Legal scholar Brenna Bhandar gives the first in a series of four talks presented by the ICA in conjunction with Cameron Rowland’s exhibition 3 & 4 Will. IV c. 73.

In her book Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora, Stephanie E Smallwood writes that ‘so pressing was European anxiety and effort to manage the innumerable risks that attended the business of slaving that it is easy to confuse European interest in preserving life to prevent economic loss with positive concern for the captives’ human welfare.’ The effort involved in turning human beings into commodities was so totalising as to spill over into affective and psychic domains usually considered collateral to economic interests. This illusion of concern belies a radical alienation of responsibility for human life. How did legal forms of property ownership enable those involved in the transatlantic slave trade to dissociate themselves from the atrocities in which they were complicit?

In this talk, Brenna Bhandar considers the racial materialities of property laws forged through slavery and colonisation, which condition our present, and explores how the separation of legal interests provides an alibi for the actors complicit in the commodification of human life.

This talk will be captioned, with the words displayed on a screen visible to all audience members.