Introduction

According to Carrington, ‘sport provides a contested arena through which competing definitions of race, gender, sexuality, class, and region are articulated’ (2008: 424). In the context of race more specifically, when people speak of racism, they often allude to two distinct social practices – namely antilocution and physical attack (see Allport, 1954). Language is rightly an important social practice (Bourdieu, 1991), which in turns shapes other social practices to do with the expression of racism.

A high-profile example of when this issue reared its ugly head took place in 2004 when former manager Ron Atkinson – who perhaps most famously guided Manchester United to win the FA Cup (the Football Association Challenge Cup) in 1983 – then an ITV football pundit, resigned after making overtly racist comments about Chelsea football player Marcel Desailly. ‘Big Ron’, as he was affectionately known in the football industry, unwittingly believed his broadcast had finished and his microphone had been muted. In making reference to what he perceived to be the poor performance of the French defender, who had been playing in a Champions League match for Chelsea against Monaco, Atkinson said, ‘He’s what is known in some schools as a fucking lazy thick n****r’ (quoted in Prior, 2004). Atkinson’s conversation was picked up by microphones which ordinarily would have been switched off once the broadcast from the stadium had ended. The remarks were inadvertently broadcast to an international audience. Big Ron was ‘outed’ as a ‘closet racist’, with some expressing disbelief that a manager renowned for having given fledgling Black players a so-called ‘chance’ when others were unwilling to do so way back in the 1970s could express such sentiments.

Those who sought to defend Atkinson the man while at the same time censuring his comments pointed out that at best there seemed to be a level of dissonance between his verbalizations and his social practices, which appeared at face value to be antiracist. In an attempt to defend himself, Atkinson pleaded: ‘I have had Cyrille [Regis] and big Paul Williams both on the phone. I was one of the first, if not the first, to play black players’ (Kelso, 2004, square brackets in original).

This chapter argues that there was a rhetorical continuum between ante and post-bellum descriptions of slavery in US popular culture as the legacies and memories of ‘old slavery days’ and abolitionism were the most significant points of comparison used by authors trying to delimit and understand mutable post-bellum slavery.

This chapter highlights the crucial function of gender at its intersection with race in discourse about slavery and abolition. It takes two case studies of ‘white slavery’, which received substantial press coverage: the enslavement of Circassian women as concubines in the Ottoman Empire and ‘the white slavery panic’ about sex trafficking in the US.

This chapter shows how representations of the perpetrators of post-bellum slavery used scientific racism to conceptualize slavery using racially motivated anti-imperialism. However, the rhetoric used in othering the slave owner in the Middle East & Pacific World was contested in popular culture, as comparison with ‘old slavery days’ was also used to humanize and justify forced labour practices. These rhetorical strategies sought flexibility in the definition of slavery, often resulting in a refusal to define particular practices as slavery.

Within the United States, the years from 1865 to 1920 represent a period during which the various understandings of the notion of slavery evolved and simultaneously became more entrenched and important within the political culture of the nation. The influence of both abolitionist (of moderate and radical hues) and proslavery discourses, that had their origins in the pre–Civil War era was marked, but there was also a new conception of the changing definition of slavery in a global context. In both domestic and global situations, it was difficult for commentators to overcome the era’s pervasive racial and gender ideologies, meaning that during this period even antislavery discourse had a strongly conservative, reactionary tone and message. However, radical antislavery rhetoric increasingly became a part of the intellectual world of the early twentieth century, challenging traditional hierarchies and, in some cases, the entire capitalist system itself.

This chapter examines the many contexts influencing US responses to global slavery, including the British anti-slavery colonial model, attempts to forge the US imperial destiny in the Pacific and Africa, and a global labour market, which blurred the distinctions between free and forced movement of workers.

This chapter examines the myriad ways that authors subverted the post-bellum slavery narrative - employing, variously, Marxist ideas, pan-Africanism and non-racially motivated anti-imperialist rhetoric. It shows that the rhetorical processes through which slaves and slave owners had been othered were challenged and an alternative vision of anti-slavery was offered.

This chapter shows how nascent racially motivated imperialism led to the othering of the enslaved, both within the US as a tool of social control of labour, to justify immigration restrictions on so-called ‘coolies’, and also in order to position the nation alongside European powers in the colonial struggles for parts of the Middle East and Africa. The edges of the definition of slavery was fought over by those arguing that forced labour was the only valid way of eliciting productive labour from uncivilized natives.

This book will examine the interplay of various factors that influenced American perceptions of slavery and other forms of unfree, coerced or forced labour in the period after the emancipation of slaves within its own borders. It argues that while, undoubtedly, the shadow of antebellum chattel slavery loomed large in the American imagination, as influential was the model of imperial antislavery practised by European powers, especially after the United States itself developed an overseas empire in the 1890s. However, representations of slavery were not only a battleground on a geopolitical level. They were also used to work out the significance of competing scientific racial ideas, and also became a way for more radical thinkers to express their distaste for such ideas, while proposing new and more broad approaches to labour problems. Abolitionists were far from simplistic humanitarians and often their approach to the problem of slavery was a pragmatic one, designed as much to maintain control and hegemonic order as to give equal rights and opportunities to the world’s poorest.