Irreparable Evil

An Essay in Moral and Reparatory History

David Scott (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

408 Seiten

2024
Columbia University Press (Verlag)
978-0-231-21305-9 (ISBN)

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What was distinctive about the evil of the transatlantic slave trade and New World slavery? In what ways can the present seek to rectify such historical wrongs, even while recognizing that they lie beyond repair? Irreparable Evil explores the legacy of slavery and its moral and political implications, offering a nuanced intervention into debates over reparations.

David Scott reconsiders the story of New World slavery in a series of interconnected essays that focus on Jamaica and the Anglophone Caribbean. Slavery, he emphasizes, involved not only scarcely imaginable brutality on a mass scale but also the irreversible devastation of the ways of life and cultural worlds from which enslaved people were uprooted. Colonial extraction shaped modern capitalism; plantation slavery enriched colonial metropoles and simultaneously impoverished their peripheries. To account for this atrocity, Scott examines moral and reparatory modes of history and criticism, probing different conceptions of evil. He reflects on the paradoxes of seeking redress for the specific moral evil of slavery, criticizing the limitations of liberal rights-based arguments for reparations that pursue reconciliation with the past. Instead, this book argues, in making the urgent demand for reparations, we must acknowledge the fundamental irreparability of a wrong of such magnitude.

David Scott is the Ruth and William Lubic Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. His books include Refashioning Futures: Criticism After Postcoloniality (1999), Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (2004), Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice (2014), and Stuart Hall’s Voice: Intimations of an Ethics of Receptive Generosity (2017). Scott is the founder and editor of the journal Small Axe and director of the Small Axe Project.

Prologue: On the Devastation of Lifeworlds and Forms of Life
Part I
1. The Idea of a Moral and Reparatory History
Part II
2. Incomparable Evil
3. Incommensurable Evils
Part III
4. Slavery’s Evil Lifeworld
5. Evil Enrichment
Epilogue: On Irreparability
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	17.01.2024
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 235 mm
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Ethik
	Sozialwissenschaften
ISBN-10	0-231-21305-0 / 0231213050
ISBN-13	978-0-231-21305-9 / 9780231213059
Zustand	Neuware