Contemporary Slavery in the UK and Its Categories

The number of enslaved people living in contemporary Britain is estimated at around 25,000. Their isolated existence is rarely documented; therefore, they have access to few rights and are often referred to as, ‘invisibles’, ‘ghosts’, non-persons’, ‘unpersons’. This remains one of the most controversial issues around the 2007 bicentenary commemorations of the abolition of the Slave Trade. By focusing on both investigative research and fictional works, this presentation emphasizes the fragmented, scattered nature of this phenomenon, due to its illegal, hidden nature. The apparently respectable British house, the cultivated field, the truck container and the picturesque beach (to mention but a few) have all become a potential site for these new forms of bondage, thus intensifying the haunting presence of these undocumented migrants throughout the country. These reflections start from Agamben’s vision of the concentration camp as the emblematic paradigm of our times, as the place of ‘exemplary exception’ where the law is suspended. Moreover, they try to show how, in today’s Britain, the concentration camp has been atomized, vaporized into a myriad of ever-changing, ever-shifting different places, thus embodying the features of trans-national capitalist mobility. On one hand, the new forms that the concentration camp has taken are not easily reducible to any unifying concept; on the other hand, the challenge consists in tracing the continuum which underlies this variety of ‘invisible holocausts’ (Lal), all these ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ places where human rights are suspended, from detention centres to brothel flats. Finally, studying the phenomenon of contemporary forms of slavery in today’s Britain requires a re-definition of key categories, such as ‘subaltern’ and ‘Black British’.