Yesterday is not Gone

Histories, memories, and legacies of slavery in Zanzibar have been rendered into words and images in autobiographies, novels, and films. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Zanzibar served as the main slave trading point in East Africa for the Indian Ocean slave trade, and its economy flourished on a slave-based plantation system. Memoirs by British missionaries and former slave owners from Zanzibar bear witness to the relational complexities of enslavement and the embodied realities of manumission, patronage, and (im)mobility. Postcolonial fiction writers from Zanzibar and the Sultanate of Oman have challenged the imposed silences around racialized and gendered violence in Zanzibar and Oman, and confronted the racism and Islamophobia inherent to the diasporic experience of Zanzibaris in Europe. In addition to the curation of former spaces related to slavery in Zanzibar, like the Slave Market, for tourist consumption, film has also emerged as a contested vehicle for representing Zanzibar’s slave past and breaking the silence on this still taboo topic. In the absence of a coherent narrative or archive of Zanzibar slavery past and modern revolutionary present, memories of slavery, sexual labor, and resistance embedded in memoirs, fiction, and film reveal the contested imaginaries of ethno-racial-cultural-national-religious identities, the imperial underpinnings of abolition, and the dissociative dissonance of the diaspora in the wake of Zanzibar’s revolutionary rupture.

Buying Love in the Twentieth Century

This chapter analyzes how the sex/work split became normalized in the twentieth century, and how this helped to render invisible the intimate connections between sexuality and economy. This involved something of a paradox for, on the one hand, large-scale consumer shifts meant that sexual and intimate life was increasingly governed by free-market rationalities whereas, on the other hand, ongoing moral panics meant that sex work was becoming ever more marked out against normality. The chapter argues that these apparently contradictory forces worked together to maintain the illusion that the sexual division of labor did little more than reflect women’s “natural” desires rather than operating as an instrument through which capitalism could extract their unpaid sexual labor.

Capitalism's Sexual History

What is the relationship between capitalism and sexuality, and why are they so often assumed to be antithetical? The book interrogates these questions by bringing together insights from two fields that have often overlooked each other, international political economy and queer theory. It develops a queer political economy lens to understand how the history of capitalism has been intimately entangled with the history of sexuality. Yet central to this story has been the construction of sexuality as something that needs to be protected from capitalism’s adulterating influence at all costs. As the author examines, this is no accident since capitalism profits greatly from the illusion that economic and sexual relations exist in distinct realms that can and must be kept apart. Focusing on the specific site of sex work in Britain, the volume draws on wide-ranging archival research to chart a genealogy of capitalist development from the Middle Ages to the present day. It shows that capitalism has long been organized around the extraction of unpaid sexual labor that, in turn, has been made possible by the creation and maintenance of a dualism between sex and work. By exposing the historical mechanisms through which the economy/sexuality dichotomy has been constituted, the book opens up new space for critical inquiry into the intersections between sex, work, and economic and sexual injustice.

Housekeeper

Chapter four focuses on enslaved women's work in the household through the history of Lucy Ann Cheatham. Cheatham was born enslaved in Virginia and purchased in the domestic slave trade by trader John Hagan of New Orleans, Louisiana. Hagan forced Cheatham to be his enslaved concubine. She bore him several children and acted as his housekeeper. In his will, Hagan disguised the reasons for Cheatham's financial inheritance by describing her as his caregiver. Hagan's language, evocative of the role of ménagères in the French Caribbean, speaks to the number of roles that Cheatham played in his household, and the tendency of enslavers to conflate emotional labor with domestic and sexual labor. After Hagan's death, Cheatham took her domestic labor to the marketplace as a boarding house operator. The chapter also speaks to the strength of Cheatham's connections with family and female friends, and how maintaining those ties can be seen as an act of resistance.