Abolition Forgery: A History of the Afterlives of Slavery

Ndubueze L. Mbah is an associate professor of history and global gender studies at the University at Buffalo. He uses oral, written, and material culture sources to show how trans-imperial systems of production and labor mobilization defined political economies of gender and sexuality in Atlantic Age West Africa. Mbah’s award-winning book, Emergent Masculinities: Gendered Power and Social Change in the Biafran Atlantic Age (Ohio University Press, 2019), reveals how transatlantic slavery made gender the dominant marker of human difference and denominator of power in West Africa. 

In this virtual lecture, Mbah will examine the theory of abolition forgery by looking at an overlooked phenomenon: how political projects to end slavery, abolition laws and policies, and liberal freedom discourses disguised the entrenchment of slavery’s political, economic, and social unfreedoms. Mbah shows that abolition forgery was a key component of liberal internationalism in the 19th and 20th centuries. Abolition forgery fostered capitalism and state control over African imperial subjects. For African people, surviving abolition forgery entailed documentary and social identity forgery, human trafficking, contraband smuggling, and forms of rebellious mobility that challenged colonial borders.Register online.

Mbah has received awards from the African Studies Association, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. He earned his PhD with distinction in African history from Michigan State University and is a first-class honors graduate of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

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