The New Slave Narrative by Laura T. Murphy;

Author:Laura T. Murphy;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)

FROM TRAFFICKING TO SLAVERY

Over the course of the narratives, these new slave narrators also begin to express their experiences as “slavery,” which allows them to articulate a somewhat different approach to their life narratives.39 When they invoke the discourse of “modern slavery,” their arguments about their experiences often stress victimization less and align more with the sociological arguments typically expressed by academics such as Kevin Bales and organizations such as Free the Slaves, who have both been influential among survivors. The narrators’ logic correspondingly shifts from a discourse of victimization to a discourse of rights (and rights violations), including notions of ownership, commodification, and disposability. Indeed, in the moments when they invoke the language of modern slavery, the narrators adapt the language and tropes that are more common to the international slave narratives discussed earlier. This discourse tends to, as Alison Brysk and Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick put it, “move the conversation from sex to slavery, from prostitution to power, and from rescue to rights.”40

Like the new slave narratives from the first decade of the genre’s reemergence, most narratives of domestic minor sex trafficking explicitly cite nineteenth-century slave narrators and employ metaphors of historical slavery to emphasize the gravity of their own experiences. Many of the narrators refer to the metaphorical “chains” and “shackles” that kept them from escaping even when literal chains were not employed.41 Reinforcing this notion of psychological bondage and giving it historical roots, Marino reminds us of the (commonly misattributed) quote of Harriet Tubman’s in which she purportedly claimed that she would have freed thousands more enslaved African Americans “if only they knew they were slaves.”42 Here, Marino does more than conjure slavery’s gravity, she makes a claim of false consciousness for all those youth engaged in the sex trade who do not yet self-identify as enslaved. By this logic, if even Tubman had known African Americans who did not recognize their own captivity and needed to be rescued from bondage, then it is no surprise that people enslaved today might be unable, as the narrators previously were, to articulate their experiences as slavery and understand their need to escape. As was the case with the logic of “trafficking,” this awakening from the misapprehension of their experiences runs throughout the texts and continues to exonerate the narrators from the sense of personal responsibility that previously made it difficult to recognize their oppression as “slavery.” However, with the introduction of the idea of slavery, the narrators reinscribe their experiences with a broader set of concerns regarding rights. Parker-Bello, for instance, employs the historical slave trade as an entrée to critique the civil rights that are denied to people who are enslaved today. She quotes Sojourner Truth’s claim that she “feels for her rights, but der ain’t any dare” to suggest that “even now, many of us do not know of or are not acquainted with our rights.”43 The narrators demonstrate throughout their narratives the ways in which they have been exiled from knowledge of and access to their rights

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