Shadows of Slavery. Refractions of the past, challenges of the present (original) (raw)
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Approaching Contemporary Slavery Through an Historic Lens: an Interdisciplinary Perspective
Journal of Modern Slavery, 2018
This article uses an interdisciplinary approach combining social justice and history to address and offer a response to critiques that argue ‘slavery’ is not an appropriate term for present day cases of extreme exploitation. By analysing the means and modalities through which situations of slavery are established and maintained across various temporal and geographical examples, this article highlights how the practices of the past persist in the present.
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Journal of Global Slavery, 2021
Indrani Chatterjee's groundbreaking research has shown the centrality of obligation and provision to historical forms of slavery in South Asia, deepening our understanding of slave-using societies beyond the plantation systems that have dominated historiography, as well as historical memory. In this interview, Chatterjee explains why the crucial question in the context of South Asian slavery was: who do you serve and for what purpose? Enslavers were obliged to materially provide for their slaves, in return for the enslaved person's service, labor and loyalty, creating varied relationships of dependence. By foregrounding the complex set of relationships and obligations in which slaves were enmeshed, Chatterjee seeks to "make people out of laborers." This has led her to rethink the ways that resistance and agency have been conceptualized in slavery studies and Subaltern Studies, emphasizing the relationships within which a person became an agent. Her research has also deepened our understanding of colonialism and slavery. British colonizers generally ignored slaves' entitlements to certain labor or taxation exemptions from the state, and colonial revenue-collection made the already-interview Journal of Global Slavery 6 (2021) 249-261 burdened doubly burdened. But in a hetero-temporal colonial context, older ways of identifying and forms of relationships endured. Chatterjee argues that this history of the provision of survival in contexts of enslavement is not "romanticizing," but rather historicizes multiple forms of violence and shows a fuller, more varied picture of slavery.
Slaves and Highlanders: Silenced Histories of Scotland and the Caribbean David Alston, Edinburgh University Press, 2021, 381 pp, £14.99; HB. £90.00;Bought & Sold: Scotland, Jamaica, and Slavery, Kate Phillips, Luath Press Limited, 2021, PB £11.99, 2021
The books reviewed in this posting document the hidden history of the involvement of Scots in slavery in the Caribbean. Slaves and Highlanders: Silenced Histories of Scotland and the Caribbean David Alston, Edinburgh University Press, 2021, 381 pp, £14.99; HB. £90.00 Bought & Sold: Scotland, Jamaica, and Slavery, Kate Phillips, Luath Press Limited, 2021, PB £11.99 Reviewer: Paul Okojie