The New Slave Narrative

The Battle Over Representations of Contemporary Slavery

Laura T. Murphy

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231547734
• Subtopic: Publishing
• Index: Literature

A century and a half after the abolition of slavery in the United States, survivors of contemporary forms of enslavement from around the world have revived a powerful tool of the abolitionist movement: first-person narratives of slavery and freedom. Just as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and others used autobiographical testimonies in the fight to eradicate slavery, today's new slave narrators play a crucial role in shaping an antislavery agenda. Their writings unveil the systemic underpinnings of global slavery while critiquing the precarity of their hard-fought freedom. At the same time, the demands of antislavery organizations, religious groups, and book publishers circumscribe the voices of the enslaved, coopting their narratives in support of alternative agendas.

In this pathbreaking interdisciplinary study, Laura T. Murphy argues that the slave narrative has reemerged as a twenty-first-century genre that has gained new currency in the context of the memoir boom, post-9/11 anti-Islamic sentiment, and conservative family-values politics. She analyzes a diverse range of dozens of book-length accounts of modern slavery from Africa, Asia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe, examining the narrative strategies that survivors of slavery employ to make their experiences legible and to promote a reinvigorated antislavery agenda. By putting these stories into conversation with one another, The New Slave Narrative reveals an emergent survivor-centered counterdiscourse of collaboration and systemic change that offers an urgent critique of the systems that maintain contemporary slavery, as well as of the human rights industry and the antislavery movement.

NOTES

A NOTE ON LANGUAGE

1. Julia O’Connell Davidson recently edited an entire issue of Anti-Trafficking Review on the misappropriation of transatlantic slavery to describe contemporary forms of forced labor. See Julia O’Connell Davidson, “The Presence of the Past: Lessons of History for Anti-Trafficking Work,” Anti-Trafficking Review, no. 9 (2017).

2. Tryon P. Woods, “Surrogate Selves: Notes on Anti-Trafficking and Anti-Blackness,” Social Identities 19, no. 1 (January 2013): 126, 122, https://doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2012.753348.

3. See, for instance, Laura María Agustín, Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour, Markets and the Rescue Industry (London: Zed, 2007), 36–41; Kamala Kempadoo, “Abolitionism, Criminal Justice, and Transnational Feminism: Twenty-First-Century Perspectives on Human Trafficking,” in Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered: New Perspectives on Migration, Sex Work, and Human Rights, ed. Kamala Kempadoo (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2012), xxvii; Joel Quirk, The Anti-Slavery Project: From the Slave Trade to Human Trafficking (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 157–63.

4. See, for instance, Elizabeth Bernstein, “Militarized Humanitarianism Meets Carceral Feminism: The Politics of Sex, Rights, and Freedom in Contemporary Antitrafficking Campaigns,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 36, no. 1 (2010): 49–51; Gretchen Soderlund, “The Rhetoric of Revelation: Sex Trafficking and the Journalistic Exposé,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 2, no. 2 (September 8, 2011): 193–211, https://doi.org/10.1353/hum.2011.0013; Jo Doezema, Sex Slaves and Discourse Masters: The Construction of Trafficking (New York: Zed, 2013), 77–105.

5. See, for instance, Michael Dottridge, “Eight Reasons Why We Shouldn’t Use the Term ‘Modern Slavery,’ ” OpenDemocracy, October 17, 2017, https://www.opendemocracy.net/beyondslavery/michael-dottridge/eight-reasons-why-we-shouldn-t-use-term-modern-slavery; Elena Shih, “Not in My ‘Backyard Abolitionism’: Vigilante Rescue Against American Sex Trafficking,” Sociological Perspectives 59, no. 1 (2016): 66–90.

6. Claude Meillassoux, The Anthropology of Slavery: The Womb of Iron and Gold (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 21–22.

PREFACE

1. Peter Landesman, “The Girls Next Door,” sec. Magazine, New York Times, January 25, 2004, https://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/magazine/the-girls-next-door.html.

2. Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, ed. Werner Sollors (New York: Norton Critical Editions, 2000), 41.

3. Ephraim Peabody, “Narratives of Fugitive Slaves,” Christian Examiner 47, no. 1 (1849): 61–93.

4. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, “Witness or False Witness: Metrics of Authenticity, Collective I-Formations, and the Ethic of Verification in First-Person Testimony,” Biography 35, no. 4 (2012): 596.

5. Rachel Banner, “Surface and Stasis: Re-reading Slave Narrative via The History of Mary Prince,” Callaloo 36, no. 2 (Spring 2013): 303.

INTRODUCTION: THE REEMERGENCE OF THE SLAVE NARRATIVE IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

1. Francis Bok, Escape from Slavery: The True Story of My Ten Years in Captivity—and My Journey to Freedom in America (New York: Macmillan, 2003), 12.

2. Bok, 29.

3. Bok, 81.

4. Bok, 221.

5. Frances Smith Foster, Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-Bellum Slave Narratives (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), ix.

6. Three collections of short narratives have been published that introduce the notion of the new slave narrative, and they begin to suggest the conventions of the new slave narrative. In addition to the journal articles I have published that are included as sections of this book, several academic articles discuss the genre to date as well. See Kevin Bales and Zoe Trodd, To Plead Our Own Cause: Personal Stories by Today’s Slaves (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013); Jesse Sage and Liora Kasten, eds., Enslaved: True Stories of Modern Day Slavery (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Language
• Preface
• Introduction: The Reemergence of the Slave Narrative in the Twenty-First Century
• One: Making Slavery Legible
• Two: The Not-Yet-Freedom Narrative
• Three: Blackface Abolition
• Four: Sex Problems and Antislavery’s Cognitive Dissonance
• Five: What the Genre Creates, It Destroys: The Rise and Fall of Somaly Mam
• Conclusion: Collegial Reading
• Appendix: List of New Slave Narratives
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index