In this talk, historian Kris Manjapra traces the invention of the “unclaimed body” within an expanding global circuit of medical practice, carcerality and anti-Blackness from the Age of Abolition to the Jim Crow Era. A hidden dynamic underlies modern societies with imperialist roots: we do not put some of the Dead to rest; we keep them in bondage. Our societies still rely, in remarkably persistent ways, on pipelines that shunt the bodies of underprivileged and vulnerable people into our medical schools, our science labs, and our museums.

Kris Manjapra is Stearns Trustee Professor of History and Global Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. He is the author of Black Ghost of Empire (Scribner and Allen Lane, 2022), Colonialism in Global Perspective (Cambridge, 2020), and Age of Entanglement (Harvard, 2014), among other works.