Glaring Whiteness: Trafficking Visual Rhetoric and Tropes of Blindness

Distinguished visiting educator, Dr. Annie Hill, will deliver a talk based on her newest book, Trafficking Rhetoric: Race, Migration, and the Making of Modern-Day Slavery. Human trafficking has generated intense global concern, with stories of sex slavery and images of women forced into prostitution so persuasive that states have raced to respond ahead of empirical data and clear definitions of the crime. In Trafficking Rhetoric, Hill analyzes the entanglement of state veneration and state violence by tracking how the United Kingdom points to the alleged crimes of others in order to celebrate itself and conceal its own aggression. Hill compares the UK’s acclaimed rescue approach to human trafficking with its hostile approach to migration, arguing that they are two sides of the same coin—one that relies on rhetorical constructions of “trafficked women” and “illegal migrants” to materialize the UK as an Anglo-white space.

Drawing from official estimates, policy papers, NGO reports, news stories, and awareness campaigns and situating them in the broader EU context, Hill accounts for why the UK’s antitrafficking agenda emerged with such rhetorical force in the early twenty-first century. Trafficking Rhetoric reframes controversies over labor, citizenship, and migration while challenging the continued traction of race-baiting and gender bias in determining who has the right to live, work, and belong in the nation.

Dr. Hill is Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas-Austin. Her talk is sponsored by the Department of Rhetoric, Writing, and Public Discourse at Whitman, and is supported through the Robert and Mabel Groseclose Endowed Lecture Fund. Dr. Hill's talk is eligible to count towards the Law, Culture, and Humanities minor's requirement for attendance at law-related events.