In thinking this question through the collusion of emancipation and imperial expansion, I am deeply influenced by the work of Thomas Holt, Saidiya Hartman, Andrew Zimmerman and others who have, in different ways, examined the remaking of race and racialized coercion after the end of slavery. As Hartman puts it in Scenes of Subjection, black labor is produced through modes of coercion that “exceeded the coercion immanent in capital labor relations.” For imperial administrators and international civil servants between the late 19th and mid-twentieth centuries, the deployment of extra-economic coercion was both justified as necessary in the tropics and rhetorically distanced from chattel slavery. I am interested in the ways that race emerges from the structures of coercion and also serves to stabilize them. I also want to return to the what where anticolonial critics like W.E.B Du Bois, George Padmore and others tried to name this specificity of black labor by returning to and rewriting the history of slavery. I am struck by chapter 1 of Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction—the Black Worker where he grasps to name what made black labor a distinctive form. Asking “What did it mean to be a slave?” he finds “its analogues today in the yellow, brown, and black laborer in China and India, in Africa, in the forests of the Amazon…” He makes this connection even more explicit in Darkwater where he writes, “Today instead of removing laborers from Africa to distant slavery, industry built on a new slavery approaches Africa to deprive the natives of their land, to force them to toil, and to reap all the profit for the white world.” The “Negro Worker” of Padmore’s journal would in this come to name discrepant and raced categories of labor that could not full assimilated to the figure of proletariat.
Though I am not sure exactly where it will lead, I want to think through how one might plot different visions of freedom from the subject position of the Negro Worker. I hope to pursue the question with three guiding orientations in mind. First, having left the terrain of formal international politics and state sovereignty, I hope to be more attuned to freedom projects that are articulated on “a lower frequency” that might not take the form of organized and institutional politics, that while ephemeral and fleeting offer conceptual resources for reimagining freedom. If in Worldmaking, I charted how critique of colonial labor as slavery grounded project of postcolonial statehood, this project opens up space to consider the alternative trajectories of such a critique and to offer a critical vantage point on the ways the postcolonial states deployed and reinforced the coercive logics it inherited. Second, I want to attend more closely to the erasures and lapses that made available the category of Negro Worker. I want to attend more closely to the underlying assumption about politics and economic transformation that underwrite the projects of Du Bois and Padmore. This too informed by Hartman who illustrates that the heroic vision in Du Bois’s general strike obscures black women’s sexual and reproductive labors. Finally, after rereading Andrew Sartori’s Liberalism in Empire in our class, I want to try and hold at bay my own desires to find certain kinds of resistance among my subjects, to be open to the multiple ways colonized people secured something akin to freedom even if compromised and limited.
I hope this gives you a sense of the questions and framing I am thinking with even if the substance of the project has yet to be fill. Ultimately, I would like this examination of colonial labor and its legacies to inform the on-going debates about the contemporary transformation of work. By provincializing the proletariat as the primary or dominant figure of labor, it attunes us less to the decline and crisis of the wage laborer than to the prior problem of dispossession and thereby makes it possible to chart the multiple ways that that dispossession is lived.
Adom Getachew in conversation with Chris Taylor, “The Global Plantation,” b2o (x)
Some inchoate and out-of-order thoughts on this:
Gotta think more about the super important distinctions between (and nuancings of the relationship between) plantation, enslavement, and capitalism in this discussion.
In a hasty, overly monolithic and sequential historical account, it’s easy to miss the fact that the plantation (as Taylor and Getachew insist) shouldn’t be reduced to the setting of slavery alone; that plantations and the carceral system as we’ve come to know it can and do coexist. Getachew’s phrase “the plantation’s uneven relationship to the world system” is helpful here.
I think the discussion (not in this quote) of the Angela Davis / RWG debate about the historical continuities and discontinuities between chattel slavery & prisons is super powerful and worth hanging onto. Especially because it calls attention to the fact that an analytic I turn to a lot, namely Robinson’s racial capitalism, might need to be specified with a historical and geographic frame. I guess all I’m saying is I often tend to use “racial capitalism” as a theoretical blanket without attending to, indeed, unevennesses within the world system.
Another quote from Getachew, earlier in the article:
I worry that when framed as an antecedent or metaphor for the carceral, its contemporaneity and co-presence disappear [i.e., the contemporaneity and copresence of the plantation and the carceral]. A couple of months before we started teaching the class, In These Times reported on labor struggles in Honduran plantations where workers demanded union rights and compliance with domestic and international labor standards. The worry here is that the plantation’s persistence as a site of a particular regime of labor process is occluded when the carceral is posited as its current iteration or instantiation.
