by demonstrating the central role that race, racism, and anti-blackness play in the discourse to end modern day slavery.

Trafficking in Anti-Blackness: The Political Stakes of Modern Day Slavery Discourse in Global Campaigns to End Human Trafficking

Trafficking in Anti-blackness shows how global campaigns to end human trafficking employ the memory and discourses of 19th-century slavery and abolition to advance their cause across sectors: news media, policy, NGOs, museums, philanthropy, and universities. The moniker modern day slavery has become a popular transnational social movement fundamentally constituted through digital media circulations and opportunistic historical conflation. I argue that by naming a new slavery—human trafficking—amid the persistent material and symbolic effects of historic racial slavery, liberal state and non-state actors appropriate black suffering. Such appropriations circumvent Western historical responsibility for enslavement by positioning the West as always freedom-granting: only ever abolitionists then and only ever global liberators now. Anti-trafficking advocates also use black suffering to advocate for market-based and carceral solutions to unsafe migration. In short, anti-trafficking work is being done in the name of slavery, through the imagery of abolition, in ways that end up legitimizing the governing structures that produce global suffering.^ This dissertation uses visual and ethnographic discourse analysis to investigate how the phrase human trafficking is modern day slavery operates within four case studies. Drawing on critical ethnic studies and media studies, I contribute to the current critical anti-trafficking literature by demonstrating the central role that race, racism, and anti-blackness play in the discourse to end modern day slavery.

Black Suffering for/from Anti-trafficking Advocacy

This article analyses the images that Antislavery Usable Past creates to promote its cause of ‘making the antislavery past usable for contemporary abolition’. Drawing on collective memory studies, I discuss the political implications of how pasts are used for present issues. I argue that Antislavery Usable Past appropriates black suffering by reducing the memory and imagery of slavery to objects that are compatible with the anti-trafficking narrative, without regard for the ongoing black liberation struggle. I conclude by discussing the troubling trend of incorporating anti-trafficking exhibitions into institutions that preserve the history of slavery and abolition. Such inclusions redirect the history lessons of slavery away from understanding and addressing anti-blackness in the present and towards supporting advocacy campaigns articulated in the logics that underpinned racial chattel slavery in the first place

Fallacies of hope: Contesting narratives of abolition in Turner’s Slave Ship

This article explores the risks and dangers of redemptive readings of JMW Turner’s (in)famous 1840 painting, Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhon Coming on) that assume that we cannot be complicit in anything other than abolition and deliberately forget and disavow the underlying structures and continuing dispossessions of slave racial capitalism. The paper reads the painting as an intervention in an important set of nineteenth-century debates around slavery and the slave trade, and as a key element in the war over representations over slavery. How should we incorporate black death and white abolitionism into our stories, self-understandings and conceptions of justice? Turner’s painting brings us all into a space of temporal entanglement, and leaves us to question the history of modernity and the meaning of freedom both in the past and in the present