• Corpus ID: 130240898

THE TREADMILL AND THE CONTRACT: A CLASSCRITS GUIDE TO THE ANTHROPOCENE

@inproceedings{Harris2016THETA,
  title={THE TREADMILL AND THE CONTRACT: A CLASSCRITS GUIDE TO THE ANTHROPOCENE},
  author={Angela Harris},
  year={2016}
}

• Angela Harris
• Published 2016
• History

Time and again, in the film Twelve Years a Slave, we see a close-up of waters splashing and churning into foam. The waters are those of the Mississippi River; the churning is caused by the paddlewheel of a steamboat inexorably driving south. Southward lies slavery, where the protagonist will lose, bit by bit, his family, his legal personhood, his freedom of movement, his privacy, his physical and moral integrity, and his very name. But the loss is not only his. Slavery, the film makes clear, is a total institution, pulling all who are connected with the great cotton plantations into the vortex of mass production, mass destruction, and mass moral corruption that is creating the modern Atlantic world. Spreading magnolia trees, river waters, cotton plants, black and white bodies and their genitalia, sun and rain, the steamboat and the whip were all factors of production in an international economic system that was also a local social system – and a national political system known simply as the Slave Power. Centuries after the events depicted in the movie, as world leaders met to discuss what would become known as the 2015 Paris accords on climate change, New York Times economic columnist Eduardo Porter articulated one of the contradictions that constitutes contemporary capitalism: Could humanity thrive today without