The Afterlife of Slavery
What does it mean to affirm life against systems designed to negate it?
To speak of “life” in the universal language of the West, is to speak of that which Blackness is cast out of. Black is synonymous with nonbeing, it is placed so close to death that the line between them dissolves.
The category of “life” was built against us. In Frank B Wilderson’s view, the very idea of “the human” in the modern world was built in opposition to Blackness. Humanity defines itself by saying, “we are not slaves, we are not Black.” This is why he insists that Blackness is positioned not as life but as the permanent figure of death. To be Black is not simply to be mistreated within the system; it is to be the ground against which the system defines what “life” even means.
The sociologist Orlando Patterson called this condition “social death.” In his 1982 book “slavery and social death” he argues that enslavement did not only strip away freedom but also removed enslaved people from the realm of kinship, belonging, and recognition.
Enslaved people were rendered socially dead, denied the ties that mark life as meaningful. Wilderson radicalises this idea by extending it: for him, emancipation did not end social death, made it a permanent condition of Black existence in the modern world.
Saidiya Hartman’s notion of the “afterlife of slavery” complicates this further. For Hartman, the end of slavery did not mark the end of its logics. Instead, it began a new phase in which the structures of racial domination—dispossession, violence, premature death—continued under different guises.
The plantation lives on in the prison, the auction block in the labour market, the spectacle of Black suffering in the circulation of images of police killings. Hartman shows how the hold of slavery persists in everyday life, shaping health, education, and freedom itself. In this sense, Blackness inhabits not only the condition of social death, but also its endless repetition across time.
We do not wait for death as an event at the end of life; it surrounds us, shapes us, it arrives in the form of a gaze that marks one as threat, greets us in the morning news, follows us on the street, lingers in the way grief for Black lives is always cut short or dismissed.
Together, these thinkers show that the legacy of slavery is not just a matter of history—it defines the present. The afterlife of slavery is visible in the structures of power, the hierarchies of labour, the economies of inequality, and the very air we breathe. Freedom is not yet complete.