CFP: "Liberalism, Blackness, and Labor Regimes In Post-Slavery Worlds" (XXI World Congress of Sociology, Gwangju, Korea, July 4-10, 2027) (XXI World Congress of Sociology)
Gwangju (South Korea)
Organization: International Sociological Association
Event: XXI World Congress of Sociology
The abolition of racial slavery in the nineteenth century aligned with universal liberal norms of human freedom and equality but did not merely fulfill those norms. Processes of slaves’ emancipation resulted instead in the reconstitution of racial hierarchies and subjugation constraining or impeding the self-determination of newly freed or colonized Black populations. The labor contract and production systems it structured within globalizing capitalism were key sites of renewed racialized domination to the extent that, when applied to blackness, laboring status was shaped by institutions that prevented actual political citizenship and social inclusion. Liberal ideas and modes of governance were therefore adapted to the task of combining normative universality with practical modalities of racial domination. Blackness thus confronted what Saidiya Hartman called “the afterlife of slavery.” This session will discuss the continuing subordination of formerly enslaved and newly colonized Black and Afro-descended populations within the labor regimes—intended as articulations of employment systems, accumulation patterns, laws, and ideas—of the post-abolition world. The session will also focus on how governments, experts, and social actors conceptualized, enforced, and institutionalized the racial subordination of post-slavery blackness in settler colonialism and evolving modalities of plantation or extractive capitalism. Analyses of and comparisons between cases from the Atlantic world, Africa, West and South Asia, societies along the Indian and Pacific oceans, and the Mediterranean are especially welcome, as are contributions on how the historically long duration of racialized labor regimes shapes social stratifications in today’s racial capitalisms.
Franco Barchiesi