The Emancipation Contract (Centre for Ethics)

Emancipation did not fail. It succeeded at reorganizing antiblack domination as freedom. Extending Charles Mills’ racial contract, this talk theorizes the emancipation contract, a post-slavery compact that makes civic incorporation an instrument of domination rather than its remedy. Where the racial contract secures white supremacy primarily through exclusion, the emancipation contract operates through revocable inclusion by two mechanisms: materially, the lease-and-release of black labor and civic standing; ideologically, the myth of black citizenship. Reading the Black Codes, convict-leasing, and the Reconstruction Amendments’ penal and crime exceptions, it demonstrates how conviction converts contractual breach into civic forfeiture, attributing withdrawn rights to the rights holder’s conduct, so that exclusion becomes the effect of revocable inclusion rather than its cause. Against accounts that treat civic incorporation as the threshold of full democracy, it argues that revocable inclusion is not democratic repair but a form through which liberal democracy reproduces antiblack domination.

Derefe Chevannes
https://www.politics.utoronto.ca/people/directories/all-faculty/derefe-chevannes
Assistant Professor
Department of Political Science
University of Toronto

About the Speaker:

Derefe Kimarley Chevannes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto, specializing in Black Political Theory. His research centers on Black liberation and Black radical thought in the modern world, writing at the intersection of Political Theory and Black Studies. His current research focuses on racial and decolonial critiques of democracy and citizenship. Dr. Chevannes has published widely in journals including Perspectives on Politics, Political Research Quarterly, PS: Political Science & Politics, Philosophy & Global Affairs, Critical Philosophy of Race, Theory & Event, among others, as well as book chapters published in several edited volumes. His work interrogates the racial logics of colonial modernity and mobilizes Africana thought as a transformative intellectual tradition for critically rethinking the human condition.

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This is a talk with audience Q&A presented by the University of Toronto's Centre for Ethics that is free to attend and open to the public. Free refreshments will be provided at the event. The talk will also be streamed online with live chat here [to be posted].

About the Centre for Ethics (http://ethics.utoronto.ca):

The Centre for Ethics is an interdisciplinary centre aimed at advancing research and teaching in the field of ethics, broadly defined. The Centre seeks to bring together the theoretical and practical knowledge of diverse scholars, students, public servants and social leaders in order to increase understanding of the ethical dimensions of individual, social, and political life.

In pursuit of its interdisciplinary mission, the Centre fosters lines of inquiry such as (1) foundations of ethics, which encompasses the history of ethics and core concepts in the philosophical study of ethics; (2) ethics in action, which relates theory to practice in key domains of social life, including bioethics, business ethics, and ethics in the public sphere; and (3) ethics in translation, which draws upon the rich multiculturalism of the City of Toronto and addresses the ethics of multicultural societies, ethical discourse across religious and cultural boundaries, and the ethics of international society.

The Ethics of A.I. Lab at the Centre For Ethics recently appeared on a list of 10 organizations leading the way in ethical A.I.: https://ocean.sagepub.com/blog/10-organizations-leading-the-way-in-ethical-ai