In literary studies, questions of race, power, and terror raised by the mention of the Zong atrocity have long been familiar. While the facts of the case are well known—in 1781, a captain of a British slave ship chose to throw 133 slaves overboard so that he could claim them as insurance losses—the afterlife of Zong far exceeds its eighteenth-century abolitionist frame of moral outrage, legal maneuver, and humanitarian activism. Following in and amplifying J. M. W. Turner’s footsteps (whose 1840 painting Slave Ship galvanized sentiment against slavery), numerous poets, novelists, artists, and historians have turned to the still unfolding implications of this horrific event and the subsequent legal battle to make the very name Zong an iconic one for studies of slavery, race, and blackness, as well as for our conceptions of history and racial capitalism. For Ian Baucom, the Zong atrocity names not an isolated or exceptional incident—rather it emblematizes the very logic at the core of contemporary financial systems and human rights regimes, the heart of what we inhabit as Atlantic modernity.1 For Paul Gilroy, an understanding of a black Atlantic counterculture of modernity rests in a similar refusal to see the past as settled and to mine contemporary culture for coded and potentially transformative visions of justice derived from slavery, particularly from the chronotope of the ship.2 Recently, Christina Sharpe connects these meditations on the slave ship to contemporary black life in “the wake” where African migrants to the Mediterranean and Europe “are imagined as insects, swarms, vectors of disease” and “the semiotics of the slave ship continue: from the forced movements of the enslaved to the forced movements of the migrant and refugee.”3
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Our new issue features a dossier on the moral economy. It includes essays on the history of ethics as part of economic life, economic justice in early modern Europe, land arrangements in Mexico, and debates over religion, the gift, social rights, and land reform. We also include an essay on Nicholas Kristof’s savior narratives on sex trafficking in Cambodia and an essay reflecting on the limits of humanitarian logics for refugee camp volunteers in Greece and France.
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Captivating Genres
This essay is part of a symposium on Yogita Goyal’s Runaway Genres. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. In his now classic essay published in NLH in 1976, “The Origin of Genres,” Tzvetan Todorov famously articulated the following: “It is because genres exist as an institution that they function as ‘horizons of expectation’ for readers, and as ‘models of writing’ for authors.” He goes on to argue that “Genres communicate with the society in which they flourish by means of institutionalization,” and Continue reading →
Thinking with Runaway Genres about Runaway Movements and Falling Monuments
This essay is part of a symposium on Yogita Goyal’s Runaway Genres. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. Which forms are most amenable for narrating the afterlives of slavery and why? Which configurations of race and power come to the fore and which recede when contemporary Afro-diasporic writers take up the slave narrative to address contemporary human-rights violations in Africa? What happens to the mutually constitutive relationship between race and form across different spaces and times? These are the questions that animate Continue reading →