Frontiers of Emancipation: Legacies of Abolition in International Politics

• In Event: The Postcolonial Politics of Land

Abstract

Abolitionist thought and praxis has a long history emerging out of the contestations and resistances of those working against shifting forms of colonial domination and rule across a range of contexts. Despite this array of politics and histories, abolitionism is frequently analyzed as a project that primarily operates within a national frame. Further, much of the focus has been on such projects both in the United States specifically and the Anglophone world more generally. Thus, in this paper we trace a genealogy of abolitionist thought and praxis as it interacts with coloniality and its contemporary legacies as a transnational enterprise. In so doing, we seek not only to decenter the national frame but also to draw attention to the ways in which abolition, in both theoretical and practical terms, troubles many of the categories and institutions of both national and international politics. We do this by conceptually situating abolition in relation to coloniality and the exercise of colonial power through material, social, and epistemic forms of coercion and regulation, and by examining a number of abolitionist movements and thinkers—both historical and contemporary—to identify the parameters of abolition and to draw connections between such movements across time and space. In this regard the paper intervenes with a deprovincialized account of abolitionism as a school of thought importantly connected with postcolonial thought and the politics of postcolonial emancipation. By thinking from the international and transnational sphere the paper also seeks to explicate how abolitionist principles contend with the territorial state as a product of colonial legacies and thus an extension of neo-colonial power.

Authors

• Owen Rhys Brown, Scripps College

• Arturo Chang, University of Toronto