SOAS Research Online

Abstract

I feel that my current research on eighteenth-century intersections of global capitalism, slavery, colonial legality and gender diversity in the Atlantic world, and their contemporary relevance, speaks to quite a few questions raised in the brief memo on the ‘Beyond Inequality’ project. For instance, the memo speaks of the need to analyse how historical patterns of double exploitation are continually reproduced within contemporary forms of work. I would like to respond to this call by examining both historical and present-day manifestations of racial capitalism in the (forceful) making of the gender binary in Louisiana (and perhaps elsewhere within the circum-Atlantic domain), with a focus on gender-non-conforming individuals and communities of colour whose (at least) triple dispossession took/takes place not only on the basis of their perceived race and class, but also due to their gender difference. Studying the forms of labour such dispossession has led to seems to me to be a task predicated on assembling an archive of inequality, or perhaps an archive beyond such intersectional forms of inequality, which would necessitate a radical rethinking of archival/archived subjectivities and socialities. We should ask (again) not only whose lives and labour count as ‘historical evidence’ but also where such repositories of the past are to be found, and under whose care and control. And, in so doing, I hope that recent critical insights of so many cross-disciplinary takes on the archive (anthropological, historical, legal, literary, feminist, queer…) can help us better understand, and account for, the forms of archival violence relative to work and gender-cum-racial capitalism.