Talk at III Colonial and Post-Colonial Landscapes Congress
Session 17: Topographies of Forced Labor. (Im)mobility, Disposability, and Liminality
Hanna Arendt differentiates the ancient concept of slavery from that of the moderns: while in antiquity it was a matter of avoiding the toiling of life’s necessities, for the moderns it is a means of procuring undervalued labor-power with a goal of maximizing profits. As economic imperative increasingly dominates all aspects of human existence, the majority of the society experiences a proletarization which deprives individuals of meaningful agency within the alienating system of mass production. This panel invites papers that reconsider the built environment not only as an assemblage of aesthetic and technological objects but also manifestations of labor relations – specifically forced labor. The use of forced labor has often been justified through the creation of an inferior “other,” on the basis of race, gender, religion, ethnicity, nationality, and knowledge. Regimes of exploitation – whether corporate entities, state-backed institutions, or sovereign states – subsume outcasts who are deemed less deserving of labor protections into their techno-economic apparatus and utilize spatial interventions to render them obscure from public view, easily relocatable, disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards, positioned at the frontlines of war as expendable subjects, and confined to substandard living conditions.
This panel seeks to interrogate the architectural histories of such acts of violence embedded within the chains of stigmatization, dispossession, and exploitation. We invite reflections on forced labor as a modern phenomenon, where human rights are contingent upon citizenship status and where technical progress gives rise to a more complex built environment which enhances mass subjugation, detention, and exploitation. We welcome papers that critically examine the spatial dynamics of forced labor in both colonial and post-colonial contexts, including indentured servitude, human trafficking, political prisoners, state-mandated public service, and corporate supply chain exploitation.
III Colonial and Post-Colonial Landscapes Congress
11-13 February 2026
Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon