Currently Reading: 2 December 2013

• Tryon P. Woods – “Surrogate Selves: Notes on Anti-Trafficking and Anti-Blackness” (2013)

Abstract: This essay explores the discursive production of black captivity across the African diaspora in the afterlife of slavery. I take as my objects of analysis the contemporary anti-trafficking and anti-slavery movements, features of the increasing hegemony of human rights discourse for formulating problems of social justice and their remedies. I argue that configuring black captivity-  in this case, the experiences of Nigerian women migrants to Western Europe- through these hegemonic discourses extend, rather than ameliorate, the global structural antagonism of anti-blackness.

Keywords: slavery; anti-blackness; anti-trafficking; modern-day slavery; Nigeria;globalization; racial/sexual violence; black migration

• “Wanderings of the Slave: Black Life and Social Death”
• Jafari S. Allen – “Queer/Black/Diaspora at the Current Conjuncture” (2012)
• Joy James – “The Dead Zone: Stumbling at the Crossroads of Party Politics, Genocide, and Postracial Racism” (2009)
• Dylan Rodriguez – “I Would Wish Death on You…”: Race, Gender, and Immigration in the Globality of the U.S. Prison Regime (2008)
• Jesmyn Ward’s “Salvage the Bones”
• David Harvey’s “A Brief History of Neoliberalism”
• Hannah Arendt’s “Between Past and Future: 8 Exercises in Political Thought”

What are you reading?