Representing Evil: Considering the Methods of and a Theory for Representing Perpetrators in Sociological Research

Alexandre White, Johns Hopkins University
Pyar Seth, Johns Hopkins University

Jamaica Kincaid described the archives of slavery as the “accounts of crimes as told almost entirely by the perpetrators of those crimes”. While scholars of slavery like Jennifer Morgan, Sadiya Hartman, Jessica Marie Johnson, Christina Sharpe, Daina Ramey Berry and others have devised profound methodologies for resisting the archival violence of the representation of enslavement as told by the enslaver and recovered experiences and voices of those under enslavement, when considering how power operates the representation of the perpetrator remains a critical component. These scholars would also rightly caution repositioning the histories of slavery around the enslaver, further erasing the lives, experiences, and resistances of those they enslaved. While perpetrators of slavery have been depicted rightly in their violence and often as perpetrators of spectacular violence, how do we understand those actors both central to the instructions of slavery though perhaps removed from some of the everyday practices of direct corporal violence, confinement and exploitation? Drawing upon the archives of Lloyd’s insurance market this paper explores questions of how to portray and represent foundational actors who contributed and maintained the trans-Atlantic slave trade through mechanisms of finance and remote ownership of plantations. Considering Black Feminist studies of slavery in conversation with Hannah Arendt, Jean-Marie Amery and others, this paper seeks to present both a method and theory for representing perpetrators in sociological scholarship.

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 Presented in Session 158. Power and Normativity in Society and History III: Counterfactuals, Counterconcepts, and Moral Representation in Social Research