The Zong Case: Slavery, Abolition, and the Zong Massacre: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

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In late November 1781, 132 of the slaves on board the British slave ship the Zong were thrown overboard enroute from Africa to Jamaica. According to Ian Baucom, the affair, which came to known as the Zong massacre constitutes an originary experience of global modernity that not only reveals the relation between Britain and the Atlantic world, but its significance seems to have helped to shaped how we understand the conditions for modernity more broadly: the vast mobilization of human beings across the Atlantic, the notion of modern personhood, and the state of exception in which certain categories of persons are placed outside legal protections. This course examines the significance of the Zong massacre through a variety of disciplines.