Representations of Slavery in Neoliberal Times
This symposium brought together activists, artists and academics who address
neoliberalism, contemporary slavery and modern slavery through the concept of
representation (visual, affective, cultural and media). It was hosted by Media and
Cultural Studies, the Postcolonial Research Group and the Gender Research Group
at Newcastle University on Friday 25th May 2012.
Abstracts
Negative Positives: The Guardian, The Slave, The Wit and The Money
Lubaina Himid, Centre for Contemporary Art, University of Central Lancashire
This essentially visual presentation will attempt to show how The Guardian
newspaper in 2007, and then just as strongly during subsequent years, constantly
suggests that European sports teams and clubs disproportionally overspend when
buying, selling and keeping black players. While this is not an unusual stance by
journalists in the British sporting press, The Guardian by frequently and jokily
representing footballers and athletes via mocking photographs, degrading texts
and or damaging juxtapositions of both, subtly ‘reminds’ its readers, many of
whom are public health and social workers, teachers and academics as well as
workers in the creative industries, of historically familiar racial stereotypes. The
newspaper designers, by taking this approach, contribute to a situation in which
the athletes remain within a ‘state of unbelonging’.
Much of Lubaina Himid’s recent creative visual practice has been taken up with
building this archive of images and texts. The creation of a series of paper works,
Negative Positives, in which ‘over-painting to emphasise’ has gone some way
towards reclaiming the dignity of the people represented has however, to some
degree, minimalised the findings and rendered them outside the debates they
were intended to develop. Through the sharing of a range of these collected
images both overpainted and in their original state, many from the year of
commemoration 2007, Himid will invite discussion around how this subtle and
oftentimes witty degradation of wealthy black elites undermines the campaigns
opposed to contemporary slavery while at the same time visually fixing the black
person as ‘other’ to be bought and sold.
Debt, Freedom and Slavery in Neoliberal Times
Julia O’Connell Davidson, University of Nottingham
In dominant discourse on ‘trafficking’, mobility, debt and dependence are
configured in a very particular way and the kind of debt involved is clearly marked
as disturbing, dangerous, illegal, morally wrong. The trafficker’s objective is to
make repayment impossible and so to establish personal, inescapable, and highly
asymmetrical relations of power and dependency. Relations between trafficker
and victim are represented as the very antithesis of freedom – trafficking is
frequently referred to as ‘modern slavery’. And yet debt that generates relations
of dependency is also often a feature of forms of mobility that are legally
sanctioned; debt that compels people to take on work that they would otherwise
refuse is hardly uncommon in Western liberal democracies; and the techniques
used to recover legally sanctioned loans from citizen-debtors can be highly
coercive. But legally sanctioned debt, backed by the coercive powers of the state,
is not framed as ‘modern slavery’. Indeed, in neoliberal times, access to credit,
i.e., the ability to indebt oneself by entering into socially sanctioned creditordebtor relations, is a marker of social inclusion, something that both reflects and
affirms political belonging and subjectivity. Starting from an interest in debt as a
social relation, and in questions about why some debt relations are sanctioned
while others are denounced, this paper is concerned with the ways in which liberal
discourse on freedom, rights and citizenship constructs particular types of debt
and dependency as ‘modern slavery’ while endorsing other arrangements that,
from the vantage point of the individual affected, may appear equally if not more
pernicious.
Alternative Empathies: Representing Slavery's Affective Afterlives
Carolyn Pedwell, Newcastle University
Against the dominant universalist injunction to ‘be empathetic’, this paper
explores the possibilities of alternative histories, practices and affects of empathy
in the context of postcoloniality and neoliberalism. Offering a critical reading of
Antiguan American author Jamaica Kincaid’s postcolonial text A Small Place
(1988), it examines how empathy expressed at the margins of our social and geopolitical imaginaries might disrupt or refigure some of the dominant ways that
affect is thought and mobilised in liberal and neoliberal discourses. As a powerful
commentary on the political, economic and affective links between colonialism
and slavery and contemporary practices of tourism in the Caribbean that has
provoked intense emotional responses among its readers, A Small Place offers a
pertinent site through which to explore how history, power and violence shape the
meanings and effects of empathy. It illustrates how the affective afterlives of
colonialism, slavery and racism shape contemporary subjectivities in ways that are
not easy to penetrate, nor possible to undo, through the power of empathetic will
or imagination alone. In doing so, Kincaid’s text also considers the role that
alternative empathies can play in interrogating the idea of time as linear,
progressive and universal. The continuing dialogue with loss and its aftermath that
alternative empathies can engender, I argue, allows for engaging with ‘the
performative force of the past’ (Munoz, 2009) in ways that invite us to break from
fixed patterns and positionings and enter into a ‘more
demanding’, and
potentially more ethical, relationship to the world and our being in it (Kincaid,
1988: 57). I thus explore how alternative empathies might open out to affective
politics which do not view emotions instrumentally as sources of – or solutions to –
complex social and political problems, but rather examine diverse and shifting
feeling states for what they tell us about the affective workings of power in a
transnational world.
Roundtable Participants
Dr. Kate Manzo (Geography, Newcastle University)
Dr. Rachel Wells (Fine Art, Newcastle University)
Dr. Diana Paton (History, Newcastle University)
Chair: Dr. Daniel McNeil, School of Arts and Cultures, Newcastle University