Corporations as Haunted Entities: Conceptualising Responsibility for Historical Harm
- Publication Type:
- Chapter
- Citation:
- Evil Corporations: Law, Culpability and Regulation, 2024, pp. 206-222
- Issue Date:
- 2024-01-01
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| Filename | Description | Size | |||
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| Haunted.pdf | Published version | 263.9 kB |
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Given the immortality of corporations, can and should they be held accountable for past wrongs? We use the haunted house as a conceptual metaphor to explore disruptive forces and the afterlives of slavery, through an analysis of the case that has become known as In re African-American Slave Descendants Litigation. These claims provided something valuable to the legal archive: our reading shows that they conceptualise, in legal terms, corporations as being haunted by the benefits they have obtained for the past. We read the case as a story of corporate haunted houses, where the plaintiff's claims put this haunting in legal form by reconfiguring causality and temporality. Throughout, we explore the question of who or what is haunted – arguing that it is not only the descendants of slavery that are haunted, but also the corporations that profited from slavery, and the legal system in its complicity. The trope of the corporation as haunted house helps us to think through what stays constant across time, haunting disrupting the linearity of time – for victims and for perpetrators. Haunting is one means to force a reckoning with the malignant inheritance of law. We conclude with the question of how can and should we respond to this haunting? The benefits and harms of slavery may seem to be immeasurable, inconceivable – beyond any capacity to recompense – and yet we can and should try. Corporations need to do better, and the law should play a much greater role in making sure they do so.
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