Afterlife Of Slavery Research Articles

“with my love”: the colonial legacy of racialized pedophilic pornography in the atlantic world

This essay provides a critical analysis of early-20th-century American postcards, focusing on the portrayal of black and white children as an aesthetic tool of white supremacy and pedophilic racist pleasures. These representations not only reflected but also perpetuated colonial ideologies and racial stereotypes, directly influencing educational practices and policies, and contributing to a social environment where discrimination and sexualization of children was normalized. The article begins with the contrast in the depiction of white and black children, revealing a pattern in which white children were often fetishized as embodiments of innocence and purity, while black children were subjected to pornified portrayals that reinforced negative stereotypes and sought to ensure the continued intergenerational subjugation of African Americans in the afterlife of slavery. A significant aspect of this analysis delves into the role of the zealous purity crusader Anthony Comstock in shaping societal views on childhood innocence and obscenity during the Progressive Era. As a U.S. postal inspector, Comstock wielded influence over public discourse and policy, particularly through his campaigns against the distribution of what he considered morally objectionable representations. This examination extends to the racial implications of Comstock’s adult-centric actions, exploring how they contributed to the differential treatment of black and white children in both media representations and broader societal contexts. The article argues that these images were not merely passive reflections of societal beliefs; rather, they were active tools used to shape and influence the educational and socialization processes of children, and they contributed to the perpetuation of Jim Crow violence, which was manifested through the sexual assault, castration, and lynching of black youth. Furthermore, this essay examines the broader socio-historical context in which racist and pedophilic images were produced and circulated. These postcards are still trafficked today under the false designation of ‘Black Memorabilia,’ reaching significant prices as vintage collector’s items, but the article reframes them as a genre of child pornography. This perspective critically challenges prevailing narratives that may sanitize or downplay the exploitative and violent nature of these images. This essay urges a reconsideration of these consumer items’ historical significance as instruments intricately complicit in sustaining colonial structures and ideologies surrounding childhood innocence in North America. Within this analytical framework, the dehumanization of black children through pedophilic pornography reflects a long heritage of anti-child violence in Western traditions and the colonial strategy of exploiting children of color as a lucrative mechanism for profit and libidinal pleasure.

Hauntings of Absence and Erasure: Black Archival Practices of Property Data

AbstractThis article analyses data at the intersection of digital geographies, critical data studies, and Black studies to bring clarity to relations, differences, and frictions between Black knowledge‐making and common data practices. I highlight artist Tonika Lewis Johnson's project, Inequity for Sale, and detail a genealogy of the data she uses in this project to illustrate how she situates these data within the afterlives of slavery. Drawing from Avery Gordon's theorisation of haunting and ideas towards absences and erasures in Black archival practice, I argue that absences in data can lead to narratives that focus on violence as a singular historical event that is isolated from a larger history of violence. I suggest that bringing a curiosity to these absences, rather than dismissing them or framing them as oversights, can help re‐situate data within a broader temporal‐relational context that brings a sense of Black humanity to the fore.

“I Thought I Was Going to Die like Him”: Racial Authoritarianism and the Afterlife of George Floyd in the United States and Brazil

This paper offers a brief yet comprehensive comparative analysis of historical and contemporary racial authoritarian violence in the United States and Brazil. Utilizing Black feminist historian and literary scholar Saidiya Hartman’s theorization of the “afterlife of slavery” and Michael Dawson’s linked fate, I examine how the processes of racialization and the racial logics of subordination have and continue to shape the contours of Black life in the United States and in Brazil. Moreover, in this work, I interrogate the afterlife of George Floyd and the afterlives of Black Brazilian victims and survivors of racial authoritarian violence; the political, transnational, and symbolic impacts of Floyd’s death; and Diasporic understandings of linked fate on racial authoritarian violence between Black communities in the United States and in Brazil.

The Ruse of Recognition: Black Labor in the Afterlife of Slavery

Given the abolitionism professed by successive labor leaders in the years following the U.S. Civil War, why did the cause of interracial solidarity fail to gain traction in postbellum organized labor? Drawing on archival and secondary data on the encounter of Black and White labor from Reconstruction to the turn of the twentieth century, we trace the failure of interracial solidarity to the labor movement’s refusal to reckon institutionally with what Hartman calls the “nonevent of emancipation” and the “afterlife of slavery” for Black populations. Enslaved artisans dominated the skilled trades before the war, and White unions emerged correspondingly to exclude Black labor. When, after the Civil War, the formerly enslaved began to argue that they were being excluded from unions, White labor used emancipation as an anti-Black discursive technology to deny those claims. White labor also employed violence to exclude Black people from the labor movement. By addressing the research puzzle in this way, we offer a novel synthesis of Black studies and the sparse but important body of work on the sociology of slavery to reframe the mainstream approach to interracial solidarity in the sociology of labor and labor movements.

Candyman and the Afterlives of Slavery

ABSTRACTThe near absence of the horror genre in Black Studies scholarship about the afterlives of slavery can be attributed to the fact that scholars are discussing the “afterlives” of slavery in a non‐mystical way while the horror genre traditionally presents “afterlives” in supernatural forms. While these connotations of afterlives certainly mean different things, they converge in Candyman demonstrating the potential harmony between the two uses of the term. In this paper, I place both versions of Candyman in conversation with recent Black Studies scholarship as well as national discourses about racial inequality and white violence in order to argue for Candyman's relevance to contemporary debates about slavery and its afterlives as a conceptual framework. In addition, I zero in on the 2021 remake to demonstrate how Nia DaCosta's Candyman (2021) clarifies the legend's relationship to the afterlives of slavery and operates as a corrective to Bernard Rose's 1992 film. The intersection of the supernatural afterlife and the afterlives of slavery as understood by Black Studies scholars comes forth in DaCosta's sequel that centralizes the operations of white supremacy and resulting Black trauma.

Commentary: Sofia Zaragocin

Repair is about doing, (re)doing, and materiality. This plenary makes it very clear that repair means taking action, building relations, and a continuous attention to the material. The authors stress the methods of land-as-pedagogy, Black place making and the afterlives of slavery as political and cultural practices. The emphasis is on action and building relations that sustain the materiality of repair. I’d like to take up the four intersecting points mentioned in this paper that can act as a roadmap for geographers and others who are looking to do repair.

America’s Deserter: Forms of Racialised Mistreatment and Escaping the Need to Escape in Percival Everett’s American Desert

In this article, I consider the protagonist of Percival Everett’s American Desert (2004) – Theodore “Ted” Street – and his treatment as a short-lived cultural phenomenon after inexplicably coming back from the dead. I read Ted’s experiences alongside Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten’s ideas on the impacts of racial inequality on Black experience and writing. I discuss Hartman’s work on the “afterlife of slavery” in “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors” (2016), and Moten’s Black and Blur: consent not to be a single being (2017), where he discusses the “predication of blackness” as “immersion” in the aftereffects of the slave trade.American Desert’s episodic narrative problematises Ted’s efforts to escape mistreatment by persistently placing obstacles in front of them. Ted’s afterlife leads to different forms of mistreatment, including unwanted media attention, harassment towards him and his family, and being held captive in two different settings, which are all intensified because Everett invites us to read his character as AfricanAmerican. In line with Hartman and Moten’s work, as the novel progresses Ted realises that to end his cycle of futile escapes he must escape the need to escape, which is a necessary response to the racialised mistreatment he is subjected to.

The work of repair: land, relation, and pedagogy

Geographers center space and place in our understanding of power, arguing that relationships to place matter, that space is a result of power relations, and that how we represent the world makes the world. But to what extent do we turn these methods of analysis to understanding our relations to the land beneath our feet? We consider the experience and limits of repair across four sites, approaching land and place-making as political and cultural practices that orient us toward action and building relations. In this plenary lecture, furthering land-as-pedagogy, work on Black place-making and the afterlives of slavery we propose that geographers take up more seriously and more materially, the work of repair. We are bound up in institutions that stole land from Indigenous peoples, benefitted from enslaved peoples, and built a world of knowledge that shored up the logics and tools of empire; moreover, we must grapple with the afterlives of these practices in their extractive relations to people and land both near and far. As geographers, we can and should be pushing for different kinds of partnerships with the Native nations whose land we are on, toward reparations in the form of material redistribution and restructured power structures, and toward better relations with all workers at our institutions as well. We have an uneven responsibility to devote not only words but also resources and labor to understanding what justice and repair might look like in our fieldsites, discipline, and in our home institutions. We discuss examples of this in our work and at our institutions, propose guiding questions, and invite geographers to reflect on how to do the material work of repair.

Uneven reproduction: Gender, race, class, and birth outcomes

AbstractIn the United States adverse reproductive outcomes are often understood in terms of Black and White differentials within the context of US‐centric racism and as an afterlife of slavery. Yet similar racial variances in outcomes are found globally. How might we understand the persistence of adverse reproductive outcomes among Black women compared to White women in transnational contexts? Building on the concept of uneven development, this article uses the framework of uneven reproduction as one way to examine how inequalities are seared on reproducing bodies. Such framing shifts the analysis of adverse reproductive outcomes from a narrow view of racial disparities to one that explains those outcomes because of complex patterns of investment and disinvestment that reconfigure reproduction. In framing reproductive outcomes as uneven reproduction, this paper excavates three distinct historical cases in three geographic areas. Drawing from imperial and colonial contexts we can track different forms of disinvestment that were and continue to be detrimental to Black women.This approach serves as a lens against which to read the persistent racial differentials in reproductive outcomes facilitated by a transhistorical, transnational and intersectional understanding of the constraints that impede Black women's successful reproduction over time and across space.

Creative Destruction in the Afterlife of Slavery: A Comment on Revaluing Work(ers): Toward a Democratic and Sustainable Future

In this review of Revaluing Work(res), I argue that the labor studies approach must move forward in two directions. First, it must anchor the conversation on the future of work in the concept of “creative destruction” and in doing so advocate a socialist alternative to organizing production. Second, it must highlight the specific legacy of Black labor in the afterlife of slavery in the forms of labor control that characterize new forms of work.

Data plantation: Northern Virginia and the territorialization of digital civilization in “the Internet Capital of the World”

Abstract Purpose The development of the Northern VA and the Washington, DC metro area as a key node in the globalizing digital urban system is well established. This essay investigates the growth of that technological geography in the 1990s and 2000s as a part of the planetary epoch of human transformation that some have called the “Plantationocene” (vs. Anthropocene). Approach A historical and critical interpretive analysis of race, landscape, and technology policy in the Northern VA area. Findings The paper establishes the region’s social attachments to its “bucolic” agrarian landscape, rooted in the US Civil War and vast inequalities of the reimposition of the plantation as an “afterlife of slavery” after Reconstruction’s failure. It then suggests that the conditions of the plantation economy within a kind of digital plantation economy—featuring resource monopolies, extractive forms of exploitation, and monocrop “ecologies”—based on the “Server Farming” (aka, data center) industry through which some 70 % of the world’s Internet traffic flows. It looks at this digital aspect of the Plantationocene as post-Bellum and insurgent, in which the manipulation of history, the accumulation and control of ‘arable’ (digital) land, and the dispossession of social processes under quasi-feudalistic property rights encourage unequal, unsustainable, and often violent cultures and political ecologies. Practical implications Researchers considering digital urbanism might use this approach to understand online and offline geographies of the contemporary media industry. Social implications It treats the contemporary anti-government and ethno-nationalist movements growing in digital mediation as part of a much longer and unsettled planetary conflict over the plantation system, racialized social inequality, and the abolition of slavery. Originality/value While some work on “data colonialism” implicitly connects digital urbanism to the mostly agriculturally-focused work on the Plantationocene, this essay makes the connection explicit, place-based in specific historical-geographical contexts, and focused on the roles of specific political economic actors.

Afterlives of Slavery in Early Liberia

Abstract: This article examines letters written by formerly enslaved settlers in Liberia during the mid-nineteenth century to examine two aspects of the afterlives of slavery. Manumitted settlers in Liberia, as formerly enslaved people, connected to audiences in the United States in different ways from freeborn settlers, who were more likely to make multiple transatlantic voyages, or had commercial connections with the United States. In this afterlife of slavery in Liberia, the letter writers examined here relied on relationships with their former enslavers to remain connected to kin and community in the United States. In a second evocation of afterlives, these letters show how settlers' conceptualizations of home pressed beyond both the United States and Liberia. For them, "home" was reunification with family–a family that could only be made whole through a belief in a shared spiritual afterlife.

In search of a post-transatlantic slave trade dwelling and conviviality: rethinking Ghana’s ‘Year of Return’ with Ama Ata Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965)

Drawing on hooks’ notion of ‘homeplace’, Ahmed’s theorisation of ‘strange encounter,’ and Sharpe’s rumination on Black being ‘in the wake’ or afterlife of slavery, this paper reflects on how Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost can help examine the ‘Year of Return’ project in terms of dwelling. The paper argues that Aidoo’s play proffers a pedagogy of intercultural communication and a radical deconstruction of home and kinship. By noting Aidoo’s emphasis on intercultural communication, home, and dwelling, the paper demonstrates how the ‘Year of Return’ can be conceptually enriched and pragmatically organised in ways that seriously consider Aidoo’s ethic of dwelling. The paper is, therefore, a corrective to the overemphasis in the ‘Year of Return’ celebrations on trade, capital, and investment. Finally, the paper sheds light on the relationship between literature and society.

Black Aesthetics and Deep Water: Fish-People, Mermaid Art and Slave Memory in South Africa

ABSTRACT Mami Wata is a water spirit venerated across the Indian and Atlantic Ocean worlds. In South Africa, a water spirit who is a mermaid figure goes by many names and is either feared or revered for her other-wordly powers. This mermaid figure, I argue, functions as site of slavery memory as well as a reminder of the troubled relationship black and previously enslaved communities have with water. I analyse artistic representations of the figure of the “watermeisie” (water maiden/water girl), a kind of mermaid creature who is half-human and half-fish. I discuss how this figure functions as a discursive site for South African women artists’ investigations into the before- and afterlives of slavery. I argue that the watermeisie as nomadic figure provides us with a speculative re-mapping of slave memory in Southern Africa. The article examines how the ocean and the figure of the mermaid appear in works by Koleka Putuma, Claudette Schreuders and Nelisiwe Xaba, artists who have brought the watermeisie with all its complexity in South African waters and discourse into focus, by charting a map of slave genealogies using the roots/routes of slavery in and out of water.

Low Country Lamentations

Michael Boyce Gillespie interviews the multidisciplinary artist Jon-Sesrie Goff about his first feature film, After Sherman. He suggests that the film that can been understood as an inquiry that explores a question that has long preoccupied Goff: “What role does documentary play when it is documented or viewed outside of the experience and space it depicts?” Gillespie argues that After Sherman manifests an answer through its expansive and reflexive accounting of culture and place as well as its formal deliberation on blackness, the afterlives of slavery, land as material and cultural inheritance, and home as site of origin and foundation for possible futures.

“All That He Seen Burnt a Hole in His Brain”

Abstract The title of this playlist comes from the chorus of Armand Hammer's “Rehearse with Ornette,” wherein billy woods repeats, “All that he seen burnt a hole in his brain/only came back to tell ’em bout them fucking flames.” This idea of a mind swallowed in shock, bellowing out its truth, is a deeply disturbing image and a generative point of entry into the psychic terror of black being in the afterlife of slavery. Thus the tracks in this playlist explore the impressionistic and visceral qualities of the Afro-Gothic mindset through songs that lyrically and sonically express themes of faith and grief as part of the soundtrack to everyday black life.

Obstetric Violence: An Intersectional Refraction through Abolition Feminism

AbstractObstetric violence, a term coined by activists in Latin America to describe violence during pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum, is a controversial feminist term in global health policymaking as well as in obstetric and midwifery practice and research. We reflect on the term both theoretically and autoethnographically to demonstrate its feminist value in addressing the problem of violence as embedded within the obstetric institution.We argue that obstetric violence as an activist and critical feminist concept can only be effective for change when it is clearly understood as institutionalized intersectional violence. Therefore, we propose an abolitionist framework for further study. Through this lens, we refract the concept of obstetric violence as institutionalized, intersectional, and racializing violence by (1) making an abolitionist historiography of the obstetric institution, and (2) centering anti‐Black obstetric racism as the anchor point of obstetric violence, where the afterlife of slavery, racial capitalism, the impact of systemic racism, and the consequences of patriarchal biopolitics come together.Abolition provides a unique approach to study obstetric violence since it not only refuses and dismantles violent institutions, but specifically focuses on building futures out of existing alternative practices toward a life‐affirming world of care. We locate the abolitionist futures of maternity care in Black, Indigenous, and independent doula and midwifery practices.

RETHINKING THE LIBERIAN PREDICAMENT IN ANTI-BLACK TERMS

Liberia’s protracted civil conflict was sustained for a period of fourteen years (1989–2003), killing approximately 250,000 Liberians and displacing half of the population. Liberia’s war, like other contemporary African conflicts, has been persistently represented as an example of wanton violence, political tribalism, chaos, or an amalgamation of such elements. Founded in 1822, the Colony of Liberia was annexed by the American Colonization Society to expatriate and colonize “free” negros and their descendants on the coast of West Africa. “Re-colonization,” as it was recognized by the ruling US Southern class, was rendered a compromise between the absolute abolition of the transatlantic slave trade and perpetual black servitude. Yet, repatriation was treacherously crafted by abolitionists and their pro-slavery contemporaries, alike, as a fugitive project, an opportunity for “free” blacks to experiment with emancipation and take refuge from the sociopolitical and economic conditions which amounted to what was effectively slavery by another name. The rhetorical propagation of the West African settlement as a pre-racial site – of sorts – in which stolen peoples could escape the violence of American racialism has made articulable contemporary theorizations of the Liberian civil war as a paradigmatic example of the negro’s irresponsible experimentations with freedom. The following paper offers a re-contemplation of Liberian historiographical accounts, one that attends to the racialized global orders against which this national crisis has developed and limns the impossibility of freedom in the afterlife of slavery, where anti-black terror is not only temporally unbounded but transgeographical.

“[Existing] While Black”: Race, Gender, and the Surveillance of Blackness

This manuscript carefully examines racialized surveillance, a mechanism of anti-Black violence, or what Hartman has called the afterlife of slavery, that persists in society despite the formal end of enslavement. To accomplish this, I conducted a critical discourse analysis of an incident in the public sphere and one in an educational context to show the ways anti-Black sentiments flow between them in similar ways. Specifically, this analysis examined the controversial Starbucks incident that involved a White manager calling the police on two Black men, and the experience of Lolade Siyonbola, who was napping in a commons at Yale University. Responding to the pressing question, how do we exist, in the bodies that we hold, in this historical moment and into the future, methodologically, I think with histories of Black men and Black women in the white imaginary and Foucault’s instruments of power to interrogate anti-Black logics affecting Black people in public and educational contexts.

Sydney Cain’s Spiritual Refusals amidst the Afterlives of Slavery

Sydney Cain (she/them) is a young, Bay-area based artist whose multimedia works on paper explore Black ancestral memory, transformation, and spirituality. Using a process of reduction, Cain moves small particles of elements such as chalk and graphite in a circular motion to surface shapes and figures. These figures are often faceless and incomplete; their blurred silhouettes evoking traces, incomplete memories, and ghostly presences. Cain refers to these figures as ancestral spirits, and their graphite and chalk as ciphers that assist in decoding “unseen realities.” The artist's discussion of these zones of liminality, and their commitment to rendering these ephemeral, ancestral forms provoke the questions: what does it mean to make legible something which we feel is always there? What does it mean to make your ancestors visible, to conjure them within an aesthetic realm? This paper will explore Cain’s interest in spirituality and ancestral memory through Refutations (2018- ), an ongoing body of work that centers narratives of Black resistance across time. Using Christina Sharpe’s theories on the afterlives of slavery, Saidiya Hartman’s practice of reading with and against archives, and M. Jacqui Alexander’s scholarship on practitioners of African-descendent religions, I argue that Cain’s practice is a form of embodied spiritual labor that ruptures the linearity of anti-Black conditions structuring the past and present.