That Dynamic Spectrum

E philosophers, from ancients like Aristotle to Enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau, no matter how radically different their attitudes toward slaveholding, articulated a mutually constitutive relationship between “freedom” and “slavery.” Each recognizes the character of the other in its negative reflection; resulting, according to Hegel, in a (life-or-death) negotiation between extremes.1 For the slave societies of Ancient Rome or the Atlantic world, a theoretical bifurcation of the population reigned. The line between free and unfree proved politically useful not just to those who sought to preserve the institution of slavery but to later abolitionists as well. It demarcated the lines of struggle and the wrongs of slavery. By highlighting how the proposed dichotomy fails to capture the multiplicity of forms slavery takes around the world—and in the East, Inner, and Southeast Asian contexts described in this special issue—I do not wish to undercut this politics of liberation or to minimize the absolute degradation enacted by slave traders and slaveholders. Close examination of global practices of enslavement, however, tests the proposition that these two concepts need each other. The supposedly tidy binary between free and unfree has become a kind of zombie idea, one that scholars of slavery must always and repeatedly dispatch, before proceeding to describe the evidence of exploitation they find in the archive at hand. And, it is not so much that the two terms are not opposites—for in many ways, they are—but rather that, as we encounter freedom or slavery in the world, the concepts operate in radically diverging ways.