Tacking towards freedom? Bringing journeys out of slavery into dialogue with contemporary migration

Angelo Martins Junior, Julia O’Connell Davidson*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

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Abstract

Antislavery actors evoke the history of the transatlantic slave trade in campaigns to mobilise action to address the suffering experienced by contemporary migrants described as ‘victims of trafficking’. That framing has been picked up by state actors who present measures to supress unauthorised migration per se as necessary to protect migrants from a ‘modern-day slave trade’. Yet the parallel between trafficking and the slave trade is undermined by the fact that people who today are described as ‘trafficked’, as much as those described as ‘smuggled’, actively wish to travel and do so in the hope that by moving, they will secure greater freedoms. This article therefore asks whether there are similarities between the journeys of contemporary unauthorised migrants and those of enslaved people who fled from slavery in the Atlantic World, and if so, why. Bringing data from historical sources on slave flight into dialogue with data on the journeys of contemporary sub-Saharan African migrants to Europe and Brazil, it identifies a number of experiential parallels, and argues that for those concerned with migrants’ rights, enslaved people’s fugitivity potentially offers a more fruitful point of historical comparison than does the slave trade.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1479-1495
Number of pages17
JournalJournal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
Volume48
Issue number7
Early online date18 Feb 2021
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 19 May 2022

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This work was supported by H2020 European Research Council: [grant number ERC ADG 788563]. We are grateful to the ERC for funding the research on which this article is based (ERC ADG 788563), and to our colleagues on the ‘Modern Marronage?’ team, Sam Okyere, José Lingna Nafafe, and Pankhuri Agarwal, as well as to the journal’s anonymous reviewers, for comments on a draft of the article.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Keywords

  • Antislavery
  • borders
  • journeys
  • racialised surveillance
  • slavery

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Demography
  • Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)

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