What Do We Know and What Should We Do About Slavery?
The ‘What Do We Know and What Should We Do About...?' series offers readers short, up-to-date overviews of key issues often misrepresented, simplified or misunderstood in modern society and the media. Each book is written by a leading social scientist with an established reputation in the relevant subject area.
"Short, sharp and compelling." – Alex Preston, The Observer
"If you want to learn a lot about what matters most, in as short a time as possible, this is the series for you." – Danny Dorling, Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography, University of Oxford
In this scintillating little book, O’Connell Davidson sketches out the relationship between slavery, racism and modernity. In so doing, she picks apart facile solutions to ‘modern slavery’ offered by philanthropists, police departments and NGOs, and instead demands we think more seriously about the structure of global capitalism and the afterlives of transatlantic slavery and colonialism. This brilliant book clarifies the term ‘modern slavery’, clearing some of the ground on our path to freedom.
What Do We Know and What Should We Do About Slavery? brilliantly distills how to interpret the phenomenon of slavery and its relationship to freedom struggles both in past epochs and our current moment. By differentiating between the languages of modern slavery and slavery’s afterlives, Julia O’Connell Davidson underscores the policy stakes for abolitionists rejecting slavery in all its forms and enslaved humans whom, their condition notwithstanding, constantly reaffirm calls for reparatory justice and unapologetically declare that their lives and personhood matter.
If you want to learn a lot about what matters most, in as short a time as possible, this is the series for you.
