Trafficking Rhetoric: Race, Migration, and the Making of Modern-Day Slavery: New Directions in Rhetoric and Materiality
Autor Annie Hillen Paperback – 6 mai 2024
Human trafficking has generated intense global concern, with stories of sex slavery and images of women forced into prostitution so persuasive that states have raced to respond ahead of empirical data and clear definitions of the crime. In Trafficking Rhetoric, Annie Hill analyzes the entanglement of state veneration and state violence by tracking how the United Kingdom points to the alleged crimes of others in order to celebrate itself and conceal its own aggression. Hill compares the UK’s acclaimed rescue approach to human trafficking with its hostile approach to migration, arguing that they are two sides of the same coin—one that relies on rhetorical constructions of “trafficked women” and “illegal migrants” to materialize the UK as an Anglo-white space. Drawing from official estimates, policy papers, NGO reports, news stories, and awareness campaigns and situating them in the broader EU context, Hill accounts for why the UK’s antitrafficking agenda emerged with such rhetorical force in the early twenty-first century. Trafficking Rhetoric reframes controversies over labor, citizenship, and migration while challenging the continued traction of race-baiting and gender bias in determining who has the right to live, work, and belong in the nation.
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| Ohio State University Press – 6 mai 2024 | 574.01 lei 6-8 săpt. |
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814259092
ISBN-10: 081425909X
Pagini: 158
Ilustrații: 5 b&w images, 2 tables
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 15 mm
Greutate: 0.29 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria New Directions in Rhetoric and Materiality
ISBN-10: 081425909X
Pagini: 158
Ilustrații: 5 b&w images, 2 tables
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 15 mm
Greutate: 0.29 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria New Directions in Rhetoric and Materiality
Recenzii
“Trafficking Rhetoric considers the rarely studied rhetoric of policy and its relationship to popular media campaigns. Hill’s readings connect race, gender, and nation to trace how antitrafficking rhetoric exposes British anxieties and racism around what it means to be British.” —Rebecca Dingo, author of Networking Arguments: Rhetoric, Transnational Feminism, and Public Policy Writing
“Hill demonstrates how major UK antitrafficking campaigns hinged on limited, if not biased, reports that conflated foreign women with prostitutes, and both with victims of trafficking, to justify anti-immigrant policies. Trafficking Rhetoric brings a feminist lens to trafficking studies, migration, rhetoric, and state policy in novel and compelling ways.” —Julietta Hua, author of Trafficking Women’s Human Rights
Notă biografică
Annie Hill is Assistant Professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin and Affiliate in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies, and the LGBTQ Studies Program.
Extras
Fabulating a transhistorical British abolitionism, UK trafficking rhetoric indexes gender, race, and nationality as indicators of criminal violence and sexual victimization. As a racializing rhetoric, it conceals itself by presenting human trafficking as a postracial problem. Modern-day slavery is modern in this sense because anyone can be trafficked now. Whites can be subjected to the dehumanization of slavery, and that changes things. As rhetoric scholar Leslie Harris argues, the portrayal of white women as exceptionally vulnerable to enslavement depends on imagining the unique innocence and violability of white femininity. Stories of white women forced into sexual slavery attracts intense attention to the subject of trafficking, pulling resources toward anti-prostitution and anti-immigration campaigns while depicting some migrants as innocent and others as illegal. Appropriating the rhetoric of abolition to advance its antitrafficking agenda, the UK government racializes East Europeans as peripherally white, as secondary to West European and British whiteness, and as unable to save themselves from criminality and sexual violence.
Antitrafficking rhetoric presents human trafficking as an exogenic problem, to which the UK reacts without ever being implicated in its constitutive conditions. “Framed as a violation of bodily integrity and problem of criminal behavior,” feminist scholar Jennifer Suchland explains, “human trafficking gained recognition as an aberration of capitalist systems.” Weaving carceral and capitalist systems together as antithetical to trafficking hides “how trafficking is intertwined in the constitutive operations of economic systems.” Instead, the UK is cast as simply a victim of transnational crime and unwanted EU migration. The victim of trafficking comes to symbolize the UK’s subordination to the EU. Accusations about lost sovereignty got louder during the 2016 “Brexit” referendum, which led to the UK becoming the first country to exit the EU. That fateful decision responded to ardent calls for the UK to free itself from EU entanglements by reclaiming its stolen sovereignty.
The conceit was that without the UK’s absolute sovereignty to decide who immigrated, unwelcome people would proliferate, and the face of Britain would change forever. It followed that the EU posed an existential threat to Great Britain as it tried to become Global Britain. “To speak of a Global Britain is to not only suggest how great Britain can be in the future,” Virdee and McGeever write, “but also to invoke warm collective memories of a now lost world where Britain was the global hegemon of the capitalist world economy.” Contrary to the image of the EU dominating the UK, Global Britain calls to mind “those glory days of economic, political and cultural superiority, where everything from ships to spoons were marked with a Made in Britain stamp.”
Boasting the most deregulated labor market in the EU, the UK privileges corporations at the expense of citizen and migrant workers. It erects a legal framework excluding undocumented workers from labor protections like nonpayment of wages, unfair dismissal, and discrimination. Routine and extreme labor exploitation occurs in a workforce made impoverished and insecure by the neoliberal policies that structure the UK’s deregulated market. According to Hodkinson and coauthors, the “conflation of modern slavery as primarily a law and border enforcement issue targeting criminal gangs excludes consideration of how the state itself acts as a ‘third party enslaver’ through hostile environment policies.” They argue that the UK structures and abets the severe exploitation of migrants in three ways: (1) compulsion to enter precarious work; (2) vulnerabilization through the removal of rights and protections; and (3) entrapment in forced labor. The UK links the transatlantic slave trade with human trafficking, while disavowing the links between its deregulation of the labor market and hostile management of immigration. This bogus historical link is made to sell the antitrafficking agenda as a moral, quintessentially British mission. The UK disempowers migrant workers but invests in law and immigration enforcement that negatively and disproportionately impacts migrant and minority communities. Analyzing the neoliberal mode of governance surfaces another link, one between the antitrafficking agenda and labor exploitation in a neoliberal context of hostile sentiment and eroded rights and protections. Thus, I contextualize and interrogate the UK government’s claim of enacting a moral response to modern-day slavery, that is, of saving migrants from traffickers who control their movement and exploit their labor.
Antitrafficking rhetoric presents human trafficking as an exogenic problem, to which the UK reacts without ever being implicated in its constitutive conditions. “Framed as a violation of bodily integrity and problem of criminal behavior,” feminist scholar Jennifer Suchland explains, “human trafficking gained recognition as an aberration of capitalist systems.” Weaving carceral and capitalist systems together as antithetical to trafficking hides “how trafficking is intertwined in the constitutive operations of economic systems.” Instead, the UK is cast as simply a victim of transnational crime and unwanted EU migration. The victim of trafficking comes to symbolize the UK’s subordination to the EU. Accusations about lost sovereignty got louder during the 2016 “Brexit” referendum, which led to the UK becoming the first country to exit the EU. That fateful decision responded to ardent calls for the UK to free itself from EU entanglements by reclaiming its stolen sovereignty.
The conceit was that without the UK’s absolute sovereignty to decide who immigrated, unwelcome people would proliferate, and the face of Britain would change forever. It followed that the EU posed an existential threat to Great Britain as it tried to become Global Britain. “To speak of a Global Britain is to not only suggest how great Britain can be in the future,” Virdee and McGeever write, “but also to invoke warm collective memories of a now lost world where Britain was the global hegemon of the capitalist world economy.” Contrary to the image of the EU dominating the UK, Global Britain calls to mind “those glory days of economic, political and cultural superiority, where everything from ships to spoons were marked with a Made in Britain stamp.”
Boasting the most deregulated labor market in the EU, the UK privileges corporations at the expense of citizen and migrant workers. It erects a legal framework excluding undocumented workers from labor protections like nonpayment of wages, unfair dismissal, and discrimination. Routine and extreme labor exploitation occurs in a workforce made impoverished and insecure by the neoliberal policies that structure the UK’s deregulated market. According to Hodkinson and coauthors, the “conflation of modern slavery as primarily a law and border enforcement issue targeting criminal gangs excludes consideration of how the state itself acts as a ‘third party enslaver’ through hostile environment policies.” They argue that the UK structures and abets the severe exploitation of migrants in three ways: (1) compulsion to enter precarious work; (2) vulnerabilization through the removal of rights and protections; and (3) entrapment in forced labor. The UK links the transatlantic slave trade with human trafficking, while disavowing the links between its deregulation of the labor market and hostile management of immigration. This bogus historical link is made to sell the antitrafficking agenda as a moral, quintessentially British mission. The UK disempowers migrant workers but invests in law and immigration enforcement that negatively and disproportionately impacts migrant and minority communities. Analyzing the neoliberal mode of governance surfaces another link, one between the antitrafficking agenda and labor exploitation in a neoliberal context of hostile sentiment and eroded rights and protections. Thus, I contextualize and interrogate the UK government’s claim of enacting a moral response to modern-day slavery, that is, of saving migrants from traffickers who control their movement and exploit their labor.
Cuprins
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction The Torque of State Veneration and State Violence Chapter 1 Speculative Figures: The Rhetorical Material of Trafficking Estimates Chapter 2 Anti-Blackness by Analogy: Human Trafficking as Modern-Day Slavery Chapter 3 Glaring Whiteness: Trafficking Visual Rhetoric and Tropes of Blindness Chapter 4 “A Really Hostile Environment for Illegal Migrants”: State Violence, Misery, and Immobility Conclusion The Disappearing Right to Remain Bibliography Index
Descriere
Examines the United Kingdom’s antitrafficking agenda through rhetorical-material analysis, revealing how it works in concert with anti-immigrant sentiment to preserve the UK as an Anglo-white space.