Description
Book SynopsisLaura 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.
The New Slave Narrative reveals an emergent survivor-centered counterdiscourse of collaboration and systemic change.
Trade ReviewIn
The New Slave Narrative, Laura T. Murphy, a literary scholar and antislavery activist, provides a timely and rigorous examination of the current narratives of contemporary slavery. Through meticulous readings of these recent volumes, Murphy reveals the profound influence of nineteenth-century slave narratives on these stories, examining how antebellum conventions impact the representations of those who have been recently enslaved. Brilliantly unraveling the political and social milieu in which twenty-first-century slave narratives are produced and published, Murphy makes a convincing argument for a “collegial literary critical approach” in order to “deepen our understanding of slavery and freedom.”
The New Slave Narrative is a critically important consideration of human rights discourse. -- Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University
The New Slave Narrative is an important, foundational text—a book that unstops our ears and opens our minds. -- Kevin Bales, author of
Blood and Earth: Modern Slavery, Ecocide, and the Secret to Saving the WorldThe New Slave Narrative highlights the centrality of first-person testimony to twenty-first-century efforts to abolish global slavery. By centering autobiographical accounts written by survivors of slavery, Laura T. Murphy attends to how testimonial appeals to distant audiences can reshape human rights discourse and reinvigorate antislavery activism, even as they cannot evade old forms of cooptation. Murphy deftly returns the leadership of antislavery agendas to those who have survived it. -- Leigh Gilmore, author of
Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their LivesLaura T. Murphy's
The New Slave Narrative will become the foundational text for a wave of scholars working to understand what these stories mean—for society, for scholarship, and for survivors themselves. -- Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, author of
What Slaveholders Think: How Contemporary Perpetrators Rationalize What They DoTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
A Note on Language
Preface
Introduction: The Reemergence of the Slave Narrative in the Twenty-First Century
1. Making Slavery Legible
2. The Not-Yet-Freedom Narrative
3. Blackface Abolition
4. Sex Problems and Antislavery’s Cognitive Dissonance
5. 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
