17701. Critical Allies On Contemporary Enslavement and Statelessness
- Author:
- Jane Anna Gordon
- Publication Date:
- 06-2020
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Statelessness & Citizenship Review
- Institution:
- Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness, Melbourne Law School
- Abstract:
- When I began reading about and researching contemporary enslavement some twenty years ago, I did so primarily as a political theorist rooted in Africana Studies, a field animated, among other core problems, by grappling with how the African diaspora has resisted institutions of racialised slavery and colonisation. I had always gravitated toward the Marxist camps of Black Studies, which rooted analyses of colonialism in those of racial capitalism, and to those that coalesced around the framework of Global Southern feminisms, which insisted that one could not understand race and class separately from gender. I was therefore very surprised to learn that many of my most valued colleagues were profoundly sceptical of — if they did not outright reject — work on contemporary enslavement or ‘modern slavery’.1Similarly, while none of my colleagues whose work is rooted in Indigenous thought and politics would diminish the significance of what is at stake in documented instances of statelessness, nor the value of the complex and difficult labour of counteracting it, few saw such efforts as immediately relevant to the political issues that they prioritise. If we step back to consider both contemporary enslavement and statelessness through a more capacious lens, we can see why neither should be understood as the siloed purview of human rights or international law — why they are instead directly pertinent to scholars motivated by the many legacies and continued challenges of racialised enslavement and settler colonialism.
- Topic:
- Diaspora, Capitalism, Slavery, and Stateless Population
- Political Geography:
- Africa and Global South