In the wake of logistics
Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted aboard a cargo boat on Colombia’s Magdalena River, and on historical accounts of fluvial transport, this paper examines the racial formations on which logistics depends. Logistics is organized around flows at the heart of capitalist modernity, which are made possible by labour regimes whose racial underpinnings have both persisted and changed over time. Tracking continuities and divergences in riverboat work along the Magdalena River, I propose that our understanding of logistics is enriched by attending to historical articulations of race and labour. Inspired by scholars who reckon with the afterlives of slavery as well as by those who track precisely how that legacy unfolds in geographically and historically situated ways, I propose the analytic of situated afterlives, which focuses attention on the persistence of racial hierarchies and on their perpetual instability.
Date: 2 February 2021, 16:00 (Tuesday, 3rd week, Hilary 2021)
Venue: School of Geography and the Environment
Speaker: Austin Zeiderman (Department of Geography and Environment, LSE)
Organising department: School of Geography and the Environment
Organiser: Dr Ariell Ahearn (School of Geography and Environment, University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address: ariell.ahearn@ouce.ox.ac.uk
Part of: SoGE Economy and Society Cluster Events
Booking required?: Required
Booking url: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIpc-mgrz0rHd2h85HYkVawicdZh9DuFdIh
Audience: Public
Editor: Ariell Ahearn Ligham