These tribunals were established through treaties between European powers, with jurists from multiple jurisdictions to preside over the prosecution of slave traders violating the abolition. Jenny Martinez (2012) describes the slave trade as the “original crimes against humanity” (CAH) and the “mixed tribunals” established to monitor abolition as offering a “bridge” to the international criminal court (ICC) of today. Adam Hoschild (2012) treats the movement to abolish the slave trade and the passage of the 1807 abolition legislation as the first human rights movement, extending the logic of the Atlantic revolutions. In this vein, Lynn Hunt’s story of the invention of human rights focuses on the French revolution and the “rights cascade” it engendered (Norton 2008). The notion of humanity helps forge those defences both in the histories told by the discipline, and in the memories it represses.ĭominant histories of human rights and humanitarianism frame the French and American revolutions as founding moments in shaping the notion of humanity, and celebrate the movements that these revolutions empowered for abolishing the international slave trade as a crime against humanity. To enact that repression and render race invisible in the work of the mixed tribunals, which prosecuted slave traders after abolition, requires an elaborate defensive structure. The repression of race in the historical narrative of then and now is a precondition for telling the story of empire and slavery in the mid-Atlantic as a story of race-transcending emancipation. This haunting speaks to a racialized text that has a particular grammar, juridical and ethical, that still shapes central features of contemporary international criminal law (ICL) and its claims to act in the name of humanity. These revisionist histories treat abolition of the slave trade as signifying the salutary juridical and moral promise of international law. The slave trade continues to haunt histories of the politico-legal subject “humanity” in international law-histories that reach back to claim their humanist origins in its abolition. Their inheritance includes the memory that both slavery and its abolition were articulated through law-just as the denial of its own racialized power is at the heart of the “force of law” and the heroic stories it tells about abolition today. Today the reparations claims advanced by Toussaint’s political descendants seek, yet again, to interrupt those logics-but with few illusions about the redemptive promises of international law. If the logic of the human rights revolutions is predicated on, and promises, the self-possession of the white man, it also implicitly, yet unequivocally, affirms and enacts the dispossession of the Black man. Toussaint’s provocation marks how that unmarked law encodes racialized property into a notion of humanity, constituted through property relations between Black-humans-as-property and White-humans-as-property-owners. ” foregrounds race to interrupt the American and French revolutions’ celebration of the rights-bearing human, whose assemblage international law refers to as “humanity,” and whose wrongs it describes as “crimes against humanity.” The Haitian revolution went to the heart of the contradiction in this notion of humanity. Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture’s 1791 declaration judiciously centers the intricate interdependence of the written and unwritten law of race and draws attention to the scandal of the free and rights-bearing “human” that was being heralded on both sides of the Atlantic, the Black Atlantic. Toussaint Louverture, “To Live Free or Die” We are black, it is true, but tell us gentleman, you who are so judicious, what is the law that says that the black man must belong to and be the property of the white man? public domain work via Wikimedia Commons. Although the artist who designed and engraved the seal is unknown, the design for the cameo is attributed to William Hackwood or to Henry Webber, who were both modelers at the Wedgewood factory. Josiah Wedgewood produced the emblem as a jasper-ware cameo at his pottery factory. Josiah Wedgwood (1730-1795) and either William Hackwood or Henry Webber. The Official Medallion of the British Anti-Slavery Society.
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