papers should be 3-4 pages in length, double-spaced and 12-point font.
1. According to Lisa Lowe in Chapter 1 of her book, how are chattel slavery, indentured Asian labor, and Indigenous dispossession interconnected forms of colonialism? What does she mean by intimacies of four continents? Please provide at least 3 examples of these connections between groups and continents.
2. According to Lowe, what is Bourgeois Intimacy and how has it allowed for the expansion of a wealthy and elite class? How according to Lowe is liberalism connected to the creation of the British (and later American) Empires? What are some examples of contemporary benefits that upper-class individuals and groups benefit from as a result of Bourgeois Intimacy and liberal ideas about capitalism?
3. According to Lowe in chapter 3, why is it necessary to conceive of settler colonialism, slavery, indentured servitude, imperial war, and trade together, as braided parts of a world process that involved Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas, permitting an optic on early nineteenth-century liberalism and empire? In other words, how do the various political moves of European colonists in Africa, Asia, and the Americas become inter-dependent upon one another? How do ideas of free trade and free market come to exist and do you see any problems with the idea of free being used in this colonial context that used unpaid, forced slave labor and violent land dispossession as a means of creating free markets and trade systems?
4. How might you trace objects we see today as being founded upon the intimacies of four continents? How do products like cell phones, computers, and internet have a genealogy that is connected to unfreedoms in the global south, on occupied and desecrated Indigenous land, under the delicate ecosystems of the Pacific Ocean? In your own communities? In other words, how do land and labor continue today to produce objects, goods, services and resources that manipulate/exploit the labor of Asian, African, and Indigenous (including Latinx Indigenous peoples) in the U.S. and abroad? (Please use a few quotes from Lowe to support your ideas).