Slavery and Neo-Slavery

Question 1

Habermas and others have focused attention on

Answer 1

The relationship between freedom and reason, which has been a fundamental feature of western political discourses since the end of the 18th century.

Question 2

Enlightenment project

Answer 2

If writers like Habermas and Berman are to be believed the unfulfilled promise of modernity’s enlightenment project remains a bealeagured but nonetheless vibrant resource, which may be able to guide the practice of contemporary social and political strugles.

Question 3

In opposition to the Enlightenment project view

Answer 3

The history of African diaspora and and a reassessment of the relationship between modernity and slavery may require a more complete revision in terms of which the modernity debates have been constructed than any of its academic participants may concede.

Question 4

Berman’s argument

Answer 4

Leads him to speak hastily of the ‘intimate unity of the modern self and the modern environment’. From Berman’s perspective, the powerful impact of issues like race and gender on the formation and reproduction of modern selves can too easily be set aside. Modernity can be said to unite all mankind.

Question 5

Modernity

Answer 5

Is understood as a distinct configuration with its own spatial temporal characteristics defined through the consiousness of novelty that surrounds the emergence of civil society, the modern state, and industrial capitalism.

Question 6

Habermas

Answer 6

Notes modernity’s contemporary crises but says that it can only be resolved from within modernity itself by the completion of the Enlightenment project. He does not follow Hegel in arguing that slavery is itself a modernising force in that it leads both master and servant first to self-consciousness and then to ddisillusion, forcing both to confront the unhappy realisation that the true, the good and the beautiful don’t have shared origin.

Question 7

Alexander Kojeve

Answer 7

identification of an existential impasse that develops out of the master’s dependency on the slave.

Question 8

Artistic expression from slave culture

Answer 8

Having recognised the cultural force of the term “modernity” we must delve into the special traditions of artistic expression that emerge from the slave culture. Art was offered to slaves as a substitute for the formal political freedoms they were denied under the plantation regime.