“<i>I Belong, but Do I Really Belong</i>?” the Suspended Future of the “Modern Slave” in British Protection Politics

Abstract Drawing on interview material with Beth, a Nigerian woman with experience of trafficking to the UK, this paper interrogates the future politics of British anti-modern slavery policy. I argue that the political time of Britain’s approach to modern slavery figures the so-called modern slave as a pre-political, temporally suspended “infantile citizen” (Berlant 1997), whose expected entry into the public sphere provides the moral justification for territorial and cultural borders. I then discuss how the spectre of embodied identity brings this into crisis, as the non-White and the non-Western pose a specific threat to the nation by revealing its foundational violence. Through my conversation with Beth, I bring these processes of infantilization and criminalization into sharp relief. In so doing, I reveal the temporal impossibility of anti-slavery rhetoric, which positions the modern slave in a state of “animated suspension” (Berlant 2011).