Centering the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Critique of Capital

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Stephanie Smallwood is Associate Professor of History and Comparative History of Ideas at the University of Washington, Seattle, where she is also a faculty associate of the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies. Her research and teaching explore early modern histories of slavery, colonialism, and race, with particular emphasis on the transatlantic slave trade, racial capitalism, and African diasporas in the Americas. She is the author of Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (2007), winner of the 2008 Frederick Douglass Prize awarded by Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. Her current project, “Africa in the Atlantic World: A Geopolitical History,” is concerned with the problematics of space in the intercontinental arena that scholars have come to call the “Atlantic world.” The project investigates the uneven spatial relations that shaped the Atlantic as a geopolitical domain and aims to produce a counternarrative of Atlantic history that puts the peoples of the African continent at its center.