Survivors of Slavery: Modern-Day Slave Narratives - Softcover

Murphy, Laura

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0231164238 ISBN 13: 9780231164238

Publisher: Columbia University Press, 2014

Synopsis

Slavery is not a crime confined to the far reaches of history. It is an injustice that continues to entrap twenty-seven million people across the globe. Laura Murphy offers close to forty survivor narratives from Cambodia, Ghana, Lebanon, Macedonia, Mexico, Russia, Thailand, Ukraine, and the United States, detailing the horrors of a system that forces people to work without pay and against their will, under the threat of violence, with little or no means of escape. Representing a variety of circumstances in diverse contexts, these survivors are the Frederick Douglasses, Sojourner Truths, and Olaudah Equianos of our time, testifying to the widespread existence of a human rights tragedy and the urgent need to address it. Through storytelling and firsthand testimony, this anthology shapes a twenty-first-century narrative that many believe died with the end of slavery in the Americas. Organized around such issues as the need for work, the punishment of defiance, and the move toward activism, the collection isolates the causes, mechanisms, and responses to slavery that allow the phenomenon to endure. Enhancing scholarship in women's studies, sociology, criminology, law, social work, and literary studies, the text establishes a common trajectory of vulnerability, enslavement, captivity, escape, and recovery, creating an invaluable resource for activists, scholars, legislators, and service providers.

About this title

Review:

Murphy has allowed the victims of contemporary bondage to speak for themselves. These often heart-wrenching accounts do more than reveal the tragic stories of contemporary abuse and suffering; they often reveal patterns of behavior and resistance that can inform our understanding of historic slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This collection clearly establishes the international dimensions and persistence of slavery.--Paul E. Lovejoy, Director, The Harriet Tubman Institute

Survivors of Slavery invites the reader not only to consider the actual words on the page, but also to question context, voice, and what is not being said.--Sandra Morgan, Director, Global Center for Women and Justice at Vanguard University

As awareness of modern slavery explodes, the least heard but most important voices we need to hear belong to slavery survivors. It is a simple fact that if you have always lived in freedom the lived truth of slavery is unimaginable. For the slaves and ex-slaves this creates a deep gap, a sense that they will never be understood. Laura T. Murphy's superlative Survivors of Slavery bridges that gap and opens the door to understanding and healing. There are plenty of books to read if you want to understand modern slavery in your head, but if you want to understand the truth of slavery in your heart, read this book.--Kevin Bales, cofounder of Free the Slaves

An "open condemnation" of modern slavery that builds powerfully by testimony.--Kirkus

... this collection gives voice to the desire of the enslaved to express their humanity.--Booklist

Graduate and undergraduate students can benefit from inclusion of this book as a text through which they can understand slavery in the voices of people who have experienced it... a critical book... few readers will be unchanged.--PsycCRITIQUES

Murphy's book provides an essential collection of narratives that everyone involved in the prevention of trafficking should read.--Journal of Human Trafficking

A welcome addition to our understanding of trafficking.--Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Review

About the Author:

Laura T. Murphy is assistant professor of English, director of the Modern Slavery Research Project at Loyola University New Orleans, and director of the Survivors of Slavery speakers network. She is the author of Metaphor and the Slave Trade in West African Literature

About this edition

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0231164238
• ISBN 13: 9780231164238
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384