Zoe Trodd

Modern slavery challenges to supply chain management

Purpose – This paper aims to draw attention to the challenges modern slavery poses to supply chain management. Although many international supply chains are (most often unknowingly) connected to slave labour activities, supply chain managers and researchers have so far neglected the issue. This will most likely change as soon as civil society lobbying and new legislation impose increasing litigation and reputational risks on companies operating international supply chains. Design/methodology/approach – The paper provides a definition of slavery; explores potentials for knowledge exchange with other disciplines; discusses management tools for detecting slavery, as well as suitable company responses after its detection; and outlines avenues for future research. Findings – Due to a lack of effective indicators, new tools and indicator systems need to be developed that consider the specific social, cultural and geographical context of supply regions. After detection of slavery, multi-stakeholder partnerships, community-centred approaches and supplier development appear to be effective responses. Research limitations/implications – New theory development in supply chain management (SCM) is urgently needed to facilitate the understanding, avoidance and elimination of slavery in supply chains. As a starting point for future research, the challenges of slavery to SCM are conceptualised, focussing on capabilities and specific institutional context. Practical implications – The paper provides a starting point for the development of practices and tools for identifying and removing slave labour from supply chains. Originality/value – Although representing a substantial threat to current supply chain models, slavery has so far not been addressed in SCM research.

Am I Still Not a Man and a Brother? Protest Memory in Contemporary Antislavery Visual Culture

This article examines the visual culture of the twenty-first century antislavery movement, arguing that it adapts four main icons of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century abolitionism for its contemporary campaigns against global slavery and human trafficking: the ‘Am I Not a Man and a Brother’ icon, the diagram of the ‘Brookes’ slave ship, the ‘Scourged Back’ photograph and the auction-block detail from the Liberator masthead. Finding some of the same limitations of paternalism, dehumanisation and sensationalism as dominated much of the first antislavery movements visual culture, the article nonetheless identifies a liberatory aesthetic and a protest memory in the antislavery imagery of several contemporary artists, including Charles Campbell and Romuald Hazoumè.

Slavery and memory in black visual culture: Introduction

Over the centuries, the imaginative inner lives of millions of enslaved African, AfricanAmerican and African Caribbean women, men and children bought and sold into transatlantic slavery have remained beyond the pale of a white racist imaginary. Simultaneously hypervisibilised and hyperinvisibilised according to white supremacist filters of perception and dominant modes of representation, slavery’s faces and bodies have remained both well-worn and under-researched territory. Alternately dehumanised and vilified by anti slavery and proslavery iconography, black bodies gained powerful currency as spectacularised objects of pornographic display, theatricalised entertainment, political propaganda, scientific enquiry and anthropological investigation. Circulating within and in relation to an array of white generated works of fine art (paintings, murals, statuary and drawings), popular propaganda (cartoons, caricatures and advertisements) and diverse material artefacts (shackles, commemorative pottery and miniaturised portraits), the physical and psychological realities of black men and women have been distorted and denied if not entirely eradicated. Regardless, the stranglehold of a white racist European and European American imaginary pales into political and aesthetic insignificance in the face of a centurieslong tradition of African, African-American and African Caribbean art-making and visual production. Imaging and imagining an array of black diasporic histories into existence, black artists have wrested control over the formal and thematic parameters of self-representation. Social, political and cultural critique fuse in their vast outpouring of paintings, sketches, prints, lithographs, woodcuts, statuary, murals, quilts, photographs, pottery, graffiti, performance and mixed-media installation art. Writ large across their eclectic bodies of work is a determination to implode polarised formal and thematic boundaries in order to establish an alternative visual language characterised by diverse practices of signification, multiplicity and patterns of exchange. Over a wide-ranging time-frame and geographical milieu, artists working across the black diaspora have liberated black bodies and souls from their widespread Slavery & Abolition, 2013 Vol. 34, No. 2, 197–201, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2013.791170

Straight Shooters, Stainless-Steel Stories, and Cowboy Codes: The Queer Frontier and American Identity in a Post-Western World

Brokeback Mountain (2005) is the latest in a series of challenges to the cowboy code of an exclusively heterosexual frontier. From Midnight Cowboy (1969) onward, pop culture has confronted the West, and with it the whole mythic weight of American identity. Brokeback and the “Rawhide Kid” series challenge the frontier language of George Bush, just as protestors and artists had challenged the cowboy code of the Vietnam era. But if attentive to the limitations of straight-shooting masculinity, Brokeback and “Rawhide” offer no vision of an alternate frontier. Instead, the true revision of America’s cowboy code comes from real-life gay rodeos. A cultural site that allows the revision of conceptual stereotypes, the gay rodeo recasts the West as a queer frontier.

Meteor of War: The John Brown Cycle

After all the noise and drama of his explosive life and death, John Brown’s body finally hanged, eerily silent and ominously swaying in the crisp Virginia air of December 1859. Jacob Lawrence’s interpretation of this eternal moment places Brown between two worlds, the heavens opening behind to let him in (figure 7.1). Lawrence’s Brown is an emblem, a timeless and abstract figure, transformed in death from man to myth, more important for what he represents than for his individual humanity. The white cloud behind the figure suggests a land mass, the blue sky of the ocean around North America, and so Brown feels like a national symbol, lifted above and superimposed onto the United States.