ABSTRACT

The passage of Australia’s Modern Slavery Act 2018 received bipartisan support and was heralded within both Houses of Parliament as a significant step towards addressing Australia’s complicity in modern slavery. Political discourse surrounding the legislation, however, exhibits a profound and disconcerting dehistoricisation, emphasising particularities of global supply chains and contemporary transnational capitalism. Australia’s own histories of slavery, slavery-like conditions and unfree labour are overwhelmingly absent from these narratives, which are framed instead by occasional references to the transatlantic slave trade. Attending particularly to histories of coerced Pacific labour within Australia, we analyse these absences as reflective of deeply rooted fissures of memory and power within Australia’s national imaginaries, and of the exercise of colonial power both within the settler state and in its entanglements with the region. Through reference to two threads of Pacific labour history in Australia—the struggle for recognition of the 19th-century Pacific labour trade, and the labour patterns of 20th-century Papuan and New Guinean domestic workers—we argue for an alternate genealogy of modern slavery, one that re-centres attention to race and coloniality, and attends more fully to the presence of the past in the exploitations of the present.

摘要

澳大利亚《2018 年现代奴隶制法案》的通过获得了两党的支持，并在议会两院内被宣布为解决澳大利亚在现代奴隶制中的同谋行为迈出的重要一步。然而，围绕立法的政治话语表现出深刻而令人不安的去历史化，强调全球供应链和当代跨国资本主义的特殊性。这些叙述中绝大多数都没有澳大利亚自己的奴隶制、类似奴隶制的条件和不自由的劳动的历史，而是偶尔提及跨大西洋奴隶贸易。我们特别关注澳大利亚境内强迫太平洋劳工的历史，分析这些缺席反映了澳大利亚国家想象中根深蒂固的记忆和权力裂缝，以及在定居者国家内及其与该地区的纠缠中行使殖民权力。通过参考澳大利亚太平洋劳工史的两条线索——争取承认 19 世纪太平洋劳工贸易的斗争，以及 20 世纪巴布亚和新几内亚家政工人的劳工模式——我们主张现代奴隶制的替代谱系，一种将注意力重新集中在种族和殖民上，并在对现在的利用中更充分地关注过去的存在。