The Spectralized Camp: Cultural Representation of British New Slaveries

The huge number of enslaved people living in contemporary Britain remains one of the most controversial issues in the wake of the 2007 bicentenary commemorations of the abolition of the Slave Trade. The isolated and fragmented existence of undocumented migrants is rarely recorded; they are often referred to as ‘invisibles’, ‘ghosts’, non-persons’, ‘unpersons’, similarly to the spectral alterities haunting Western social and ideological constructions in Postcolonial Studies. Moreover, the scattered places in which they are imprisoned belong to a wide range of typologies: private homes, factories, cultivated fields, truck containers, picturesque beaches, forming a ‘concentrationary archipelago’ throughout the country. In today’s Britain, the concentration camp has been atomized, vaporized into a myriad of ever-changing, ever-shifting different places, thus embodying the dynamic features of trans-national capitalist mobility. With this paper I argue that the study of cultural representations of new slaveries must integrate both perspectives – Postcolonial/Diaspora Studies and Holocaust Studies, respectively incarnated in the tropes of the ghost and the concentration camp. This approach integrates Michael Rothberg’s theorisations on ‘multidirectional memory’ with Giorgio Agamben’s reflections on the figure of the refugee as a development of the concentration camp prisoner/homo sacer. The necessity to tackle representations of new slaveries through a ‘multidirectional’ approach is even more pressing in the face of the removal of imprisoned migrants from public view. The new forms of concentration camps are increasingly spectralised, reduced to a haunting trace rather than an evident reality. In other words, the two tropes are developing an increasingly intricate relationship. This operation is effected by political and journalistic language, but it is also validated by some theoretical works which elude the specificities of new slaveries.