Resumen de Slavery is not a Metaphor

Adelle Blackett

• This is a pivotal moment for the study of slavery, in historical and contemporary form across a range of comparative law contexts. The foreword to Annie Bunting and Joel Quirk’s timely and insightful collection of essays is written by the first United Nations Special Rapporteur on contemporary slavery, Gulnara Shahinian, who recalls the “decades of silence that had relegated slavery to a relic from an earlier stage in history.”1 Shahinian laments the initial reluctance to talk about anything but slavery’s legacy, and even then only in largely psychological terms—she wants instead to address a range of forms of structural inequality to “transform...