Some Asian countries such as Malaysia and Singapore have been experiencing economic growth which, in its turn have been stimulating migrant workers, mainly un-skilled, to migrate into those countries. The present paper tries to examine the human rights violations of domestic workers in Malaysia and Singapore which are occurring in the form of modern servitude or servitude. Moreover, the paper also tries to elaborate the working conditions of foreign domestic workers in Malaysia and Singapore. The present paper is using human rights coupled with intersectionality theories in order to examine whether enacted migration policies in Malaysia and Singapore in relation to migrant workers, though migration policies imposed to domestic workers are aimed to fulfill the national interests, can be regarded as a form of modern slavery or servitude . The present thesis is a case study which is examined by elaborating numerous literatures regarding the working conditions of foreign domestic workers in Malaysia and Singapore. The factual conditions of domestic workers in Malaysia and Singapore, namely the conditions and policies concerning the limitation of several rights of domestic workers will be described and analyzed under the human rights coupled with intersectionality perspectives.

This thesis examines how digital mediations of art and performances can contribute to shaping new memories and perceptions about the Danish colonization of the U.S. Virgin Islands. By analyzing six pieces of art and performances that engage critically with Danish colonialism and slavery, this study aims to expand the limits of how Danish colonization is traditionally perceived in Danish authoritative representations. Based on theory about visual art, mediatization and digital memory, this study has found that art as an aesthetic tool can revise and challenge traditional ways of engaging with the past and representing it. Art and performances can promote new ways of understanding the complexity of colonialism and bring attention to underrepresented views and voices. Contemporary media plays a key role in how we socially construct memory, as processes of mediatization have changed traditional methods of retrieving and storing knowledge. It is found that digitizing art and publishing it on the archive of the Internet, creates a foundation for potential dialogue, reflection and reconsideration of Denmark’s former role as a colonial power. The Internet allows for access to various, manifold perspectives and memories of the Danish past. Thus digitizing and publishing works of art and performance online, adds a dimension of shaping a ‘social network memory’ where viewers and artists are involved in processes of sharing and reflection that allow for discussions about Denmark’s colonial past.

This dissertation examines the conflict over slavery and freedom in Philadelphia from 1820 to 1847. As the northernmost southern city in a state that bordered three slave states, Philadelphia maintained a long tradition of abolitionism and fugitive slave activity. Conflicts that arose over fugitive slaves and the kidnapping of free African-Americans forced Philadelphians to confront the politics of slavery. This dissertation argues that until 1847, Pennsylvania was in effect a slave state. The work of proslavery groups, namely slave masters, their agents, white and black kidnappers, and local, state, and national political supporters, undermined the ostensible successes of state laws designed to protect the freedom of African-Americans in Pennsylvania. Commonly referred to as “liberty laws,” this legislation exposed the inherent difficulty in determining the free or enslaved status of not only fugitive slaves but also African-American kidnapping victims. By studying the specific fugitive or kidnapping cases that inspired these liberty laws, one finds that time and again African-Americans and their allies forced white politicians to grapple with the reality that Pennsylvania was not a safe-haven for African-Americans, regardless of their condition of bondage or freedom. Furthermore, these cases often precipitated into desperate rescues and bloody riots on the streets of Philadelphia; these civil wars in miniature reflected the negotiated and compromised realities of living while black in the city. Ordinary African-Americans living in Philadelphia bore the burden of comity, or friendly relations between states, by practicing what I term “street diplomacy”: the up-close and personal struggles over freedom and slavery that had local, state, and national ramifications. In a larger sense, street diplomacy in Philadelphia magnified the stakes of national comity, i.e. the Union, by showcasing how dividing states by their condition of bondage remained impossible due to permeable geographic borders that fostered perpetual fugitive slave and kidnapping crises. Thus, this dissertation argues that African-Americans and their allies’ struggles with slave-masters, slave-catchers, kidnappers and proslavery politicians disrupted the best efforts of white politicians to maintain a compromised and compromising Union. / History

On Monday 22 June 1772, the English jurist William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield, delivered his oral verdict as Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench in the famous case involving the enslaved Afro-British servant James Somerset to declare that only an Act of Parliament could legalize domestic bondage and that Somerset was a free man. For the estimated 15,000 captives living in the English metropole, Somerset v. Stewart effectively undercut the Anglo-Atlantic slavocracy that had hid behind legal technicalities and extrajudicial decrees defending domestic bondage since the last quarter of the seventeenth century. In order to offer a full treatment of Somerset, its Afro-British legal antecedents, and the Black experience in Early Modern Britain, this work traces the roots of British racial construction--deep seated physiognomic, socio-cultural, legal, and economic roots that date to 1553 when the English first explored equatorial West Africa or what cartographers generically branded “Negroland.” When investigating Somerset scholars have overlooked the semantics of race, its longue durée link to English legal systems, and the historical actors who socially and legally defiled the Black presence in the British Empire. In addition to reconnoitering the origins of British racial construction, this work examines the judicial minutia of Afro-British case law and Mansfield’s 1772 decision, while offering a comprehensive account of its immediate and long-term effects on emancipations in the Anglo-American diaspora. This provides an all-inclusive treatment neglected by Somerset scholars. Mansfield’s verdict was an exceptional threat to slavery in that it resonated powerfully within interracial trans-Atlantic abolitionist movements and the enslaved communities that waged various forms of “diasporic warfare” against captivity throughout the British Empire. My original quantitative data based on the Glasgow University “Runaway Slave in Eighteenth-Century Britain project” reveals the correlation between pro- and anti-slavery Afro-British legal cases and the 830 ‘runaway’ and eighty-two ‘for sale’ advertisements published in eighteenth-century British newspapers. The quantitative evidence illustrates that from 1758 the surge of Afro-British ‘runaways’ led to the high-profile trials of Joseph Harvey (1762), Jonathan Strong (1765), and Thomas John Hylas (1768) which provoked increased anti-slavery activity the following decade. Indeed, by the 1760s servants were absconding in record numbers and resisting--as what I coin metropolitan maroons--and domestic slavery was quickly dying out in Britain. The public reaction to Mansfield’s 1772 verdict, coupled with the precipitous fall of post-Somerset ‘runaway’ and ‘for sale’ advertisements, proved the end of de facto slavery in England. While its legal legacies were at times ambiguous, the Somerset case gained new meanings in the imaginations of emancipationists and pro-slavery apologists alike, as tellings and retellings of its verdict were passed by word of mouth among enslaved people and through popular publications among literate free people in the decades that followed. Some of the reverberations were resounding and others much more subtle, yet all attest to the special significance of Somerset in the long emancipationist struggle against slavery.

This dissertation examines the evolution of institutions and legal rules regulating and prohibiting the slave trade into a global regime for the regulation of international labor migration between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. In the nineteenth century, the spread of anti-slavery norms increased Western demand for African and Asian contractual workers; but it also upturned labor recruitment networks in the Senegal River valley and the Pearl River delta, which relied on coercive practices that Western governments now prohibited. As a result, imperial powers, indigenous authorities, and labor-source communities competed to set and enforce new rules for the lawful recruitment of West African and Chinese laborers for Western enterprises. I argue that jurisdictional competition between these groups produced legal regimes that determined mobility and economic opportunity for Asian and African workers. As novel legal arrangements both facilitated and restrained African and Asian migration to worksites across the globe, labor-source societies in West Africa and China grew conscious of their shared existence within a Western-dominated world order and engaged in global debates over slavery, labor, and civilization. I trace the origins of these debates to two phenomena: the early modern global trade expansion and the subsequent emergence of the anti-slavery movement. These developments transformed political ideologies not only in Western imperial metropoles, but also in Sahelian West Africa and across the South China Sea. I also uncover African and Asian critiques of domination, discrimination, and inequality in international and imperial legal orders. This project thus elucidates how labor mobilization produced new identities and solidarities across Africa and Asia. It further reveals how the regulation of migration produced global disparities of wealth and sovereignty.

In the last twenty years, studies in Afro-American slavery have given special attention to the slave community and culture. They have emphasized the slaves' control over their lives, while glossing over the brutality of the institution of slavery. Slave women have been ignored until very recently, and those few historians who studied their lives have applied the same categories of inquiry used by traditional historians with a male perspective. The topic of interracial sexual relations crystallizes this problem. This issue has been left aside in most scholarly studies and, when mentioned, addressed more often than not from a male perspective. As sexual abuse, it exemplifies the harshness of slavery. The oral slave narratives, often referred to by the same historians, are one of the few primary sources by and on slave women. Yet, historians have not used them adequately in research on slave women, primarily because of inadequate conceptual frameworks. / Master of Arts

When Francis Troutman attempted to recapture the Crosswhites, a family of runaway slaves that found a home in Marshall, Michigan, he did not anticipate that a sizeable amount of the community would rebuke him. The event, known as the Crosswhite Affair, placed the runaway family at the heart of the sectional battle over slavery. Troutman’s failed recapture set in motion a chain of events that eventually ended with the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, a law despised by many, particularly in the North. It allowed slave catching to become widespread and forced American citizens to actively participate in recapturing runaways or face severe penalties. By connecting the Crosswhite Affair to the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, this dissertation asserts that the plight of runaways forced many Americans to confront slavery, especially when slave hunters prowled the North in search of these freedom seekers. / History

This dissertation is an analysis of Elaine Mitchener’s structurally improvised work SWEET TOOTH, initially devised in 2017 and 2018 for an ensemble of four. I focus on the February 22, 2018 London premiere at St George’s Church in Bloomsbury, where Mitchener, an experimental vocalist and movement artist, performed the piece with Sylvia Hallett (accordion, violin and voice), Mark Sanders (percussion), and Jason Yarde (saxophones). I have previously examined this piece in a co-authored essay with Mitchener entitled, “‘Water long like the dead’: The interruption and flow of time in Elaine Mitchener’s SWEET TOOTH,” as part of the volume Composing While Black: Afrodiasporic New Music Today, edited by Harald Kisiedu and George E. Lewis. This essay concentrated on how, with its improvisatory performance style, SWEET TOOTH’s structure, including harmonic and pitch content, emulates the simultaneous interruptions and flow of what Antonio Benítez-Rojo refers to as the “Plantation Machine”: the mechanics of transatlantic slavery that have continued to repeat and reveal themselves in renewed but connected ways as part of an expanded framework, where the Caribbean exists as what Benítez-Rojo describes as a “meta-archipelago,” a de-centered, multidimensional nexus without boundary that is also realized through SWEET TOOTH. In this thesis, I argue that the air is as vital to the Caribbean’s borderless flow as the sea, in that its vibrational qualities also repeat and oscillate through space and time. Specifically, I explore what Ashon T. Crawley describes as the “choreosonics” of SWEET TOOTH: how the combination of movement and sound together displace the air, making the work multi-sensory, and enabling travel between the interconnected histories, time zones, and dimensions that form the conditions of the Machine: the hold of a slave ship, the deep seas of the Atlantic Ocean, a Caribbean sugar plantation, spiritual realms and unknown worlds. Furthermore, I consider how “in-between,” or “blue” zones are formed, which facilitate these connected sites to simultaneously exist and be disrupted, as well as how aural triggers conjure these spaces in the present through memory, real and imagined. Finally, I analyze the means through which the Afro-Jamaican religion kumina is incorporated and practiced as part of SWEET TOOTH in the hope of transcending into an otherworldly realm: an act of defying the Machine. Ultimately, I demonstrate that whilst SWEET TOOTH replicates, and even belongs to the Plantation Machine complex, the work simultaneously finds ways to cut through and resist it: to frustrate its repetitions with the desire to completely disrupt it in perpetuity. shouting forever into the receiver (2022), a musical composition for large ensemble, attempts to recreate the repetitious condition of the Plantation Machine. This is achieved primarily through auxiliary instruments and their resulting effects on the work’s overall sound world and temporal state. A two-way walkie-talkie device introduces feedback and radio interference into the soundscape symbolizing the Machine’s persistent looping system, also simulating the cries of the plantations. Furthermore, a confluence of separate time zones is created through a chorale-like section of massed harmonicas and seven wind-up music boxes playing well known pre-programmed melodies by Beethoven, Mozart and Strauss composed during the establishment of the Plantation. Thus, not only is the past connected to the present through these aural memories, the ties between Europe and the plantations are purposefully emphasized. Eight players play two harmonicas simultaneously, breathing independently, each creating their own time zone with every repeat of the exhale-inhale action. The music boxes wind down at their own rate generating additional cyclical layers of time, thus emulating the eccentric situation of the Caribbean, which is without center or axis. A “blue” space is formed as a result, an expansive new site of connectivity where it is possible for transformation to occur or to, indeed, transcend out of the Machine.

The severity of the phenomenon of forced labour, among other forms of human exploitation, has garnered paramount significance in the context of contemporary socioeconomic changes. For this reason, the present work seeks to address the issue through the lens of international law with two primary objectives. Firstly, to delineate the actual legal status surrounding the prohibition of forced labour and secondly, to clarify the nature of State responsibility for the utilisation of forced labour by private actors. Built upon this foundation, the research unfolds in a tripartite structure. The first chapter is introduced by an historical overview focused on States’ acknowledgement of forced labour alongside abolitionist movements against slavery between the XIX and XX centuries. The overview serves as a basis for an in-depth examination of relevant key international agreements drafted within the League of Nations and later the United Nations, as well as the International Labour Organization, up to the latest developments. The analysis then extends to forced labour provisions enshrined in regional human rights conventions and other pertinent international agreements as well as to the most recent contribution developed within practice of international organisations. The second chapter is divided into two sections. In the first part, the focus lies on the case law on the prohibition of forced labour as interpreted by the International Court of Justice and regional human rights courts. In the subsequent part, examples of national legislation aimed at combating forced labour through corporate accountability are outlined, alongside supranational initiatives aligned with this overarching objective. Drawing from the insights garnered in the preceding chapters, the concluding chapter presents an exploration of the status of the prohibition of forced labour within the framework of international law. This is followed by the analysis of three potential hypotheses aimed at elucidating the nature of State responsibility regarding the employment of forced labour by private actors. On these grounds, the prominence of forced labour in contemporary international law and the critical role of States in addressing it is ultimately unveiled. The outcomes of the work assess if States’ strategies align with the urgency of the issue, suggesting future approaches to effectively tackle forced labour in the actual global landscape.

The dissertation argues that the development of the British abolition movement was based on the abolitionists' perception that their actions were kairotic; they attempted to shape their own kairos by taking temporal events and reinterpreting them to construct a kairotic process that led to a perceived fulfillment: abolition. Thus, the dissertation examines the rhetorical strategies used by white abolitionists to construct an abolitionist kairos that was designed to produce salvation for white Britons more than it was to help free blacks. The dissertation especially examines the three major texts produced by black persons living in England during the late eighteenth centuryIgnatius Sancho's Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho (1782), Ottobauh Cugoano's Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery (1787), and Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789)to illustrate how black rhetoric was appropriated by whites to fulfill their own kairotic desires. By examining the rhetorical strategies employed in both white and black rhetorics, the dissertation illustrates how the abolitionists thought the movement was shaped by, and how they were shaping the movement through, kairotic time. While the dissertation contends that the abolition movement was rhetorically designed to provide redemption, and thus salvation, it illustrates that the abolitionist's intent was not merely to save the slave, but to redeem blacks first in the eyes of white Christians by opening blacks to an understanding and acceptance of God. Perhaps more importantly, abolitionists would use black salvation to buy back their own souls and the soul of their nation in the eyes of God in order to regain their own salvation lost in the slave trade. But ironically, they had to appear to be saving others to save themselves. So white abolitionists used the black narratives to persuade their overwhelmingly white audience that slavery was as bad for them as it was for the African slave. And in the process, a corpus of black writing was produced that gives current readers two glimpses of one world.