Table Of Content

Statelessness and Contemporary Enslavement Why have statelessness and contemporary enslavement become endemic since the 1990s? What is it about global political economic policies, protracted warfare, and migration rules and patterns that have so systemically increased these extreme forms of vulnerability? Why have intellectual communities largely ignored or fundamentally rejected the concepts of statelessness and contemporary enslavement? This book argues that statelessness and enslavement are not aberrations or radical exceptions. They have been and are endemic to Euromodern state systems. While victims are discrete outcomes of similar processes of the racialized debasement of citizenship, stateless people share the predicament of those most likely to be enslaved and the enslaved, even when formally free, often face situations of statelessness. Gordon identifies forcible inclusion of semi-sovereign nations, extralegal expulsion of people who cannot be repatriated, and the concentrated erosion of the rights of full-fledged citizens as the primary modes through which people experience degrees of statelessness. She argues for the political value of seeing the connections among these discrete forms. With enslavement, she insists that while the centuries-long practice has taken on some new guises necessary to its profit- ability in the current global economy, what and who it involves have remained remarkably consistent. Rather than focusing on slavery as a radical and exceptional extreme of abuse or coercion, Gordon contends that we can understand contemporary slavery’s specificity most usefully through considering its defining dimensions together with those of wage laborers and guest workers. Gordon concludes that appreciation of the situation of the stateless and of the enslaved should fundamentally orient our thinking about viable contemporary concep- tions of consent and of the kinds of twenty-first-century political institutions that would make it harder for some to make the vulnerability of others so lucrative. Jane Anna Gordon teaches and directs the graduate program in Political Science at the University of Connecticut, USA. She is, most recently, author of Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Frantz Fanon and co-editor (with Cyrus E. Zirakzadeh) of The Politics of Richard Wright: Perspectives on Resistance and co- editor (with Drucilla Cornell) of the forthcoming Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg. She was President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association from 2013 to 2016. Gordon co-edits the Creolizing the Canon and Global Critical Caribbean Thought book series. Statelessness and Contemporary Enslavement Jane Anna Gordon First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Jane Anna Gordon to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gordon, Jane Anna, 1976- author. Title: Statelessness and contemporary enslavement / Jane Anna Gordon. Description: New York, NY: Routledge, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2019035931 (print) | LCCN 2019035932 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Slavery–History. | Statelessness–History. | Globalization–History. Classification: LCC HT867 .G67 2020 (print) | LCC HT867 (ebook) | DDC 305.9/06914–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019035931 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019035932 ISBN: 978-0-367-35853-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-35854-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-34229-5 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India Contents Acknowledgments vi Introduction: Two Euromodern Phenomena 1 1 Degrees of Statelessness 18 2 Theorizing Contemporary Enslavement 42 3 On Consent 80 4 Lucrative Vulnerability 102 Conclusion: Against Anti-Statism 126 Bibliography 133 Index 147 Acknowledgments This book was written in intense and protracted fits and starts. It began with an invitation from Ramón Grosfoguel and Eric Mielants to draw on my recently completed PhD training in Political Theory to offer a comprehensive framing of the issue of statelessness. In the following year, their international conference on Global Anti-Blackness, co-organized by Lewis Gordon, provided the space to begin my more focused grappling with Kevin Bales’s account of contemporary enslavement. During that time, I was based at Temple University. Members of its Humanities Institute, directed by Peter Logan, offered very useful questions regarding statelessness while my colleague in Political Theory, Joseph Schwartz, and his then newly published book, The Future of Democratic Equality, proved very helpful in describing contemporary theoretical and practical challenges to democratic equality. In that period, my most consistent and supportive inter- locutors on these and so many other related themes were my then doctoral students, now colleagues and dear friends, Desiree Craig Melonas and Alex Melonas. The first person to read my writing on this subject was Asma Abbas, to whom I remain most grateful. Also formative was the invitation to participate in a yearlong meditation of questions of consent at the Pembroke Center for the Study of Women at Brown University. While I spent much of the time in disagreement with my fellow participants, who devoted considerably more intellectual energy and insight to discrediting the viability of consent, these were a constant, fruitful challenge. I am especially grateful for conversations on this topic with Elizabeth Weed, Joseph Fischel, and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg. The rightness of my move to UConn was immediately affirmed by the pres- ence and work of Samuel Martínez, Anna Mae Duane, and Thomas Meagher who, with me, formed the two-year working group on Unfree Labor in the Americas. Each of their work on these themes has been an ongoing inspira- tion and challenge. Sam and Tom’s careful and incisive feedback on the full manuscript of this book, along with Takiyah Harper-Shipman’s, contributed significantly to the book’s improved infrastructure and better-articulated cen- tral arguments. Acknowledgments vii Especially precious during this period has been the way that Adian Boothe Holmes, Matthew Boothe Holmes, and my sister-from-another-life (!), Rose- mere (Rose) Ferreira da Silva have become such indispensable parts of our shared, multifaceted lives. At the end of my first year at UConn, my focus shifted considerably to the administrative challenges of sustaining and strengthening the PhD program in Political Science in the face of continued and major budgetary cuts. Despite the difficulty of that labor, it has been some of the most rewarding of my profes- sional life. That has had everything to do with undertaking it with David Yalof, Lindsay Halle, Christine Luberto, Oksan Bayulgen, and Suzanne Waterman. What has made these efforts so intellectually valuable have been their parallel development with the programmatic projects of colleagues in Political Theory and Race, Ethnicity, and Politics: Michael Morrell, Fred Lee, Evelyn Simien, Shayla Nunnally, Rob Venator, Bhakti Shringarpure, and David Embrick. I am especially grateful to Don Baxter, Michael Lynch, and Dan Weiner, who have each contributed so consistently to the shared project of creating a vital and humanistic intellectual community that bridges the disciplines. My travels to other educational institutions always affirm just how unique and special is our community of graduate students working at the intersection of Political Theory, Political Philosophy, and Education: Derefe Chevannes, Steven Del Visco, Greg Doukas, Brooks Kirchgassner, Josué López, Steven Manicastri, Thomas Meagher, Dana Miranda, Patricia O’Rourke, Megan Peterson, Darian Spearman, and Steven Williamson. Always enriching our conversations and thinking have been Jihan Asher, Ross Dardani, Megan Fountain, Frank Griggs, Takiyah Harper-Shipman, Erica MacDonald, Stavros Pappadoupolos, Michelle San Pedro, and Gabriela Tafoya. I would also like to thank Hoeun Lee for her considerable help with preparing this book’s bibliography. Five to seven years can fly by indiscriminately in the lives of people in their thirties and forties. Not so for those who are younger. This period has been marked by our children, Mathieu, Jenni, and Sula, becoming adults with their own life companions: Donny, Luis, and Simeon. It is such an ongoing source of pleasure and pride to see each of you become more fully yourselves in and through your relations with each other and how you each distinctively com- bine fierce intelligence and profound integrity with genuine creativity. In the final year of working on this project, Elijah became the only “child” remaining in our soon-to-be-empty nest. Elijah, we are so excited to see you begin the transition into manhood and how you will bring melody, humor, and the written word together in your own multifaceted endeavors. This rich intellectual and social life, for which I am so grateful, is anchored by and an outgrowth of my fundamental, orienting commitment to and with my beloved Lewis Gordon to whom, without even realizing it, I enthusiasti- cally and spontaneously commit and recommit over and over and over again. With you, Lewis, everything is made more meaningful. Introduction: Two Euromodern Phenomena When the phenomena of statelessness and contemporary enslavement enter public discussion, they do so in similar ways. First, both are assumed to be radical and exceptional conditions or the outcome of extreme and unusual forms of political failure. As such, even as activists working on these issues try to under- score their urgency by citing large, if contested, figures, conventional percep- tions tend dramatically to underestimate the actual numbers of those implicated. Second, in a world where there is little that is unambiguously good or bad, both statelessness and contemporary enslavement are thought of as clear evils or indis- putable maledictions. There is a widespread consensus—in ways that downplay the political causes of both—that statelessness and contemporary enslavement lack all moral and legal standing or support. Third, both kinds of non-relations— with legible political units, on the one hand and other human beings as a human being, on the other—are discussed as problems that could “be solved” through existing mechanisms, either by extending legal instruments of international law or through better coordinated regional or international policing. These three positions come together in the orienting assumption of many activists, lawyers, politicians, and scholars that most human beings occupy a condition that is clearly the opposite of the stateless person or the contemporary slave, one in which they fully belong to a state in which they are meaningfully free. In fact, in ways that also run in parallel, neither statelessness nor contemporary enslavement is a radical exception. They are two discrete but predictable outcomes of similar processes of the racialized debasement of citizenship. Those most vulnerable to enslavement already work under multiple rights deficits. Intersecting rights deficits similarly render a person either literally stateless or incapable of exercising meaningful citizenship. Few lamentable circumstances have not befallen communities facing protracted statelessness. Among the lamentable circumstances is literal enslavement. Finally, for members of ethnic and racial communities long enslaved in particular Euromodern nations, the condition that follows can be compared with that of the stateless since the govern- ments of the nations where they reside refuse to treat them as belonging, and there is no other political unit they might claim as their own.