Todd Awbrey/Flickr. Creative Commons.
Since the era of colonial and genocidal world conquest, the historical pathways of transatlantic chattel slavery have marked the geographical and political boundaries of global racial dominance. We cannot adequately conceptualize, theorize, or politically intervene in contemporary institutions of bodily expropriation and chattel-making—literally, the violent conversion of the human subject into an object of violent commodity relations/exchange—without a central focus on ‘race’ as a matrix of enslavement. Racial slavery thus cannot be positioned in the past tense, as if it were some kind of historical artifact no longer relevant to the shaping of our global (racial) condition. Neither can the endemic violence of racial chattel slavery—its institutionalized rituals of psychic, physical, and cultural brutality—be conceptualized as the extremist or irrational residue of an otherwise bygone period. Slavery shapes our spatial and political present tense, to the extent that the places in which we move would literally not exist as they do if not for the epoch-shaping violence of a global racial enslavement regime.
How does racial chattel slavery, as a modeling of power relations, shape the current historical moment?
