Freedom Seekers: Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London

'Freedom Seekers: Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London' reveals the hidden stories of enslaved and bound people who attempted to escape from captivity in England’s capital. In 1655 White Londoners began advertising in the English-speaking world’s first newspapers for enslaved people who had escaped. Based on the advertisements placed in these newspapers by masters and enslavers offering rewards for so-called runaways, this book brings to light for the first time the history of slavery in England as revealed in the stories of resistance by enslaved workers. Featuring a series of case-studies of individual "freedom-seekers", this book explores the nature and significance of escape attempts as well as detailing the likely routes and networks they would take to gain their freedom. The book demonstrates that not only were enslaved people present in Restoration London but that White Londoners of this era were intimately involved in the construction of the system of racial slavery, a process that traditionally has been regarded as happening in the colonies rather than the British Isles. An unmissable and important book that seeks to delve into Britain’s colonial past.

The great experiment – the Trinidad experiment: art, abolition and racial indenture across archipelagoes

Scholar Tao Leigh Goffe, co-editor of the Journal of Indentureship and Its Legacies, interviews mixed media visual artist Andrea Chung who is based in the United States. Connecting the histories of the Great Experiment of indenture in Mauritius and the Trinidad Experiment of Chinese indentureship in the Caribbean, the two discuss the history of labour exploitation and the abolition of racial slavery comparatively across oceans. Themes include those tackled in Chung's artwork spanning colonialism, loss, motherhood, Afro-Asian heritage, and the material culture of global indentureship.

Politics of Affect in Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

This paper analyzes The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in terms of Coleridge’s imaginative plea for a modification of consciousness about racial slavery prevalent in the then British society. What lends muscle to the plea is the use of gothic supernaturalism, which helps bring about a transformation in the Mariner. The gothic-actuated transformation, this paper claims, derives from Coleridge’s own ambiguous attitude to English imperialism—an ambivalence which results into systematic portrayal of the violator as the rightful beneficiary of the reader’s sympathy. The paper concludes that the poem’s turn to the affect of moral sentimentalism intends to make the reader of Coleridge’s time acquiesce in accepting colonial guilt as the spiritual politics of quietism, thereby averting the possibility of a violent reaction both from the hapless victims and some conscientious victimizers. There was not much thrust on an economic and political upgrading of the status of the slaves; instead, the affects of outrage, disgust, horror, and shame were evoked in the white anti-slavery texts so that the ugliness of imperialism and the concomitant slavery were criticized without really writing them off.

The United States Navy, Slave-Trade Suppression, and State Development

The mission of the United States Navy expanded significantly because of the presence of the institution of racial slavery on American soil. Most important, both proslavery and antislavery forces favored, for very different reasons, a substantial naval buildup in the late 1850s. The navy had, however, long been engaged in securing the nation’s borders against slave smuggling, an activity that also seemed to have broad support at the time. Finally, somewhat more controversially, the navy had been associated with the American Colonization Society’s Liberian enterprise from its very inception, deciding to deploy vessels to Africa in an otherwise unimaginable time frame. The relationship between the presence of slavery and the pre–Civil War activities of the navy is a largely untold—or, at best, half-told—story of American state development.

Theorising ‘racial/colonial primitive accumulation’: settler colonialism, slavery and racial capitalism

This article reconceptualises the Marxist notion of ‘primitive accumulation’, examining how settler colonialism and anti-Black racial domination structure American capitalism. The analysis intervenes in theorisations of primitive accumulation in both critiques of neoliberalism and the growing literature on racial capitalism. It shows how particular appropriations of primitive accumulation in the context of neoliberalism not only treat the concept as, ultimately, external to the core logic of capitalism, but also ignore the ways racial domination and colonisation configure capital’s violence. Simultaneously, within racial capitalism scholarship, primitive accumulation is prone to conceptual stretching, often flattening disparate forms of land and labour expropriation. In contrast, through the analytic of ‘racial/colonial primitive accumulation’, the author elucidates how normative wage-labour exploitation is predicated on settler colonialism and racial slavery and its afterlives. This thus adds precision to received understandings of capitalist expropriation, while also pushing the literature on racial capitalism beyond a white/Black binary.

“Cannibals All!”

This chapter argues that pro- and antislavery advocates mobilized disability rhetoric behind political discourse to garner support and deride opponents. John C. Calhoun, George Fitzhugh, and others constructed proslavery arguments based on benevolent masters’ supposed care of dependent, disabled bondpeople. Others absorbed medical discourses of black defectiveness, cited suspect U.S. Census records as evidence that freedom would lead to insanity and physical degeneration for blacks, and made disability central to their rationalizations of racial slavery and inequality. Abolitionists and fugitive slaves also deployed sentimentalized and often gendered disability rhetoric to underscore the brutalities of slavery. Their persistent reliance on constructing and sentimentalizing disability in their efforts to denounce slavery, however, left them and their audiences with a stigmatized view of race.

Extensions after Man: Race, Counter/insurgency and the Futures of Media Theory

This article returns to the geopolitical scene and racial logics that provide the underacknowledged conditions of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media and, specifically, its well-known proposition that media should be understood foremost as ‘outerings’ or ‘extensions of man’. Attending to the structuring inheritances of racial slavery and the plantation system in this founding statement of mid-twentieth-century media theory, as well as its debt to the literary and intellectual movement of the Southern Agrarians, I consider how the racializing figure of ‘Man’ conserved by the nascent field of media studies was contemporaneously brought to crisis by black (and) anticolonial freedom struggles. Arguing for the need to reread the career of western media theory through its political vocation in attempting to manage this crisis, the article concludes by turning briefly to a revisionary account of media and exteriority also circulated in 1964: the revolutionary intellectual James Boggs’s ‘The Negro and Cybernation’. Boggs’s writings, which situate emergent forms of computing and cybernation within a longer materialist genealogy of race, capitalism and technology, offer both a proleptic critique of the early disciplinary formation of media theory and a divergent set of coordinates for approaching media technology on the terrain of black political struggle.

Slave Christologies: Augustine and the Enduring Trouble with the “Form of a Slave” (Phil 2:5–7)

This essay finds in the thought of Augustine of Hippo a key moment in the development of a strand of the Western theological tradition I will call slave Christologies: theological accounts of the person and work of Jesus Christ that, drawing from the Philippians hymn (Phil 2:5–11), symbolically identify his body with the body of the enslaved, and in so doing, weave the order of slaveholding into the texture of Christian thought. I approach the political and theological implications of this tradition under the pressure of a twofold haunting: of the perennial, if hard to specify, interplay between ideas and forms of life, between the symbolic and the social; and of the contingent, specific historical afterlife of racial slavery which provides the conditions for contemporary Christian thought.

How Much Is Your African Slave Worth?

Arguing that racial slavery was a foundation of the modern world and of capitalism, this essay details the historical ways in which the organization of debt and credit networks were integral to the Atlantic slave trade. The author contends that the enslaved body of the African was itself commodified and, as such, opened new technologies of rule. Contemporary forms of commodification, indebtedness, and saturation, the essay concludes, draw from some of the ways in which the enslaved black body was ruled.

In the wake of logistics: Situated afterlives of race and labour on the Magdalena River

Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted aboard a cargo boat on Colombia’s Magdalena River, and on historical accounts of fluvial transport, this article examines the racial formations on which logistics depends. Logistics is organized around flows at the heart of capitalist modernity, which are made possible by labour regimes whose racial underpinnings have both persisted and changed over time. Tracking continuities and divergences in riverboat work along the Magdalena River, I propose that our understanding of logistics is enriched by attending to historical articulations of race and labour. Inspired by scholars who reckon with the afterlives of racial slavery as well as by those who track precisely how that legacy unfolds in geographically and historically situated ways, I propose the analytic of situated afterlives, which focuses attention on the persistence of racial hierarchies and on their perpetual instability.