Public Lecture by Kris Manjapra – Associate Professor of History and Interim Director, Consortium of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora, Tufts University
During the so-called Age of Liberalism (1830-1900), forced labor spread across the globe. Amidst discourses of abolition, the monumental migration of ‘indentured’ laborers from Asia to the West Indies was matched by other large-scale forms of migration that traveled in the opposite direction: the movement of assets, capitalists, biota, and discourses about labor mobilization and labor control from the West Indies to Asia. In the midst of these complex circulations, racial-colonial modes of capitalist production spread, dependent upon the use of force, debt, and bodily destruction. This mode of production expanded worldwide in that very era associated with the coming of the wage, the contract, and “emancipation.” The material history of the plantation exposes the great internal contractions of Liberalism.
Monday, February 13, 6pm, Wolff Conference Room (6 E 16th St, Room 1103)
