2012-13 Rice Seminar Participants

Rebecca’s project examines slavery as practiced on people indigenous to the Americas and the enslavement of Indians by Europeans in the first two centuries after contact. The enslavement of Indians was an economic and ideological precursor to the large-scale enslavement of Africans, and indeed predates the English trade in slaves on the West African coast. Interest in Indian slaving was an early and regular feature of English colonization attempts from the late sixteenth century on, yet no studies have attempted to explain English interest in enslaved Indians at this early date. Goetz explores the logic behind English enslavement of Indians as a crucial element for understanding Anglo-Indian relations in this new colonial world. Throughout the year she will focus on English ideologies of Indian enslavement and the Anglo-French alliance of enslavement on St. Christopher between 1620 and 1640.

Kimberly Kay Hoang, postdoctoral fellow in the Poverty, Justice, and Human Capabilities Program
Human Trafficking: Migration and Forced Labor 

Kimberly is currently working on two book projects that will contribute to the discussions of this year's Rice Seminar. Her first book titled, Chasing the Dragon: Sex and Finance in Vietnam’s New Global Economy, is a monograph based on 22 months of ethnographic research between 2006-2007 and 2009-2010 in Ho Chi Minh City Vietnam’s global sex industry. She worked as a bartender and hostess analyzing four different bars that cater to wealthy local Vietnamese men and their Asian business partners, overseas Vietnamese men living in the diaspora, Western businessmen, and Western budget travelers. The second book project titled, Human Trafficking: Migration and Forced Labor, is an edited volume commissioned by Open Society that she is co-authoring with Professor Rhacel Parreans.  

Exploring the psychological dimensions behind human trafficking, Rachel studies Kara Walker’s cut paper silhouettes from “Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as it Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart” (1994) to “Excavated from the Black Heart of a Negress” (2002). She examines these silhouettes as part of a long history of human trafficking that has gone largely unvisualized and unseen. In addition, she studies the psychological effects of creating and viewing images of suppressed narratives, catharsis, exorcism, and sadomasochism.  Rachel hopes to build a database of images from which to study human trafficking, and locate Walker’s art as part of the stories suppressed beneath contemporary and historical histories of human trafficking.

This project explores the sonic dimensions of slavery and human trafficking and its specific articulations and representations within 20th century African American and Diasporic Literatures. Meina examines textual moments in which narrative language fails, wherein sound is referenced or represented as a supplement through which to decode or understand the text. This project focuses on the aural rather than the oral nature of black textual production beyond the bounds of linguistic articulation. By studying these sounds within the long history of human trafficking and bondage, this project will locate the specific set(s) of sound-practices that typify transatlantic slavery as well as track the development of sound technologies that continue to transform the aural aspects of trafficking articulated in various modes of cultural and artistic production.

McCurdy’s research examines the on-going policy and programmatic effects of trafficking on public health efforts, attending specifically to the intersection of human and drug trafficking and how networks of trafficking respond and adapt to international and state policies aimed to combat trafficking.  Using social science theory and methods, she examines the ideas, theories, and practices related to both universalistic human rights and criminalization in an examination of the ways global, national, and local actors in particular locales negotiate the chaos created by human and drug trafficking. She will analyze the prevailing public health and social science discourses that emphasize the criminalization of human migration and use of illicit drugs under the discourse of ‘trafficking,’ and how people accommodate and resist these discourses at different levels (local, national, global/transnational).

Jennifer Musto, Ph.D. Women's Studies, UCLA
Human Trafficking, Carceral Protectionism, and Rescue Politics in the United States
jennifer.l.musto@rice.edu

Jennifer's research explores questions about how state and non-governmental agents collaborate around the regulation and surveillance of sex workers, irregular migrants, and sexual minorities in local and global contexts. She further traces law enforcement, non-governmental, and social service responses to human trafficking, irregular border crossing, and intimate labor. Expanding upon earlier work, she attends to the ways in which human trafficking has translated into heightened multi-professional efforts to identify forced labor practices in the United States. Informed by ethnographic research with trafficked persons, law enforcement agents, NGO advocates, social workers, feminists, and human-rights activists, her project contributes to scholarly knowledge on human trafficking by mapping the sites and spaces in which collaborative anti-trafficking interventions have expanded the reach of the criminal and juvenile justice systems and fastened anti-trafficking rescue projects to the growth of the carceral state. For more information on Musto's work, click here.

Against the background of Critical Security Studies (CSS), Deliana’s research deals with the question of how human trafficking has developed into a security issue and how identity issues are implicated in it. She explores the two dominant conceptualizations of human trafficking as a security problem linked to illegal immigration and organized crime and a moral problem linked to prostitution as parts of one and the same process, namely the securitization of human trafficking, in which restrictive crime-oriented and humanitarian victim-oriented discourses and interventions imply the same politics of exclusion and marginalization. Using the comparative examples of three countries with different immigration history and legal regulations on prostitution - Germany, Italy and the United States – she unpacks the different ideological rationales behind existent protection schemes for “victims of trafficking” and explains why they are unable to incorporate a human rights perspective.

Continuing his current book project, “Central-African culture and slave identity on the sugar and coffee plantations of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, 1791-1888,” Slenes explores key aspects of Central-African slave culture in Brazil. More specifically, he attends to markers of African identity, including key religious movements and black challenge songs dating from the period of slavery. As an extension of the book, Slenes also seeks to explore new research regarding manumission in Brazil’s Center-South. This research demonstrates that slaves in smallholdings – particularly in properties of first-time owners, especially freed Africans – had considerably more access to freedom than those in large properties. He investigates the reasons for this contrast and its consequences for slave identity in plantation and non-plantation contexts, arguing that these conditions were specific to the historical and political context of Brazil.