Enslaving Globalization: Slavery, Civil War, and Modernity in Sierra Leone

Examining hegemonic postcolonial discourse vis-à-vis the trans Atlantic slave trade and its resonances in late capitalism, my paper explores a literary and visual cultural project to remap the spatial and temporal atlas of postcolonial modernity. In an effort to situate what has been called by one scholar a "crisis of modernity" (Richards 1996)—manifested in a civil war fought over the spoils of a lucrative global diamond trade, state collapse, mass population dispersals, etc.—Sierra Leonean writers and artists have called into question the discourses that associate modernity and post-independence political crises almost exclusively with the colonial encounter. Turning to the more expansive cartography of the Atlantic world—of which colonialism represents but one spatio-temporal element—these writers and artists have brought a new focus to the residual traces of the trans Atlantic slave trade's remaking of village social structures, practices of violence, and definitions of personhood. Only with such a spatial and temporal remapping, the Sierra Leonean texts suggest, can the post-independence crises make sense.