Dialogue Two: Abolitionism and the Afterlives of Unfree Labor
Date: February 8-9
Location: Grand Hall in the Gayle Karch Cook Center at Maxwell Hall
For this two-day event, eight renowned scholars will deliver lectures addressing abolitionism and the turn to "free" wage labor, a distinguishing feature of global capitalism in the nineteenth century. In conversation with Indiana University faculty and students from all campuses, invited speakers will consider the paradoxes of abolitionism and how it continued, rather than dismantled, systems of unfree labor amid widespread displacement of agrarian and other groups. Regimes of labor control and enforcement produced conditions ranging from servitude to debt bondage. They were constitutive of carceral systems whose legacies are very much alive today. Indiana University professors will offer commentary at the end of each panel.
