Description
The legacies of plantation slavery continue to inhabit, animate, and haunt the diverse forms of unfreedom that mark our present. Diverse Unfreedoms charts a new way of thinking through these legacies of unfreedom via a more entangled and multidirectional model of what makes for historical change and continuity in practices and relationships of subjugation. This volume troubles the stark opposition between slavery and freedom by foregrounding the diversity of types of exploitation above and beyond the most extreme forms of dehumanization characterized by slavery. The chapters, from multiple disciplines and discussing diverse regions and historical periods, illustrate the significance of interdisciplinary and international perspectives in understanding diverse unfreedoms, and offer a nuanced account of historical change and continuity in systems that generate and perpetuate unfreedom. Through examining the frictions that mark certain key moments of legal, social, and institutional transition, the essays in this volume express the limits of liberal humanist projects and present a critique of the liberal notion of freedom as the necessary horizon of emancipatory imagination and labor.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction: Diverse Unfreedoms —The Afterlives and Transformations of Post-Transatlantic Bondages
Keith Michael Green, Cati Coe, and Sarada Balagopalan
Part I: Transitions
2. A "Sentiment of Humanity"?: Child Protection, Surveillance, and State Guardianship in Senegal, 1895-1910
Kelly M. Duke Bryant
3. Benevolent Complicity: The Detention of Unaccompanied Children in the United States
Lauren Heidbrink
Part II: Legacies
4. Post-Apartheid Nostalgia and its Images of Common Sense
Zamansele Nsele
5. "You are My Slave!": Adjacent Relations of Unfreedom in Care Work and the Racialization of West African Care Workers
Cati Coe
6. Abolitionist Action Heroes: Operation Underground Railroad and the Material Cultures of Philanthropy
Meredith A. Bak
Part III: Reimaginings
7. Disenchanting Freedom in Sylvia Wynter’s The Hills of Hebron
Margarita Castromán
8. Freedom as Staying: Race, Religious History, and Carceral Ethnography in Chicago
Kai Parker and R. Noll
9. The Blood That Has Dried in the Codes: Sovereignty, Right, and the (Im)Possibilities of Freedom
Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes
"Arrival Day"
Eve Ewing
