Logistics Genealogies. A Dialogue with Stefano Harney (original) (raw)

2017

No other topic in the history of the Atlantic World is more politically, socially, culturally, and emotionally charged than slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. As the Western world (and through the processes of globalization, much of the rest of the world) seems to be moving towards more universal and inclusive principles of human rights, social and political constructions of race still echo with often polarizing power as humanity struggles to reconcile concepts of race, by definition exclusionary, within a more inclusive paradigm. Like all social and political ideas, concepts of race are historically rooted. These seeds of these concepts were carried deep within the bowels of the ships, which one recent historian describes as “complex, technologically sophisticated instruments of torture,” that transferred millions of Africans across the Atlantic Ocean over the course of four centuries. Much of the history of what is now termed the Atlantic World has been directly affected by the consequences of the conceptions of race that solidified as African men and women were offloaded, weary and emaciated, from the decks of those floating gulags. To understand the Atlantic World today, it is imperative to trace the ways these concepts have manifested historically and continue to shape the ways that humanity conceives of itself socially, politically, and culturally.