Slavery is something that I have thought about, read about, and taught for quite some time. I teach a course at Queen's University in Kingston Ontario on Slavery in North America from the colonial era until 1865. I also teach courses that deal exclusively with or touch upon aspects of the Black experiences in Canada in the broader context of Canadian Racial State formation. One of the things I have not done as well as I might have is to acknowledge that there are many types of coerced labor and trafficking—forms of slavery in a word—that exist today.
This is one of the many things that this collection does extremely well. It amply shows that slavery in the post-1926 era is still very much with us. Although there is a broad consensus that trafficking exists, there is a general reluctance to talk about the endurance of forms, patterns, legacies, and iterations of slavery into the present and this fine collection has alerted me to the importance of signaling that singularly important fact and reflecting upon its significance. I also appreciated the discussion around disaggregating the discussion to look at several themes and how they existed—often uneasily—under the rhetoric of “ending slavery” (22). The discussion of the multiple rhetorics of anti-slavery is also enlightening as it pulls apart the nuances and complexities of the topic that are often flattened in typical conversations and policy discussions. This book is divided into three parts and 12 chapters. Part 1, Chapters 1–4 deal with the causes of contemporary slavery; Part 2, Chapters 5–8 examine patterns of rhetoric; and Part 3, Chapters 9–11 deal with today's forms of slavery in practice. The books' perspective is global, traversing sites in Africa, Asia, and the United States.
This is a well-curated collection that very effectively grounds the subject matter both empirically and conceptually. As an historian, there were several things that struck me about this book, however. The first is the use of the terms “contemporary” and “modern” to signal that this collection is rooted in the present. It is used to create a temporal break between the past and the present day and perhaps to distinguish the iterations of slavery that exist now from their predecessors in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. A few things strike me about this. First is the idea that slavery is now widely considered to be some sort of “relic”—to borrow the language used in the preface—that needed to be exhumed from the past as it is buried beneath silences. Perhaps, and I agree that is the case for a wide swath of the North American population, but such a claim, I argue, is generated from a rather privileged standpoint in some respects—and it reflects a very particular understanding of the trajectory of slavery and its complicated legacies.
Second, historians and Black Studies scholars locate modernity—the modern—race, capitalism, colonialism, and its unprecedented displacements, asynchronous time, and etcetera in the very period that this collection is writing against. In other words, in some respects the invocation of the modern is a little odd and perhaps somewhat limited (in fairness, Joel Quirk gestures to this in ftn 53 of the introductory chapter citing a piece of his that explores the relationship between the reticence to discuss contemporary slavery to facilitate this rhetorical dodge. Third, the scholars that I have in mind have spent a lot of time thinking about how the modernity that was birthed on the slave ship created the conditions for slavery and its “afterlife” throughout the West. Indeed, many of us see these histories as resistant to the straightforward notions of linear time but not how these histories constantly fold in on themselves, noting, for example, that contiguity of the plantation, the prison, and the carceral city in North American life, for example. Last, it is clear that slavery is not limited to the black experience by any means. Indeed as Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick demonstrates in his piece, there were three waves of anti-slavery agitation in the English speaking world: British, United States (Emancipation Proclamation) the “white slave trade”, and lastly trafficking for labor and sexual exploitation. His piece goes on to tell us “it is in the third and fourth waves that explicitly focus on ownership- and the deep social, legal and cultural rituals that ownership underwrote- was replaced by new struggles around rights and dignity” (279). I might quibble with some of the distinctions being made here among the first, second, third, and fourth eras although I am generally in agreement. But is nonetheless jarring to see a study that constantly references abolitionist/anti-slavery movement has so little to say about Blackness.
Fuyuki Karasawa's contribution “Contemporary Anti-Slavery Advocacy as Symbolic Work” gestures to some of these links providing us with an intriguing analysis of how “modern” anti-slavery activists mobilized the rhetoric and imagery of their nineteenth-century predecessors in terms of what he calls the “analogical juxtaposition” and thereby “eschewing analogically coding images in a manner that would aim to collapse the substantial differences in intensity and scale between present types of enslavement and the transatlantic trade.” (161). Karasawa's project is a little different from the one I have in mind because I see the links between the two eras as more than just the deployment of rhetorical, symbolic, and hyperbolic imagery. I think Karasawa misses an opportunity to think about the current lingering historical present of Trans-Atlantic slavery that do not necessarily crudely collapse the past and the present. Indeed, in my view so much of the discussion of contemporary slavery misses the point that forms of slavery—the condition of unfreedom—and its attendant miseries are a product of the stew of race/modernity/coloniality. The work of scholars such as Reference HartmanSaidiya Hartman (1997) and Reference SharpeChristina Sharpe (2016) would have thus been helpful in thinking through these issues for the contributors to this collection.Footnote 1 Hartman's work emphasizes the continuities in the pre- and post-slavery eras and compels us to look beyond the legal categories of slavery and emancipation to think about the reiterations of white supremacy over space and time. Christina Sharpe uses the concept of the wake and its multiple registers to talk about the breaks and continuities of life in the metaphoric materiality of the wake: the holds of ships and the weather of anti-Blackness.
Annie Bunting and Joel Quirk have given us a fine collection that alerts us to ongoing practices of slavery and the enduring global patterns of unfreedom that still mark far too much of the human condition. This is precisely why it is so important. Future work in this area, nonetheless, needs to grapple with the legacy of Trans-Atlantic slavery for its descendants not in terms of rhetoric or analogically coded images but in terms of the materiality of the historical present.
