On the Strange Case of “Work” without Workers

“It is not that I have no past. Rather, it continually fragments on the terrible and vivid ephemera of now.” — Samuel R. Delany, Dahlgren

Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger warns us in The ‘Air of Liberty’: Narratives of the South Atlantic Past that “[I]t’s not enough to condemn [this] slave trade as having been a crime; the details of its afterlife, the cultural heritage it left in its wake, have to be understood as a contemporary dilemma, an open wound.” And yet there is scant critical analysis in the Netherlands of slavery’s afterlife. In general, Dutch attitudes are very much in line with contemporary neo-liberal discourse that “treats the present,” as Issa Shivzi observes in The Struggle for Democracy, “as if the present has had no history.” This uncoupling of the present and the past is actively done and maintained as an aspect of power.

We need to make visible these obscured, deliberate modes of violence and place the present in relation with history. As I will argue, a critical engagement with the afterlife of slavery forces us to re-think concepts like freedom, progress, work, production, exploitation, freedom, as well as contemporary conceptualizations of race, gender, sexuality, ability and class. Prior to emancipation White Dutch politicians imposed their vision of “freedom” and their circumscribed definition of autonomy on Black folks in the Dutch Caribbean. The attempts of the Dutch state to control and prescribe the comings and goings, desires, and behaviour of “freed slaves” have left lasting marks on the ways we imagine freedom and what constitutes work.

Freedom, Coloniality and the Fact of Blackness

I couldn’t attend Keti Koti this year. Truth be told, though, I don’t think I would’ve attended if the circumstances had been different. I’ve been judiciously avoiding all happenings remotely connected to the glib mea culpa “Gouden Eeuw, Zwarte Bladzijde” – and after last year’s disappointing Keti Koti it seemed only wise to sit this one out. I argued on Twitter and Facebook recently: we need to re-think (and contextualize) the meaning of Emancipation, and subsequently “freedom,” when the “freedom” of enslaved Africans in the Caribbean was paid for with the fruits of the coerced labour of Indonesian peoples. As Seymour Drescher writes in The Long Goodbye: Dutch Capitalism and Antislavery in Comparative Perspective

“[Even then,] the dynamic and profitable sector of the Dutch imperial economy, which, in effect, covered the compensation costs of Caribbean emancipation, was the coerced labor system of the Dutch East Indies. Other than in helping to fund slave emancipation, the Dutch East Indies provided little stimulus for moving toward an imperial free labor policy. The dismantling of colonial slavery in the West began during the heyday of the coercive “Cultivation System” in Java.”

Moreover, decades later after Indonesia had fought successfully for independence, which the Dutch were forced to recognize mainly due to international pressure, the Dutch government forced Indonesia to pay for the Netherlands East Indies debts – the colonial debts. Many White Autochtoon Dutch folks argue that the Netherlands has paid enough, that we should let bygones be bygones. However, bearing these facts in mind the question becomes: did the Netherlands ever truly “pay” for anything? Mind you, I’m not arguing for reparations. I agree with Saidiya V. Hartman when she says in Position of the Unthought that,