Shifting Blame on the Enslaved
Laura T. Murphy. The New Slave Narrative: The Battle Over Representations of Contemporary Slavery. $30. 320pp, softcover. ISBN: 978-0-231-18825-8. New York: Columbia University Press, September 17, 2019.
**
This book promises to deliver a needed text that covers a tragic turn back towards enslavement in modern America. Slavery was abolished a couple of hundred years ago, but it has been growing despite its illegality. The change in the past decade or so is that this problem has become more visible not only because of reporting on the subject, but also due to the publications of authentic memoirs or slave narratives. When scholars refer to the “slave narrative” in their discussions, they almost always are referring to the slave narratives that were popularized in the decades surrounding the Civil War. The book commences with a chapter dedicated to “A Note of Language” because the terms such as “slavery” or “sexual enslavement” are indeed politicized today, and consistency is necessary to distinguish between specific criminal acts referred to. The rest of the book is handled with a similar precision, as specific evidence is presented from the past and the present, as well as from American and international examples.
The publisher reports: “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.” The last note is a curious approach that is particularly unique. It is uncharacteristic of a publisher to voice this type of doubt in other publishers’ intentions or corrupting influences. Civil War-period slave narratives have been claimed by many scholars to have been ghostwritten by white writers or publishers who altered not only their linguistic styles, but also some of the more radical intended meanings. Given how little time in the news and effort among law enforcement has actually been applied to this massive problem, clearly any “alternative agendas” that are preventing the exact truth and the interests of the enslaved to reach the public are at fault of assisting the guilty. “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.” It is typical of politicians to shift blame from failures of domestic policing onto imagined evil terrorists overseas. And those who purport extreme religiosity have always been one-and-the-same as those who are at the front rows of witch-burnings and victim-blaming. “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.”
One of the problems with this book that I note as I read sections of it more closely is that it lingers too long in abstractions rather than presenting the facts, and offering solutions. Modern slavery is not a subject for philosophical digressions: victims of slavery have no freedom and are at constant risk of losing their lives without hope of their enslavers being caught. Given this urgency, why are sentences such as the following being wasted as they repeat across several pages of cyclical pondering: “Read together, the new slave narrators redefine freedom as a multifaceted, elusive, psychological, and political project, grounded in substantive, cosmopolitan freedoms” (97). There is no need to “redefine freedom”: freedom is a legal term; if a person cannot go or do where or what he or she wants, this person is enslaved, and not free. Elusive? Yeah. It is difficult to escape from slavery and to gain freedom: why is this fact being twisted into something beyond the facts of a criminal case against enslavers? While enslavement must leave psychological scars, being free is not a psychological problem as this sentence suggests. With the other words removed, this sentence is saying that freedom is redefined as international freedoms. This is just nonsensical. It hurts the anti-slavery movement if books like this are published that introduce the idea that this fight is innately nonsensical and incomprehensible. In contrast, if this book focused on the facts of known enslavement cases and on strategies citizens or policing agencies who observe signs of enslavement can take to rescue their fellow humans, this book would have truly shown sympathy for the afflicted.
This cyclical digressive style dominates most of the book with only a few factual glimpses. For example a paragraph that is over a page long begins by promising to describe a “cacophonous symphony of competing ideological constructs” and then keeps cacophonously babbling about the “slavery paradigm” and the psychology “of personal experience and degradation” without a single specific example of what an enslaved person suffered: those enslaved are cast into the irrelevant background, while the clever philosophy of the writer is given unbridled space. Leading to sentences like this: “They briefly link their personal enslavement to a larger community of oppressed people through the language of commodification and disposability, but the narratives, shaped as they typically are as memoirs or self-help books, consistently return to the question of personal recovery from exploitation” (168). It would be impossible for a general reader to read this far into this nonsensical narrative, as following even a single sentence either enrages or confuses, and typically both, making one want to put this horrid production down. In this particular sentence, the slave narrators are accused of selling out and being disposable because they structure their narratives to mimic self-help books. This is just one sentence and yet it is a pile of garbage that is perhaps the most insulting thing that can be said about a memoir of enslavement.
This is a horridly dangerous book: it approaches being pro-slavery as it subversively cycles around accusing survivors who publish books about their experiences of commodifying their suffering. A book about modern slavery is desperately needed to counteract nightmarish books like this one that deliberately disguise its dimensions and remedies to it.