In the Wake of Logistics
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Published:March 2025
Chapter 4 foregrounds the workforces powering the movement of goods along the waterway from the colonial period to the present. It argues that the labor power required by the fluvial transport and logistics industry depends on regimes of difference-making whose racial underpinnings have both persisted and changed over time. Alert to continuities and divergences, this chapter engages with the afterlives of colonization and enslavement as well as with their geographically situated manifestations and historically specific transformations. The focus on articulations of race and labor in the domain of logistics reveals the persistence of racial hierarchies and their perpetual instability, which in turn enables the links between past, present, and future to be analyzed without teleological assumptions.