Runaway Genres

The Global Afterlives of Slavery

Yogita Goyal

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781479832712
• eBook ISBN:
  9781479879120
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Winner, 2021 René Wellek Prize, given by the American Comparative Literature Association

Winner, 2021 Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Award, given by the International Society for the Study of Narrative

Honorable Mention, 2020 James Russell Lowell Prize, given by the Modern Language Association


Argues that the slave narrative is a new world literary genre

In Runaway Genres, Yogita Goyal tracks the emergence of slavery as the defining template through which current forms of human rights abuses are understood. The post-black satire of Paul Beatty and Mat Johnson, modern slave narratives from Sudan to Sierra Leone, and the new Afropolitan diaspora of writers like Teju Cole and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie all are woven into Goyal's argument for the slave narrative as a new world literary genre, exploring the full complexity of this new ethical globalism. From the humanitarian spectacles of Kony 2012 and #BringBackOurGirls through gothic literature, Runaway Genres unravels, for instance, how and why the African child soldier has now appeared as the afterlife of the Atlantic slave.

Goyal argues that in order to fathom forms of freedom and bondage today—from unlawful detention to sex trafficking to the refugee crisis to genocide—we must turn to contemporary literature, which reveals how the literary forms used to tell these stories derive from the antebellum genre of the slave narrative. Exploring the ethics and aesthetics of globalism, the book presents alternative conceptions of human rights, showing that the revival and proliferation of slave narratives offers not just an occasion to revisit the Atlantic past, but also for re-narrating the global present. In reassessing these legacies and their ongoing relation to race and the human, Runaway Genres creates a new map with which to navigate contemporary black diaspora literature.

1

Sentimental Globalism

It doesn’t take a revolution to set slaves free.

—Kevin Bales, Understanding Global Slavery

I deeply respect American sentimentality, the way one respects a wounded hippo. You must keep an eye on it, for you know it is deadly.

—Teju Cole, “Seven Thoughts on the Banality of Sentimentality”

In insisting that slavery still exists, modern abolitionists pose the question of the afterlife of slavery in stark, literal terms. To claim that there are more slaves in the world today than at any other time in history is to invoke both historical precedent and the urgency of now. Anti-Slavery International, for instance, unambiguously connects its efforts to combat bonded labor, forced marriage, and human trafficking across the world to historical efforts to end the transatlantic slave trade. Its Fight for Freedom 1807–2007 campaign “aims to revitalize the abolitionist spirit of two hundred years ago,” joining “slavery past and present” by arguing that the “abolition of the slave trade in 1807 was achieved by a mass movement.” Because “many people think that slavery no longer exists,” a new mass movement is needed today.1 Another such organization, Free the Slaves, describes its mission as “dedicated to alerting the world about slavery’s global comeback and to catalyze a resurgence of the abolition movement.” Explicitly linking its twenty-first-century work to Atlantic slavery, Free the Slaves claims that it “exists to help finish the work that earlier generations of abolitionists started.”2 From activism on college campuses to hearings before the US Senate, from consumer campaigns to sensational documentaries on television, from blockbuster films to a thriving body of crime fiction, modern slavery has become a fixture of the twenty-first-century public sphere. Whether child abuse in Haiti, debt bondage in India, wartime kidnapping in Uganda, or forced prostitution in Cambodia, modern abolitionists maintain that the appropriate touchstone for gauging the meaning, prevalence, and prevention of such practices remains Atlantic slavery. A vigorous twenty-first-century abolitionist movement clearly modeled on transatlantic slavery (led by such organizations as Free the Slaves, Anti-Slavery International, the Walk Free Foundation, Christian Solidarity International, End Slavery Now, Not For Sale, and the American Anti-Slavery Group) has thus generated a consensus about a range of contemporary hyperexploitative practices amounting to slavery.3

In this chapter, I situate the phenomenon of modern slavery at the charged intersection of the human and the global. As Pheng Cheah notes, the idea of human rights is one of the “primary ways of figuring the global as human.”4 Enshrining the language of sentimentalism as the most effective weapon in the human rights arsenal, the discourse of modern slavery defines a global relation between “us” and “them” solely as a matter of sentiment. To do so, best-selling memoirs, activist campaigns, and media spectacles converge to propose that the history of US slavery must be seen as the present and future of the rest of the world. Such a claim, I suggest, not only simplifies our understanding of the unresolved legacy of slavery in the United States, but also disorders our comprehension of the nature of exploitation and abuse in the present across the globe. Making slavery mobile like this—not just as metaphor but as the exemplary frame for thinking about oppression today—requires reckoning with what it might mean to insist on slavery as exception instead.

Modern slaves, according to the most recent estimates, are said to number some thirty million, across 160 countries.5 Though these numbers are disputed, and many would quarrel even with the seeming oxymoron of modern slavery, neo-abolitionism is rapidly gaining increasing acceptance as the frame through which to view contemporary human rights violations.6 Anybody who is forced to work, controlled by an employer with the threat of abuse or actual abuse, dehumanized, bought or sold as property and physically restrained is said to be in slavery. Such an understanding is ratified by law, as the Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery (1956) calls on the legal precedent of the Slavery Convention (1926) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) to confirm that “debt bondage, serfdom, forced marriage and the delivery of a child for the exploitation of that child are all slavery like practices and require criminalization and abolishment.”7 The UK Modern Slavery Act of 2015 is one of many pieces of antitrafficking legislation ratifying the frame of slavery.

In order to claim that modern forms of oppression must be seen as reprising Atlantic slavery, neo-abolitionists revive the slave narrative for the present day. Modern slave narratives thus form a peculiar—and growing—genre of contemporary literature. Accounts of atrocities like human trafficking, capture in war, debt bondage, forced marriage, the use of the child soldier, and sex trafficking, such narratives are explicitly modeled on such Atlantic slave narratives as Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), and Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789). Just as narratives by Douglass or Solomon Northup were sanctioned and promoted by white abolitionists, most modern slave narratives are ghostwritten by an amanuensis, and framed by a range of prefatory material guaranteeing the veracity of the story and the good character of the storyteller. For example, Damien Lewis, “a white English man in his thirties,” tells the story of Mende Nazer, this “black Nuba woman in her early twenties” collaborating with the help of an English-Arabic dictionary in a “grand Georgian castle,” and he credits the results with Nazer’s oral tradition and her power of recall of memories of early childhood. He notes that “I keep trying to get her to write a daily diary,” but she “hardly ever writes anything down.” In the note after the text, he admits that there was a “creative process of selection and condensation” and some scenes were “deliberately fictionalized” to protect some people but also to “aid the narrative flow of the story” so that “it may be read in an accessible, compelling form.”8

Both the primary literature of modern slavery and the scholarship that promotes it make explicit reference to US slavery to establish an equivalence with contemporary abuse and bondage, concluding that present-day slavery should be seen as a shameful anachronism. Rachel Lloyd’s Girls Like Us (2011), for instance, links pimps to slave owners and argues that “our equivalent of slaves on the auction block is the ads on Craigslist, Backpage, and numerous other online sites, the street corners in certain neighborhoods, the stages of strip clubs.”9 Lloyd also invokes what she dubs Equiano’s Stockholm syndrome toward his master to explain why the women subject to sex trafficking form attachments to their abusers. Zana Muhsen’s Sold: One Woman’s True Account of Modern Slavery (1991) connects her own bondage to the African American slave experience by drawing on her reading of Alex Haley’s Roots, recalling Kunta Kinte’s flight as she runs away from captivity.10 Replaying familiar narrative tropes like exile and natal alienation, the idea of social death, the quest for literacy, sentimental appeals to readers, the journey north to freedom, and dreams of the Jubilee, modern slave narrators seek to arouse readers to action against modern slavery. Narrators emphasize an idyllic childhood, cruelly ended with their abduction and removal from a loving family, and chronicle a journey of servitude and exploitation as they forge a sense of self based on individual autonomy, the acquisition of literacy, and a life devoted to service.11

First-person accounts of horrific abuse and suffering, modern slave narratives may reprise the language and philosophy of the antebellum slave narrative, but they circulate in a changed geopolitical arena, where human rights advocacy must contend with ongoing disputes over war crimes and reparations, the so-called War on Terror and increased militarism in Africa and the Middle East, and the growing power of global evangelism. Given the changed landscape of the contemporary moment, why does the frame of slavery—and not even as a metaphoric antecedent but a literal one—continue to resound today? Kevin Bales, the foremost authority on modern slavery and founder of Free the Slaves, explains that “most Americans’ idea of slavery comes right out of Roots—the chains, the whip in the overseer’s hand, the crack of the auctioneer’s gavel. That was one form of bondage. The slavery plaguing America today takes a different form, but make no mistake, it is real slavery.”12 Not just drawing on the rhetorical or affective power of Atlantic slavery to raise awareness for the cause, neo-abolitionists establish literal links to the past, emphatically refusing metaphor. What are the assumptions about the power of analogy and comparison at play here, as one form of exploitation is narrated through forms developed in another time and place? How does the choice of genre circumscribe the enunciative possibilities of the narrators? What is at stake in these claims to equivalence?

Just as nineteenth-century slave narrators were constrained by the limits of the white, northern US audience, modern slave discourse, in easily transposing an Atlantic genre to narrate stories from the Global South, offers a homogenizing story of African atrocity that affirms the primitivist and imperialist tropes that depict Africa and the postcolony more broadly. Since readers are already expected to be familiar with the story of American slavery, modern slave narrators are required not to prove their humanity but to insert themselves within the preexisting template. The politics of analogy at work reinscribe a global experience in a normative American genre to make their claims self-evident. Moreover, such narratives are also difficult to read in terms of concepts of race and racial formation, in relation to the status of slavery as an institution relative to other forms of labor exploitation. The valence of race in an era of neoliberal globalization remains unresolved, as race is variably rendered visible or invisible, anchored in history or unmoored from time and place, attached to certain bodies or continents or set free to float above and beyond them. For antislavery activists, modern slavery as a phenomenon is not racialized: as Bales claims in Understanding Global Slavery, anyone—of any race or ethnicity, nation or region, language or religion—can be enslaved. And yet, I want to suggest, the discourse of modern slavery is neither color-blind nor beyond race despite its protestations. This is so not just because the figure that is often invoked in visual representations of modern slavery is a black body, and Sudan, and Darfur in particular, have come to occupy increasing visibility and emblematic status in these discussions, but, more importantly, because constructions of race are the ghost in the machine (as Toni Morrison noted for an Africanist presence in American literature in Playing in the Dark), invisible but ever-present levers that lubricate concepts of the human in contemporary culture.13 When a figure like Mende Nazer calls her North Sudanese captors racists, even though only a slight difference of skin color exists between north and south, claiming that “the Northerners define themselves as Arab and as white, and they call everyone else Black. They think that every Black person can be their slave,” it is clear that differences of region and religion are as much at play as those of a black-white binary imported from the Atlantic context.14 Such nuances deserve specificity of geopolitical context and demand a rethinking of concepts of racial formation for the contemporary world. As many modern ex-slaves migrate to the United States or Europe, their collision with various existing regimes of racialization—from antiblackness to the model-minority frame for immigrants—stretches and reshapes our understandings of the relations among race, migration, and conceptions of the human. Moreover, the entire project of modern abolition raises disturbing questions about the ways in which we understand slavery and its afterlife today, in terms of not just what slavery itself was as an American institution, the peculiarity of which has been much disputed, but also how and whether comparative transnational analysis may yield richer conceptions of race in migration.

Certain tableaus thus recur in the language and imagery of modern abolitionism, clearly derived from its transatlantic predecessor. First, modern abolitionists insist on literalism and simplification, with innocent victims and evil villains, favoring a sentimental and moral frame, often divorced of social and political structures of power. Accordingly, they claim that they are beyond partisan politics, geared toward a principled consensus among all political parties and communities against slavery.15 Next, to combat modern slavery, such activists prioritize awareness, visibility, and exposure, claiming that revealing what is hidden and bringing such abuse out of dark corners will guarantee emancipation. Finally, they attach freedom to storytelling, editing, and publishing a vast body of modern slave narratives, which duplicate the connection between literacy and freedom established by the African American slave narrative.

For example, To Plead Our Own Cause: Personal Stories by Today’s Slaves (2008), edited by Kevin Bales and Zoe Trodd, takes its title from the Freedman’s Journal—the first newspaper set up by freed slaves, in 1827—which declared that “we wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us.”16 Neo-abolitionist organizations circulate such edited collections of first-person narratives, often written with an amanuensis, thus echoing not only the form but also the conditions of production of antebellum slave narratives, leading to lingering questions of whose voice we hear behind the words.17 Scenes of reading, instruction, and writing recur, repeating the antebellum slave narrative’s emphasis on literacy and the trope of the Talking Book. Many narratives end with rescue in the United States through the aid of a humanitarian worker who appears as the modern-day abolitionist of the Underground Railroad in the Global North. But where the antebellum slave narrative condemned the United States as a hell on earth, modern accounts posit the nation as the savior for fugitive slaves, an example of a nation that has transcended its own horrific past while Africa emerges as a site of little political or human possibility. Both the norm and normative, the US experience of slavery becomes the locus of a universal experience of suffering and struggle.

In explaining their agenda, many of these narratives call into play the language of visibility and exposure to make their readers accept the designation of slavery. To do so, they insist on both transparency and tautology. Gloria Steinem, in a foreword to Enslaved: True Stories of Modern Day Slavery, hopes that “just as nineteenth-century slave narratives forced readers to recognize the humanity of slaves, these twenty-first-century slave narratives force us to recognize the reality of slavery.”18 If a figure like Douglass asserted over and again that he was a “man” and not a “slave,” these texts emphasize the opposite, insisting that—to use the title of a film based on the Sudanese national Mende Nazer’s experiences of captivity and abuse—I Am Slave. Nazer affirms that “there is slavery going on, right now, today. I am an example and I am the living proof and it happened to me, personally.”19 For the readers, victims like Nazer are “our contemporary Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs and Lavinia Bell.”20

Using the language of an exposé or scandal to bring to light the hidden existence of slavery, documenting and rendering visible become key abolitionist strategies, and anybody who attempts to parse the meaning of the terms used is suspect. Bales expresses this idea in Disposable People with some irritation: “When the public stops asking, ‘What do you mean by slavery?’ and ‘You mean slavery still exists?,’ then slaves will be on their way to freedom.”21 A neoliberal logic of surveillance similarly underpins Kony 2012, the viral video created by the aptly named Invisible Children Foundation, which foreshortens the distance between here and there, as the use of technology will illuminate the “dark continent” of Africa. By simply watching the video, and making the Ugandan overlord famous, the viewers are said to be launching a human rights revolution. The tagline of the campaign—“make him visible, make him famous”—encapsulates this notion perfectly: “Could an online video make an obscure war criminal famous?”22 The discourse of modern slavery claims a certain obviousness, similar to what Joseph Slaughter terms the ubiquitous and commonsense claims of human rights, and attempts to dissuade us from geopolitical specificity favor of immediate (and universal) affective response.23 Perhaps this is why it is tempting to simply repeat the titles of these books, since they give away the whole story: for instance, Jean-Robert Cadet’s Restavec: From Haitian Slave Child to Middle-Class American (1998) and My Stone of Hope: From Haitian Slave Child to Abolitionist (2011) or Beatrice Fernando’s In Contempt of Fate: The Tale of a Sri Lankan Sold into Servitude Who Survived to Tell It: A Memoir (2004) already divulge the journey that they will document, laying out the curiously flat temporality of the narrated lives, all of which are relentlessly moving toward rescue in the United States.

In several edited collections of first-person narratives, there is no systematic account of how the stories were selected, translated, or edited; the empirical claims are often unsourced, and there is little awareness of the political complexity of the experiences, or explanation of why and how child soldiers in the Philippines, debt bondage in Indian brick quarries, and prostitution in Cambodia or the former Soviet Bloc should all be seen as slavery, rather than as instances o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: The Genres of Slavery
• 1. Sentimental Globalism
• 2. The Gothic Child
• 3. Post-Black Satire
• 4. Talking Books (Talking Back)
• 5. We Need New Diasporas
• Epilogue: What We Talk about When We Talk about Slavery
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author